This open access textbook introduces the emerging field of Development Engineering, its constituent theories, methods, and applications. It is both a teaching text for students and a resource for researchers and practitioners engaged in the design of technologies for low-resource communities. The scope is broad, ranging from the development of mobile applications for low-literacy users, to hardware and software solutions for providing electricity and water in remote settings. It is also highly interdisciplinary, drawing on methods and theory from the social sciences as well as engineering and the natural sciences.

The opening section reviews the history of "technology-for-development" research, and presents a framework that formalizes this body of work and begins its transformation into an academic discipline. It identifies common challenges in development and explains the book's 'innovate, evaluate, scale' approach, integrating it with product development lifecycles. Each of the next six thematic sections focuses on a different sector: water, sanitation and health; governance; energy and resources; information; markets; and human capital. These thematic sections contain case studies from landmark research that directly integrates engineering innovation with technically rigorous methods from the social sciences. Each case study describes the design, evaluation, and/or scaling of a technology in the field and follows a single template, with common headings and questions, to create continuity and pedagogical consistency. Together, they highlight successful solutions to development challenges, while also analyzing the rarely discussed failures. The book concludes by reiterating the core principles of development engineering illustrated in the case studies and highlighting common challenges that engineers and scientists face in designing technology interventions to accelerate economic development.

Development Engineering provides, for the first time, a coherent intellectual framework for attacking the challenges of poverty through the design of better technologies. It offers the rigorous discipline necessary to help channel the energy of a new generation of scientists and engineers studying and engaged in advancing social welfare and improving living conditions in low-resource communities.

Ashok J. Gadgil is Faculty Senior Scientist and former Director of the Energy and Environmental Technologies Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He is also Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. He specializes in heat transfer, fluid dynamics, and technology design for development. He also has substantial experience in technical, economic, and policy research on energy efficiency and its implementation - particularly in developing countries. Two of his best-known technologies for the developing-world are "UV Waterworks" (a simple, effective, and inexpensive water disinfection system), and the Berkeley-Darfur Stove (a low-cost stove that saves fuelwood in internally displaced person's camps in Darfur). In early 1990s, he analyzed the potential for large utility-sponsored projects to promote energy efficient electric lighting in poor households in developing countries, then teamed up with others to design and demonstrate such projects. These have become commonplace in dozens of developing countries since 2000 onward, saving billions of dollars annually to their economies. Gadgil holds a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of California, Berkeley and an M.Sc. in Physics from Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur.

Temina Madon is Executive Director of the Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA), a research network headquartered at UC Berkeley that focuses on the design and rigorous evaluation of anti-poverty policies, services, and technologies. In this role, Madon oversees the Development Impact Lab, a USAID-funded consortium of universities leveraging science and engineering to accelerate global economic development. She also spearheads multiple initiatives to build scientific capacity in developing countries, particularly in the areas of economics and public health. She has served as an advisor to the World Health Organization on implementation research and has consulted for the World Bank, the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Earlier, Madon served as founding executive director of the Center for Emerging and Neglected Diseases at UC Berkeley. From 2006 to 2008, she was the science policy analyst for the Fogarty International Center at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Prior to this, she led a portfolio of global health initiatives for the U.S. Senate HELP Committee (under the leadership of Senator Edward Kennedy) as a AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow. She received a PhD in 2004 from UC Berkeley and a BS in 1998 from MIT.

Michael Callen is professor of economics and strategic management at the Rady School of Management at University of California, San Diego. He uses experiments to identify ways to address accountability and service delivery failures in the public sector, working primarily in Afghanistan and in Pakistan. His primary interests are political economy, development economics, and experimental economics. Before coming to the Rady School, Callen was an Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles. As a post doc, Callen was a visiting faculty member at the University of California, Berkeley Center for Effective Global Action and the UC San Diego Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation. Callen has received research grants from the International Growth Center (IGC), South Asia Institute, Harvard University, Department for International Development, Consortium for Financial Systems and Poverty, Policy Design and Evaluation Laboratory, Center for Effective Global Action and the Development Innovation Lab (UC Berkeley). He also won the Innovate Award from the Development Innovation Lab from UC Berkeley. Callen earned his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California, San Diego and his B.Sc. in Econometrics and Mathematical Economics from the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Catherine Wolfram is the Cora Jane Flood Professor of Business Administration at the Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley. She is also Faculty Director of the Energy Institute at Haas and of The E2e Project, a research organization focused on energy efficiency. She is program director of the Environmental and Energy Economics program at the National Bureau of Economic Research and an affiliated faculty member in the Agriculture and Resource Economics department and the Energy and Resources Group at Berkeley. Wolfram has published extensively on the economics of energy markets. She has studied the electricity industry around the world and has analyzed the effects of environmental regulation, including climate change mitigation policies, on the energy sector. She is currently implementing several randomized controlled trials to evaluate energy programs in the U.S., Kenya and India. She received a PhD in economics from MIT in 1996 and an AB from Harvard in 1989. Before joining the faculty at UC Berkeley, she was an assistant professor of economics at Harvard.