[Stoves] Revisiting WBT and performance metrics - revisiting history

[Cecil E Cook]

Dear autodidact Crispin,and

You speak truth! The essence of the AT movement initiated by Gandhi - probably in South Africa while cogitating on his back-to- the-land Tolstoy farm - the Pheonix settlement - located in the peri-urbs of Durban - from it's very beginning involved innovating technologies from the materials at hand that radically empowered the community members. These proto Gandhians  were searching holistically for the best technological means for advancing their little community. Gandhi continued his search for affordable technologies that would advance the masses of tiny farmers. Schumacher learned about small being beautiful in India from the search for affordable village scale technologies, then came Bucky Fuller's synergy, Ivan Illich's intense critiques of secular bureaucracy , the back to the land "whole earth" movement through out the western world, the AT materialistic critique of western civilization, and the mistaken notion that small user centered and community managed simple technos can magically fix the alienation and environmental destruction caused by big technos favoured by powerful elites!

The challenge became using state of the art science to design culture and nature friendly technologies such as the present world wide search to discover - for example - more efficient, low emission, contextualized, and affordable stoves that some how make everybody happier!

My main response to your discussion with Nikhil et al is to point out that you are correctly disintegrating the local context of stove culture, design, fabrication, testing and standard setting\regulation, fuelling, marketing, etc. into a number of well established institutional role players and interest groups. All of these different stove "players" shape the local stove culture. Their different preferences and inputs gradually give substance to a shared stove "language" about the ideal functions and the most desirable features of what the indigenous stove users, fuel suppliers, stove makers, standard setters, and funders accept as a description of the best of all possible stoves. 

Each of the different stove actor and communities with voice in the de facto conversation about the most desirable and\or practical stove functions, performances, energy carriers, shapes, appearances, materials, costs, durability, safety and health benefits all contribute to the gradual  formation of the dominant culture of domestic stoves. Such a provisional interpretation of what the best of all possible  indigenous stove(s) will look like is the outcome of a devilishly complicated political game! 

Different stove actors and constituencies have more or less power to influence  complex processes of decision making at local, regional, national and international levels. So there are big differences in power and legitimacy of stove stakeholders at each level of organization. Reflecting briefly here:  stove change agents - whether financial, technical, NGO\political, or governmental - need to pay careful attention to whether stoves are home made, craftsman fabricated, or factory produced and commercially sold. These relative strength of these different major approaches to stove fabrication - home made, local craftsmen and women, regional or national manufacturing, and the importation of stoves from international factories - to a large extent must determine the main change strategies  adopted by agencies interested in the massive transformation of domestic cooking, heating, and work performing stoves!  
 
The macro approach selected to change the  environmental, energy, economic or health performance of domestic stoves in a country, region, city, or socio-economic horizon (aka class) will depend on many variables. What I find curious is the resistance exhibited by western change agents working for national &  international development agencies to the obviously (to me) better cost benefit performance of small investments to radically improve stove performance by training householders and local artisans to fabricate radically higher performance household stoves! 

The canonical AT approach to bottom up development is not - in my experience -  favoured by big bilateral and multilateral development agencies. My untested hypothesis is that modernizing elites in developing lands do not like to spend money that strengthens small enterprise and  empowers local autonomy. There is a strong irrational bias against helping villages and even rural regions to prosper! (perhaps my experience of resistance to joyfully investing in bottom up development initiatives is not shared by others?)   

I must admit that I dislike working for big development bureaucrat and they tend to dislike me, my attempts to capture the world view of township and village dwellers, and my recommendations aimed at incremental revolution from below!!

My final comment to Crispin, Nikhil and other who are still reading  is that we need to create regional development "communiversities" which convene small development task groups that being together the diversity of constituencies, actor, and experts and charge them with innovating well contextualized whole system socio-technical change programs for particular communities of potential beneficiaries. The task of such diverse problem solving groups - which could be convened by a village of a cluster of villages - is to combine the different assessment about the most perfect domestic stove for "X" region which Crispin identified in his rebuttal of Nikhil. Our problem is that there is no neutral platform or matrix where all these partial assessments of potentially better stoves can be competently combined and the  interests of as many actors are objectively  taken into account and the science of stoves can democratically served the interests of all equally!

That's what I wanted to share. The Office of Technology Assessment function is sadly lacking in the arena of small stove development. We need to put poor old humpty dumpty back together again. Have a look at the OTA model and it's methodologies and check out a couple of the completed TA. Where do we house a world level Global Office of (Stove) Technology Assessment? Only such a trusted science court can hope to assist Crispin and others  in their quest for the most appropriate stove technology for a particular client community!

