[Stoves] Fuel and Forestry etc.

Ronal W. Larson rongretlarson at comcast.net
Tue Jan 21 11:42:54 CST 2014


Crispin and list

   1.  Since we are a few days away from the ETHOS meeting, and there will be some funders there, I hope you can elaborate on this phrase from below:

>    “….  the major pathologies have been excised …”
   
   2.  We have discoursed on your not measuring char production in the proposed test procedures for Indonesia.  Is char-production still a “pathology” that you have “excised", or do you now measure char production when testing stoves designed to intentionally make char?  

   3.  My question includes all possible “major pathologies”, not just char-production (my meme).  Just hoping for a list we should be considering at ETHOS.

Ron




On Jan 21, 2014, at 10:06 AM, Crispin Pemberton-Pigott <crispinpigott at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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_Humanitarian_Space_Darfur_Advocacy_and_the_Rape-Stove_Panacea/file/5046352d950ca6cfdf.pdf?ev=pub_int_doc_dl&origin=publication_detail&inViewer=true
>  
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