[Stoves] White Men in White Clothes (and Whitewashing, White Lies)

[Traveller]

Roger:

Thanks. I don't know what agency you work for; you seem to know much more
about GACC than I do, which is entirely the public persona. It seems GACC
Secretariat does do good work.

You raise two major concerns - GACC program design and the Secretariat
competence, the latter as apparent in cultural insensitivity. I have
several reactions, which I will try to articulate in different posts.

Caution:I may seem to disagree with or challenge you. After all, you
practically invite me to - "Divergent opinions are healthy".

While I am harshly critical of some gassy emissions from GACC and its CEO's
pretensions, I think these are minor misdemeanors; "high crimes" are
somewhere else, by people who may or may not be in the public domain.

Face it, UN Foundation, Inc. is a three-faced animal (I forget Greek
mythology). It is a middleman for some grantmaking. It is a think-tank. And
it is a consulting company - contractor for professional services. As such,
all of this requires raising quite a bit of money and hosting impressive
parties and flying around the world. (I shared a flight with Senator Wirth
and Prof. Yunus way back when.)

It was inevitable that GACC become a "fine-wine-dine-and-shine" party.

I have great sympathy for GACC CEO. Hers is not an easy job at all.  I have
no idea if anybody at GACC reads what I post here; to them, I may be an
annoying mosquito, not a wild ass. But think about it - GACC CEO needs to
have a thick skin and an ability to impress those she needs to impress,
raise money.

Right off the bat in 2012 she had to put up with a Washington Post story by
Brian Palmer
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/clean-cookstoves-draw-support-but-they-may-not-improve-indoor-air-quality/2012/04/16/gIQAnjCvLT_story.html>,
quoting a con (econ, that is) perfesser, Michael Greenstone, that what GACC
was doing was "spending money unwisely".  While people may have divergence
of opinions on whether UN Foundation, Inc. was spending money unwisely,
Greenstone is hardly an example of "spending money wisely". (I criticized
the study reported - posted just a few hours online before Palmer put up
his Post item, strongly suggesting that Greenstone had engineered a public
relations coup against GACC and Hillary.) I will write on that later; I am
trying to locate the rightly angry reaction of GACC CEO to that conspiracy
of dunces.

She also has to put up with Marc Gunther and other skeptics, critics.

This is Washington. As Vince Foster said, "ruining people is considered a
sport" here.

GACC has become a circus. (Can someone enlighten me if Gotham City had a
circus? What was Jack Nicholson's Joker character in Batman?)

If it is true, as you suggest, that GACC staff does not represent people
who know much about international development or energy industries, whose
fault is that, really? Who advised or controlled what GACC CEO could do and
whom she could here? There is only so much that can be laid to her feet. Or
even Hillary's. While call these women Queens of Chappaqua and Washington,
DC - I am an ass, I have already confessed - it is the mania of "results"
and "credibility" that has driven GACC "program design".

The fault lies in the stars (bureaucratic celebrities at State and EPA),
not much (if any) with GACC CEO. (At least, a presumption of innocence must
apply.)

******

There is more to GACC incompetence than the cultural insensitivity apparent
in White Men in White Clothes at the Imperial Hotel, one of my favorites,
so long as someone picks up the tab. (GACC?)

I had forgotten about that picture. If the White Men were chefs, it might
be their uniform.

I owe huge gratitude to White men. Including one in White clothes: a
Spaniard Jesuit.

White men - and women - have shown amazing capacity for reflection and
self-criticism, especially in the last few decades. I don't know if you are
White or not; I do think non-Whites - men and women - need to show they can
be as self-critical as White Men.

It's not that selecting non-White men or women is necessarily virtuous.
Those Indian women cooking at the Imperial Hotel may well have felt proud
showing off to White Men in White Clothes.

*****

In your view of GACC, "The program design is not adequately focussed on
results based management. It seems GACC gets its money to  manage for
health outcomes for poor people".

