Facilitating Development or Subjugation?: A Critical Ethnography of a Guatemalan Water Filtration Project

Background and Purpose: International service learning has achieved notable recognition as important form of global engagement by universities.  In addition to extending the institution’s global impact, international encounters create transformative experiences for students.  However, the gains to developing communities remain less certain.  Despite the numerous ways development projects could enhance lives, scholars and activists note that such projects also tend to be fraught with unintended consequences (Amankwah-Amoah, 2015; Baden & Barber, 2015).  In this paper, we describe a critical ethnography of a water filtration project in rural Guatemala facilitated through a partnership with a Guatemalan NGO and an interdisciplinary team of social work and civil engineering faculty and students.  Together, the team worked to create access to clean water in rural Mayan communities.  We used a critical ethnographic approach to understand the challenges the team encountered in fulfilling its ethical responsibility to address one specific inequality—access to clear water— within a particular lived domain (Madison, 2011).   

Methods:  We collected a number of data sources—participatory and observational field notes, peer debriefing, and interviews from community members, key informants, and student volunteers— over a two year period that included three field visits to rural communities in Guatemala and numerous teleconferences with our Guatemalan partners.   From the beginning, the social work team engaged in a process of progressive focusing (Parlett & Hamilton 1976) by using an iterative and reflexive method to interpret the data as they were collected (Stake 1995). Such an approach enabled the team to adjust the data collection process as additional concepts need to be investigated or new relationships explored (Schutt, 2011). In addition, we use an inductive approach to analyze the various representations the key actors—faculty, students, NGO workers, and community members—held about each other and themselves.  Finally, we considered how the social positions held by the Western students and faculty biased those representations and reified the community members’ sense of self efficacy.

Findings: Our data analysis reveals five ways the project inadvertently favored the faculty and student volunteers at the expense of the developing communities they sought to help.  These included: (a) the prioritization of faculty and student preferences for research outcomes over social change, (b) programmatic structures that sanctioned frequent student turnover, (c) the use of communication patterns which reinforced the cultural dominance of faculty and students, (d) a tolerance for students to engage in unsupervised trial-and-error, and (e) the exclusion of community members and local key informants from decision-making processes between the university partner and the NGO.  We also found that the use of social work perspectives on cultural competency, social justice, an emphasis on collaborative relationships with community member mitigated some of detrimental effects embedded in the program. 

Conclusion and Implications: The findings highlight how social work principles can be used to understand the ethical dilemmas embedded in development projects and how social work principles can be used to balance the power in stakeholder relationships.  This study also underscores the role of social work on interdisciplinary development teams.