I am in my soap box now shouting:
Scientific Power to the People

In search,
Cecil the Cook


On August 2, 2017, at 12:26 AM, Crispin Pemberton-Pigott <crispinpigott at outlook.com> wrote:

Dear Nikhil

Apart  from reminding me how much damage has been done to the stove design community by the WBT, the sorry list of misdirected energy below is worthy of keeping in mind.

I think if Mary Louise Gifford and Bilger and Barnes and Elinor Ostrom were starkly aware that the WBT does not report the ‘time to boil and fuel consumption’ as understood by the community of potential users, they would be even more upset. The toxic thread running through years of papers and plans cause by the chronic misrepresentation of performance is difficult to describe in detail because it is absolutely everywhere.

Nikhil, you don’t like the metrics – and have given reasons for that dislike. I am saying above that, ‘if they calculated and operated correctly the assessment would have been more realistic and people would have not been given stoves to play with that were no better or even worse than their traditional devices’. You can reject that argument if you reject the metrics on principle, but I think there is merit in it.

What is see happening is this:

Enthusiastic stove designers and fiddlers and donors and administrators plan a stove improvement project. This is a reasonable thing to do. Because they cannot possibly know everything they need to know to pull of a perfect ‘project’ setting up a perfect ‘producer’ of perfect ‘stoves’ they are going to have to wing it some of the time. The question then is, which gaps in knowledge and understanding shall be ‘winged’ and which shall tread on solid ground.

If the project is dominated by social interventionists who focus entirely on the people and their behaviours and traditions, and further, they assume people do not and cannot change and are not currently changing their behaviours (all dangerous assumptions) they may be driven to produce a ‘suboptimal technical solution’ in order to have rapid adoption or widespread adoption. Fair enough, decisions must be made. They are winging it with respect to the technical design and combustion parts of the enterprise and concentrating on what they think is important, nay, critical.

If the project is dominated (as a few are) by technicians who are efficiency bean counters and particle filter aficionados they are likely to wing it over the social science aspects such as pot accommodation, stirring energy, fuel size flexibility and so on.

If the project is dominated by financial methods and artful ways to bring into existence a self-sustaining industry making ‘better stoves’, success will be measured on a completely different basis.

My point is that when the authors below have discussed stove projects and their many short-comings, they have also winged it on certain matters that are in fact crucial to success. We have been offered, in effect, a choice of lesser results because of gaps in the team that should not be there. When reading about the locally developed ‘low performance stoves in Nigeria’ that were better than the baseline but not nearly as good as the ‘expensive’ stoves, the first thing I think is that the designers of the low end stoves probably don’t know what they are doing. Bit brutal, but I am keeping it short.

The difference between stoves in terms of performance should be limited to durability, not function. A high performance stove usually has good combustion and heat transfer and controllability and is sealed better. A low cost version of a high performance stove can have very similar performance, but not last nearly as long.  It is not about ‘performance’ per se, it is about recurrent cost and the opportunity cost of purchasing either. There is no good reason for all cheap stoves to have poor performance. Look into who was winging what to discover what happened.

Obviously it is easy to find exceptions but the point I am making is generally true: the recent GIZ stove project (ongoing?) in Nigeria is promoting a sub-optimal rice par-boiler design not because the local producers find that ‘it can’t be done’ for less money, but rather that they really don’t know that much about designing combustion and heat transfer systems. In short they may be very knowledgeable about par-boiling rice and working with metal, but not about designing high efficiency large scale cooking appliances. The choice made was not between stoves of similar technical perfection with two different cost profiles (which it should have been), but between a highly engineered and expensive stove with pretty good performance and a local product that has the technical elements ‘winged’ due to lack of experience and training.

The sheer amount of misinformation and malformed generalisations circulating on ‘how stoves work’ is a problem. Well-meaning doesn’t necessarily lead to well-conceived. Why should Nigerian par-boilers not make low tech (in terms of materials and skills) stoves using an advanced understanding of ‘how stoves work’? Par-boiling doesn’t have to be hot, smoky, inefficient and slow work just because the stove is cheap.

Are optimal solutions obtainable from the autobiographic hagiographies available on the internet? Apparently not.

