[Stoves] Fuel and Forestry etc.

Tue Jan 21 11:06:38 CST 2014

Dear Samer

It is my hope that Cecil Cook will wander through here one day because we
spent a great deal of time looking into these problems 

>In particular I will be keen to explore more deeply the ramifications for
testing, actual fuel use, and the memes that relate these to problems of
deforestation and health.

By that I mean the problems related to the use of information generated by
the specialists who do not individually have much administrative control
over project design and management (in a lot of cases - there are
exceptions).

I recall some years ago at ETHOS expressing a view that we really needed
more input from professional marketing people - input to the stove
designers, backyard inventors and hardly-ever-do-wells who are trying to
make the world a better place with what little they have. 

The value of this input is to separate developers of technology from their
egos. No kidding. It is very disciplining to have in-your-face feedback
about one's preconceptions for a product. Marketing people have enough power
in the relationship to make the message stick. If the speaker is an
individual objecting to a stove product, they (although the customer) are
often dismissed as not realising what a wonderful device I have created for
you if you would just learn to use it properly it will do wonderful things
and make your life better and your whole family will celebrate.

The next cold shower that brings benefit is professional traders who are the
middlemen in the value chain. Sometimes we can stimulate their enthusiasm
with storied stoves with creative claims attached, piggy-backing on their
existing distribution systems and sneak a 'better product' into their
display of wares.  Let's say you can always do that once, but it had better
work for them. They are pretty callous about viability and their depth of
view is often not what is needed to launch a transformative stove product.
They can make a living selling other things too so the product has to be
viable, income-wise.

Another group that has had sterling success in attaching themselves to the
wonderful world of stoves (Disney Kitchen?) is the health community with
their agenda(s). The clear link between cooking and health is easily shown
in any community and the health sector has been a major proponent of
improved, especially lower-smoke stoves.

So these groups all have the capability to generate messages, and to receive
and store them.  They can create, store, modify, refute and extrapolate
memes arising from 'things they heard' about stoves.

The significant parallel I see in these collections of memes about what
stoves do, can do, should do and really do and the significant paper you and
Saeed have produced is that the complex world of stoves needs this sort of
analysis in order to avoid falling into a variety of traps. These traps are
the (often quite separate) agendas of a huge number of power centres always
on the lookout for the Next Big Thing they can manage, prosper from, ride,
lead, and ultimately benefit the generality of humankind through their good
efforts.

I have drawn attention to external forces and interests, but there is, were
one doing the same type of analysis as you have done, an internal group of
forces or interests that produce their own memes and circulate and evolve
them entirely within the stove community. One easy example is that
'gasifiers are inherently cleaner burning than other combustors'.  In fact
all fires are gas fires. Teasing out the intended meaning from these words
gets one into a repetitive semantic discussion that doesn't really mean much
except to the participants. The meme continues, sailing along on the current
of misunderstanding that there might be 'other fires' that do not burn gases
and that those 'other fires' are inherently 'dirtier' that gasifier fires.
Consider the remarkable examples (with hundreds of thousands of citations)
of fuels themselves being given the attributes of 'clean' and 'dirty'! 

These curiosities are fun and harmless unless they start to impact policy
and that policy impact is driven by a power centre that lies outside the
influence of the stove making community that create the meme in the first
place. That power centre is now 'misinformed' and begins allocating the
distribution of resources based on their understanding.

The result, in short, is that the projects which create, disseminate and
promote improved stoves (however defined) and fuels (ditto) can be quite
severely skewed towards goals that may actually be ephemeral. An alternative
is that the goals are real, but low priority in the community of interest. 

So, what to do about it. That is where Cecil Cook and Tig Tuntivate,
Veronica Mendizabal, Helen Carlsson, Simon Bell, Iwan Boskoro, Prianti
Utami, Christina Aristanti, Yabei Zhang plus too many others to mention come
in. Taking a comprehensive view of what happens in the community (behaviour
and resources), the market as it really exists, finance models that avoid as
many pitfalls as possible, producers and distributors who are or want to be
in the formal sector a new approach to the construction of a stove programme
has been taken and is being piloted in Indonesia. 

This approach includes significant changes in the way resources are
allocated to those who 'cause better stoves to be purchased' (which is the
ultimate goal of a viable stove industry). It includes upgrading the level
of input to the point of power sharing from social scientists (social
anthropologists and sociologists, social workers etc). It includes
developing new and affordable test methods for making comparative
evaluations that allow meaningfully accurate lab tests to realistically
predict performance when the stoves are used in a target community. It
includes careful programme design so that the system is scalable to Really
Big if the spend is justifiable.

If you, Samer, were to study this initiative from the outside I think you
would find the sort of critique you present in the paper has been done on
multiple levels by this team, and as far as we were able in the time
allocated, the major pathologies have been excised and hopeful innovations
substituted. My hope is that they are well-considered!

I will provide more details related to the technical side of the project
when it is appropriate.

Regards

Crispin freezing (again) in Waterloo

Technologizing Humanitarian Space: Darfur Advocacy and the Rape-Stove
Panacea  Samer Abdelnour and Akbar M. Saeed 

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259104849_Technologizing_Humanitari
an_Space_Darfur_Advocacy_and_the_Rape-Stove_Panacea/file/5046352d950ca6cfdf.
pdf?ev=pub_int_doc_dl
<https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259104849_Technologizing_Humanitar
ian_Space_Darfur_Advocacy_and_the_Rape-Stove_Panacea/file/5046352d950ca6cfdf
.pdf?ev=pub_int_doc_dl&origin=publication_detail&inViewer=true>
&origin=publication_detail&inViewer=true

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