I have a heretical view:

a) There is no way "clean cookstoves" can be shown to cause a reduction in
disease incidence or premature mortality;

b) anybody giving GACC money to "manage for health outcomes for poor
people" has mortgaged common sense, knows nothing about health of poor
people. Mountains of data - a lot of it "cooked up" - and "super-human"
IHME efforts to run super computers don't amount to anything.

It is the donor class that has a problem if they have pushed GACC to show
"health benefit" results. I can set up a Logical Framework to show how
wrong premises have set up GACC to fail. Perhaps such a log-frame was
created for GACC back in 2009.

Or maybe the answer lies not in GACC being too glib or its financiers being
too gullible. Nor in Hillary pulling a snow job. That's a politician's duty
- to promote causes to please his/her followers.

Senator Tim Wirth is probably the one to blame - taking on a project he
knew nothing about, then cooking up a strategy and staff recruitment that
you are not happy with. Did Hillary have the right advice? Did Tim?

Either way, it's time to admit error, retreat from grandiose promises of
"emissions and health" - what I call the "box paradigm", treating stoves
and lungs as oxidation devices that can be modeled by physicists applying
dubious statistical inference methods .

Did you ever wonder why anybody needs to prove health benefits to poor
people of reduced air pollutant emission rates, and show the results to
whom?

I suspect Hillary and Tim were ill-advised by USEPA. GACC may well be the
hobby horse of EPA bureaucrats to cook up own careers.

Pending evidence to the contrary, I don't think GACC Secretariat can be
blamed for anything but accepting White Lies from EPA and Whitewashing the
reality - parroting "deforestation", "causes deaths", "women's
empowerment", "climate change".

More to come.

Nikhil



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> Message: 5
> Date: Fri, 9 Dec 2016 17:15:02 +0000 (UTC)
> From: Roger Samson <rogerenroute at yahoo.ca>
> To: Discussion of biomass cooking stoves
>         <stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org>
> Subject: Re: [Stoves] report with dissapointing results from cleaner
>         cookstoves (Andrew) - Malawi
> Message-ID: <739398483.1284031.1481303702589 at mail.yahoo.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
>
>
> I think everybody just needs to thicken up their skin a little. Divergent
> opinions are healthy to any list even if the comments aren't appreciated by
> all. When Nikhil attacked GACC on the WHITE MEN dressed in WHITE clothes at
> the IMPERIAL hotel standing and CIRCLING the sitting brown women I thought
> then that GACC really had lost its way. That photo was completely
> revolting. How much worse can you do than that photo set-up?  I was pleased
> to see him call GACC out on that photo and its best done by someone from
> the south.
>
> The fact is that a lot of development money is being used by GACC with
> pretty modest results.   I have had staff attend their meetings and found
> them useful. I think somes of the programs are helpful.   But that Imperial
> hotel photo in my opinion should have made heads roll at GACC. Now this
> major stove study with no results where a lot  of money was spent should be
> a wake up call to reassess the program implementation.
>
> I think there are 2 main problems with current GACC programs.
>


> 1) The program design is not adequately focussed on results based
> management. It seems GACC gets its money to  manage for health outcomes for
> poor people but their activities are not adequately delivering the results
> efficiently. In my opinion the program needs to be redesigned to manage for
> activities that create a  comprehensive strategy to develop sustainable
> cooking systems for improved health outcomes at lowest cost.  They seem
> overzealous in their pursuit of clean cooking technology as their end goal.
> 2) The overall  staffing at GACC has an insufficient representation of
> people who have spent adequate time working in international development
> that understand the complexity of issues affecting poor people. If they did
> there is no way that revolting Imperial hotel photo would ever have been
> taken or distributed or the meeting even held at that hotel.
>
> Our agency has largely withdrawn from GACC because there is no point
> trying to work within an organizational structure that is broken and they
> largely are the main controller of stove funds. The GACC program needs to
> be externally reviewed and redesigned to manage for developmental outcomes
> around health and poverty alleviation. If that can happen we would be most
> willing to re-engage with the agency but we won't be a partner in
> encouraging  high cost happenstance development programs for poor people.
>
>
> regards
>
> Roger Samson



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(US +1) 202-568-5831
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