You can look back to two entries on 20 November and 4 December. Now, as we plan our resolutions and aims for the new year, I have drawn out three lessons for you to think about. I welcome your reactions.

Systems. As one of thirteen HoPs in DFID and FCDO we championed inter-disciplinarity (thank you Bridget!). Not ‘just’ multi-disciplinarity which can still leave you in disciplinary siloes. With that in mind we commissioned the K4D programme (Knowledge and Evidence for Development, led by IDS at Sussex) to run a series of learning journeys and produce the resulting guide Systems Thinking and Practice: A Guide – K4D (ids.ac.uk). If you read the first of these blog entries you will note the rural WS&S programme in Maharashtra tackled the symptom not the cause – we did not touch the agriculture sector there and perhaps could have done more.

And now you only have to turn to the Enabling Better Infrastructure (EBI) initiative at the ICE to see how of systems-of-systems thinking is being promoted with partner countries, I refer you to the incoming ICE President’s address of 5th November.

Return. Back in the 1980s I conducted a site investigation for an irrigation project in Zambia and subsequently undertook design work for the centre-pivot irrigation systems that you can see as your airplane comes in to land at Lusaka airport. The farm project that I worked on had the first ones in the country and the first outside of the USA and South Africa at the time. In 2017 I was fortunate to be able to return to see the project, more correctly, the agribusiness that was now in operation and successful thanks to the infrastructure services that are bring provided. In 1983 I thought it was a given that it would work, in 2017 I realised that the infrastructure and engineering was a necessary but not sufficient contribution.

Passion. In the last few years I have been involved with the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure (CDRI) a global initiative led by the international organisation based in New Delhi. I have drawn on that involvement in speaking to sector colleagues and had to establish some explanation for my involvement. I have come to realise some of this goes back to the Aberfan tailings dam disaster in 1966 that buried a school in south Wales killing 116 children and 28 adults. My mother was a primary school teacher from south Wales, not at that location but I remember the effect on her. Researching that event, the newspaper headlines emphasise the lack of accountability and responsibility of the National Coal Board at that time. EAP’s theme and I think part of what drives me. And coincidentally the first firm of consultants that I worked for back in 1980 were leading designers of tailings dams.

And on that theme of accountability, as HoP for infrastructure in DFID I was intimately involved in finding a solution to design and construction problems that arose on a school building construction and rehabilitation programme. DFID and the implementing partner had both made mistakes on the design and implementation of the programme but while there were contractual, financial and institutional problems, at the core was a technical structural engineering problem. As the Head of Profession I was responsible for ensuring that we found a technical solution. I worked with excellent colleagues, one international and one local, as well as a secondee to DFID from the Royal Engineers. Together we oversaw the work of the implementing consultants and sought peer review from a global expert at University College London which eventually resulted in the programme being satisfactorily completed.

I took two lessons from this. First, despite one of my earlier remarks about occasionally downplaying aspects of engineering in some situations it is vitally important that we do not diminish its importance, and from that, secondly, I drew on the experience with fellow Heads of Profession and the Chief Scientific Adviser in DFID/FCDO, to resist a creeping dilution of the value and recognition of expertise in the organisation. Not easy when some of our political leaders question that value.

As for the future. I will do what I can with EAP to help it position itself and the sector. We know that Artificial Intelligence will be key. A timely report from EY/FIDIC on AI and infrastructure is current and being considered as I write. Let us work to ensure that governance is given its rightful role as AI tools serve our greater needs. EAP is well placed to grasp that agenda given its hosting of CoST and use of data for transparency.

I hope you have found these three entries of interest. I will be very happy to respond to any questions of points you would like to raise. Best wishes for the next year ahead and let’s hope for a more peaceful 2025.

Mark Harvey is a Trustee at EAP and a Chartered Civil Engineer with forty years of professional experience in international infrastructure development with a focus on low-income countries and fragile and conflict affected situations. Most recently, ten years of professional leadership in infrastructure for international development for the UK’s DFID and FCDO. He has worked on UK government development programmes in India, Southern Africa, Nepal, Ethiopia, Afghanistan and Vietnam including secondments to partner governments. He has a BSc in Civil Engineering, MSc in Water and Waste Engineering for Developing Countries and is a Fellow of the Institution of Civil Engineers as well as a Member of the Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management. He was awarded an OBE in 2011 for public service. He is married, has two boys in their twenties and is fortunate to live in the Yorkshire Dales National Park.