[Stoves] Subject: Re: Advocacy action: ask the GACC to stop promoting the WBT

Traveller miata98 at gmail.com
Thu Feb 16 22:28:22 CST 2017


Tom:

You may be interested in this paper - Can Currently Available Advanced
Combustion Biomass Cook-Stoves Provide Health Relevant Exposure Reductions?
Results from Initial Assessment of Select Commercial Models in India Sankar
Sambandam, et al. EcoHealth DOI: 10.1007/s10393-014-0976-1.

It has some very good insights not common in peer-reviewed journals, for
instance

"Further, use of different combinations of biomass, changes in location of
the stove, type and number of meals cooked, and use of multiple stoves
changed the conditions between baseline and post-ACS installation phases
variably across the six sets of households."


(ACS = Advanced Cook Stoves).

There is a 1994 World Bank paper by Doug Barnes, Keith Openshaw and Kirk
Smith - What makes people cook with improved stoves? (Or words to that
effect.) Before that, the 1983/4 paper by Fernando Manibog in the Annual
Review of Energy. I posted an excerpt a few months ago.

There's also a more recent book by Doug and Keith, with Priti Kumar - Cleaner
Hearths, Better Homes
<http://cleancookstoves.org/resources_files/cleaner-hearths-better.pdf> -
mostly on India. I note just one sentence from the preface - "To our
surprise, many programs previously branded as hopeless had promising,
innovative features."

There's much more to program success than a stove design meeting standards
for boiling water.

The Caravan Magazine story Up in Smoke is also good., for India.
http://www.caravanmagazine.in/reportage/smoke-india-perfect-cookstove

Roger:

You wouldn't find the words "user needs" and "available fuels" in IWA,
though it does recognize that stove tests do not describe fuel properties
well enough. Boil water, weigh fuel, as if chemistry and temperatures are
fixed and all users behave like automatons.

Fuel subsidies and free stoves are not bad per se; if they save time and
labor, or for whatever reason the users prefer them, some means can be
found to please the users. The paramount problems for biomass stoves are i)
variability in local biomass and relative cost and ii) variability in
cuisines and cooking practices, particularly in large countries with
ethnic/cultural complexities like India.

Only versatile fuel/stove technologies can address these problems; so far
kerosene, gas, electricity have filled that role.I remember a couple of
 years ago, the prospective chief minister in a state promised free
electric induction stoves (around $25 apiece). Qualifying criterion might
have been households that were not already provided subsidized LPG.
Earlier, it was pressure cookers (which most of the middle class had
already.)

I don't know whom you mean by donors, but there is a basic reason why
"technology innovation" cannot be supported by public entities: procurement
and financial management rules, short-term project planning horizons, and
lately, an obsession with "results", no matter what the theory of change.

Technological innovations have to originate with public bodies responsible
for RD&D. On cookstoves, the immediate problem is that S&T (science and
technology) experts are so far removed from the reality of poor people
cooking that they keep on debating equations.

This has been a real problem for at least 30 years. The only exception I
know of is a World Bank energy project in Ethiopia around 1990-95 - it
supported local development of improved charcoal stoves and the cement mtad
(wood, for injera baking). Even that was a one-time intervention that
petered out, though the company that was contracted for the project kept
supporting some follow-on work on its own money.




Date: Wed, 15 Feb 2017 11:14:00 -0800
From: "Tom Miles" <tmiles at trmiles.com>
To: "'Roger Samson'" <rogerenroute at yahoo.ca>,   "'Discussion of biomass
        cooking stoves'" <stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org>
Subject: Re: [Stoves] Advocacy action: ask the GACC to stop promoting
        the WBT
Message-ID: <00d901d287bf$ab3b76f0$01b264d0$@trmiles.com>
Content-Type: text/plain;       charset="UTF-8"

Roger, Crispin, Frank,

Great comments and references.

What do we know about what stoves have failed and what have succeeded?
Which stoves sell and which don?t? In a given local I would think that some
designs succeed and others don?t. I have seen manufactured stoves (e.g.
LPG) abandoned for locally made stoves. There are probably studies of stove
life and use based on long term monitoring programs in organizations like
GERES. Are there links to those studies?

Thanks

Tom


----Original Message-----
From: Stoves [mailto:stoves-bounces at lists.bioenergylists.org] On Behalf Of
Roger Samson
Sent: Wednesday, February 15, 2017 8:18 AM
To: Discussion of biomass cooking stoves <stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org>
Subject: Re: [Stoves] Advocacy action: ask the GACC to stop promoting the
WBT

just to add a bit more about  Crispins point about using locally available
fuels to design stoves....

One of the reason so many stoves don't find user acceptance is that they
are designed remotely from the user and their accessible fuels. We use a
constructivist approach with end users to construct together a technology
that fully meets users needs and available fuels. We did this with our rice
hull stove in the rural Philippines 15 years ago and more recently with our
clay brick stove in Gambia.  We are concerned with performativity at the
user level not the published journal results using a sub-optimal stove test
and cooking fuels that are not typical of those used by communities.

The opposite approach is positivism, you independently develop the
technology from the users, publish the results in journals, and effectively
push it on communities through various means like fuel subsidies and free
stoves that certain agencies promote.

Douthwaite describes sustainable and unsustainable pathways to technology
development. One of the reasons improved stoves are failing is the donors
dont understand sustainable approaches to enabling technology innovation.

Read the work of Douthwaite:
http://boru.pbworks.com/f/ag_syst_IPE.pdf

A youtube video on it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wM6mpqTrFLM

and what's supposed to be a good book that I haven't read yet
http://www.amazon.com/Enabling-Innovation-Practical-
Understanding-Technological/dp/1856499715

regards

Roger


Roger Samson
Executive Director
Resource Efficient Agricultural Production (REAP)- Canada Centennial Centre
21,111 Lakeshore Rd.
Ste. Anne de Bellevue, Quebec, H9X 3V9
Tel. 1-514-398-7743
www.reap-canada.com
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Roger_Samson2
---------
(India +91) 909 995 2080
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.bioenergylists.org/pipermail/stoves_lists.bioenergylists.org/attachments/20170217/38dbafde/attachment.html>


More information about the Stoves mailing list