I think you may be underestimating the real-world messiness of this water sanitation example, and other types of problems where location-specific factors WILL make or break the project.

There's an enormous gap between knowing the specs of a pump and knowing which company will make one that won't break and will provide decent service for it. A water sanitation plant that would work in one part the US (or one part of a state) might fail in another due to any among hundreds of factors.

Any time you're doing something that involves silt, algae, microorganisms, weather, human factors... etc... those factors are likely to make a fool of you and your textbook. The "scoop from a grizzled veteran" suddenly becomes essential.

There's a well-known example of a sludge field that worked on a small scale but did not work when executed on a large scale. Total disaster. Hugely expensive project, requiring hugely expensive cleanup.

Sure, there are plenty of realms within tech where "grizzled veterans" aren't needed and where solutions can transfer and scale nicely. You can't safely extrapolate that to real-world problems.

In many endeavors, local knowledge can't safely be ignored, and hubris leads to tragedy.

Nina Munk's reporting on the Millenium Villages Project is illustrative of the difficulties one can be blindsided by when trying to get something done with insufficient regard for local conditions: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/01/nina_munk_on_po.htm...