MSL Joins Global FEW Alliance

MSL has joined and will be working to support the Global Food-Energy-Water Alliance. The FEW Alliance is an international coalition focused on place-based knowledge and contextual engineering to foster climate change adaptation solutions. MSL and its Energy Sovereignty Institute will work with the Alliance, its North American Hub, and the newly established Contextual Engineering Research Group to develop organizational infrastructure, and anchor an energy sovereignty practice.

The FEW Alliance’s mission is to “Connect a global network of experts, scholars, and practitioners, to gather, organize, and apply place-based knowledge to support communities adapt to climate change impacts on food, energy, and water resources.” Its several regional hubs (North America, South America, Africa) meet to exchange information and findings on a regular basis, and members convene in a bi-annual summit, under the vision of becoming “the global resource from which distinctive ideas of value are put into practice through regional hubs, operating as centers of contextualized knowledge, research, and application to address community needs under intensifying climate change impacts on the Food-Energy-Water nexus.”

Place-Based Knowledge & Contextual Engineering

Place-based knowledge is a key organizing principle for the Alliance’s work, which it defines as follows: “Access to materials, as well as possession of the proper tools, limit technical capabilities, and those conditions often are dependent upon the environment, the societal practices, and the cultural experience of the individual. This is place-based knowledge, and it grows out of and continues to develop in non-globalized societies throughout the world.”

When applied to a conventional engineering process, a paradigmatic shift occurs: Many engineering programs and engineering-based advocacy/aid agencies have  adopted the concept of user-population engagement to improve engineering design, but  the process typically used—often referred to as humanitarian engineering or engineering  for society—still falls under the design process of the Western engineer rather than the pathway of the user community itself.

Energy Sovereignty as a Related Practice

The concept of energy sovereignty, as employed by MSL’s Energy Sovereignty Institute (ESI), aligns strongly with these principles and practices. Many of the key FEW concepts also emerged at the 2024 ESI workshop and in the resulting research agenda white paper, addressing cultural aspects of energy development and the integration of Traditional Ecological Knowledge and contemporary science and technology. The MSL/FEW collaboration offers strong potential for deepening this work, and accelerating its impact over a global footprint.