Nikhil, I can’t accept the criticism that the performance metrics have no value. They do.
I don’t accept that well-wishers can guess their way to a high performance stove. They can’t.
I don’t accept that stoves can be developed in isolation from the intended community of users. They can’t.
I don’t accept that applying a high tech understanding of combustion and function necessarily results in a much more expensive appliance. It doesn’t have to.
I don’t accept that ‘low cost’ stove are all ‘low tech’ devices. Elegance is shy too.
I don’t accept that ‘really good stoves’ will self-propagate without a coherent marketing plan and institutional actors such as distributors and vendors. They don’t.

One of the constant surprises is how well a three stove fire rates on a safety test. Even noticed that? People often comment on it asking, “How can a traditional TSF get such a high rating on safety?” It would be better to ask why so many ‘improved stoves’ get such a low rating. Someone was winging it, that’s why.

“Smith’s primary source of success is the acceptance of a stove by a community, while the researchers at Aprovecho define success as optimal energy efficiency.”

But if Aprovecho had instead optimized fuel efficiency the story lines might have converged. It is not a ‘choice between’, it is about ‘filling in’ the blanks.

The community should be able to both bake their cake and eat it.

Regards
Crispin




List, Xavier:

I stumbled upon paper a few months ago - Sustaining Culture with Sustainable Stoves:The Role of Tradition in Providing Clean-BurningStoves to Developing Countries<http://www.consiliencejournal.org/index.php/consilience/article/viewFile/157/67>,  Consilience, The Journal of Sustainable Development Vol. 5, Iss. 1 (2011), Pp. 71-95. Britta Victor Department of Anthropology Princeton University, Princeton, NJ  .

It is relevant to the earlier discussion on the tensions between physical and social scientists or students of cultures and foods, and the pursuit of energy efficiency as the sole metric.

There is another 2011 paper - A Review of Global Cookstoves Programs<https://mlgifford.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/cookstove-programs_berkeley-thesis.pdf>, by Mary Louise Gifford - that cites some of the same material that is cited by Britta Victor, and reaches similar, though less strong conclusions, namely that global technologists alone are likely to fail.

Nikhil

-----------------------------------
Excerpt from Britta Victor's Sustaining Culture with Sustainable Stoves:The Role of Tradition in Providing Clean-Burning Stoves to Developing Countries<http://www.consiliencejournal.org/index.php/consilience/article/viewFile/157/67>, Consilience


9. Technological Imposition

Stove programs, especially those that developed countries initiate, do not always know what is best for the communities they are trying to help. This is no fault of their own; they simply do not understand the individual needs of each community, and perhaps they cannot. Local members of the community know best which stoves the community will embrace. It seems that, instead of designing a stove such as that pretty, shining, and mass-produced Envirostove to all of these communities, the best thing the developed world can do is to fund local stove projects.

.........While their argument is no different from that of Smith: the most efficient stoves are probably not going to be made by the designers who call rural villages in developing countries home, their definition of a successful stove is different. Smith‟s primary source of success is the acceptance of a stove by a community, while the researchers at Aprovecho define success as optimal energy efficiency.

Jacob Moss of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency elaborates on this point while at Aprovecho‟s stove camp in Oregon:

When we first got into this, we had this utopian vision of working with local communities to build locally grown stoves. We‟ve moved away from that—I won‟t say a hundred and eighty degrees, but maybe a hundred and sixty. I don‟t really listen to small stove projects anymore. When I hear Dean say that one millimeter can make a nontrivial difference, it‟s inconceivable to me that all these local stovemakers can make all these stoves efficiently. You have to work in a different way (Bilger 2009:96).

However, if Moss is correct in saying that local stovemakers cannot make an efficient stove—perhaps they can make a stove that is “better” in some ways but still doesn‟t meet a certain standard—then the community‟s acceptance of that stove is irrelevant. If we are to agree with these representatives of the Aprovecho Research Center—leaders in sustainable stove design—and the Environmental Protection Agency, then we agree that stoves for the developing world should be designed in the developed world and subsequently distributed to a variety of diverse communities.

This does not mean that stovemakers from outside the communities should not take local preferences into very serious account. And the researchers at Aprovecho are aware of this. “The campers in Cottage Grove spent half their time agonizing over cultural sensitivity,” Bilger writes. “‟We‟re highly dominated by elderly white engineering types,‟ a stovemaker who‟d worked in Uganda told me. „So you get a lot of preposterous ideas that‟ll never fly in the kitchen‟” (2009:94). These expert stovemakers, advocating for stoves designed far from their future homes, are conscious of this drawback of their own method.

