Infrastructure Decision Preferences and the Influence of Social Justice Education

Social justice considerations are critical in today’s engineering education. As an example, access to electricity will be crucial to the development of sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) by powering essential sectors and services that would yield economic growth and an improved quality of life. Because infrastructure investments are often allocated to urban areas, it is important for stakeholders to equally prioritize rural electrification in their efforts to achieve universal electrification. These stakeholders make decisions on allocating infrastructure investment based on their underlying values and preferences. It is therefore important to introduce and integrate ideas of fairness and social justice into the engineering curriculum. Our paper investigates the influence of social justice education on decision preferences among students tasked with planning electricity systems. We engaged graduate and undergraduate students in a discrete choice experiment to determine their preferences for equality. In our study, we find that an interactive social justice education module can be effective in increasing equality preferences among non–U.S.-citizen students by 22%. Among students with relatively low preferences for equality, we find that the education module was effective in increasing preference by 18% on average and up to 191%, which translated into more equitable resource allocation. As such, we show that an education intervention for stakeholders may be effective in improving equitable electrification in SSA. The preference elicitation and education module presented in this paper could be repurposed by instructors to include other contexts in their course content (e.g., money, water, housing, etc.) or to people wanting to educate decision makers about social justice.