The compromise, it seems, is stove design should be done by outside experts, with considerable input by the community members who will be using the stoves. Douglas F. Barnes, Keith Openshaw, Kirk R. Smith, and Robert van der Plas advise that engineers must build the stoves, with heavy local influence on their design, rather than the other way around. Stove programs often fail, they explain, when outside engineers dictate to community artisans how the stove should be built (1994:14). Local cooks should instead dictate how outside engineers should build the stoves. The stoves will be technically better when Western engineers have control over those critical millimeters, but they will be more successful (even if a bit less efficient) if they take local preferences into account.

There is, of course, a balance between too little local input and too much. Stoves must be custom-designed for communities, but they will fail if “critical stove components are custom built” (Barnes et. Al 1994:14). These critical components, such as the combustion chamber, should be mass-produced, while the body of the stove should be adapted to local needs.

Unfortunately, this push for local input may have developed into a basis for false advertisement. Stove programs that claim to welcome local input may not actually take that expertise into account. As Smith argues, “you can have it in any color, as long as it‟s black,” he says of this false sense of choice consumers are offered (1989:521). The companies that design the stoves are so much larger and more powerful than the consumers, he explains, that the designers have no need to truly listen to their customers, and he suggests that in this way the designers are taking advantage of their customers‟ lack of power.

“Even if legislation or policy boasts a „participatory‟ or „community‟ label, it is rare that individuals from the community have had any say at all in the policy. Further, many of these centrally imposed „community‟ programs are based on a naïve view of community,” seconds Elinor Ostrom (2001:ix). But programs using deception in this way, she writes, benefits nobody, as the programs are likely to fail. She is referring to any community resource legislation or policy, demonstrating that stoves fit in with other environmental initiatives—best understood by communities but often overtaken by outsiders.

...........

12. A Message to Stove Programs

To avoid this accidental imperialism, stove programs should be careful not to manipulate the marketing of their products. If the stoves are not selling, it is not because customers should be convinced in a different way of the stove‟s value. Rather, it is because the stove is not well adapted to the customer‟s needs. If the cooks that are exposed to the health threats accompanying traditional stoves are unwilling to switch to cleaner stoves, it is probably because there is something intrinsically unappealing about those stoves.

“My number one piece of advice of doing successful work in the stove business is first listen to your clients. You cannot change your clients out there, it‟s much easier to change your technology, so if you‟re not selling your stoves you‟ve got the wrong product,” advises Christa Roth of the GTZ Program for Biomass Energy Conservation in Southern Africa (Toward Clean Cooking).

Stovemakers may be unable to design stoves that appeal to the cooks because of their relentless quest for optimal efficiency. Perhaps a small degree of efficiency must be sacrificed in order to create the greatest magnitude of change, by shifting the emphasis from near-perfect efficiency to performance that can match that of traditional stoves when cooking traditional meals (Barnes et al. 1994:13).

This performance standard has been ignored in most stove tests. In fact, the efficiency of the stove when cooking the traditional foods of one‟s community may be completely different from the efficiency measured in the laboratory. The most common test for measuring stoves‟ efficiencies is the Water Boiling Test (WBT). The models that boil water the quickest with the minimal amount of fuel and ambient heat loss are chosen to be mass produced and distributed to the rural communities. This test is preferred as it is an easy way to standardize between stoves when choosing the best model, but standardization is exactly what stovemakers should avoid. Stoves should be custom-designed for each community, not used to perform a function that the stove may never actually perform in its lifetime.

An example of a stove which may be preferred by many cooks enough that they may actually purchase it and use it, so that it may make a more significant impact on climate change and human health than those stoves which are never adopted, is the Ecostove. Jetter and Kariher describe this stove, just one of many they tested:
This stove has a steel griddle top that is useful for making tortillas and frying foods, but it is not well suited for boiling water or cooking with a pot. . .The ecostove could be more fairly compared to other griddle stoves used for tortilla making and frying foods using a test protocol different from the WBT, such as the Controlled Cooking Test (CCT) (2009:7).

For cooks who want to make tortillas (some variety of which is popular in communities in many developing countries throughout the world), this Ecostove may function similarly enough to their traditional stoves that they would be willing to make the switch. They will never make that switch, though, if the stove is rejected because its efficiency is slightly lower than that of another stove. In fact, Kariher and Jetter explain that the stove performs poorly in the WBT because the heat transfer from the griddle top to the pot is inefficient,