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

Xavier Brandao xvr.brandao at gmail.com
Tue Jan 24 11:01:17 CST 2017


/There is literally no point. Anyone can send their stoves to 5 or 10 
testing stations, get 5 or 10 fundamentally different results and then 
send in the one that suits the occasion.
/Indeed! Keep playing again and again to improve your score. Send you 
best score to funders and call for tenders./
/Expect for-profit companies competing for bids and investment, to do 
that! Expect non-profit competing for funding to do the same./
/Huge loophole, that is endangering the whole sector.


On 1/24/17 17:26, Crispin Pemberton-Pigott wrote:
> Dear All
>
> If Camilla can select from a set of WBT results the one that best 
> suits the programme qualification‎(s) sought, and the product is in 
> fact the same, what is the point of setting performance criteria?
>
> There is literally no point. Anyone can send their stoves to 5 or 10 
> testing stations, get 5 or 10 fundamentally different results and then 
> send in the one that suits the occasion.
>
> Two points are supported by these results:
>
> As Philip says, the WBT results are irreproducible, with very 
> sophisticated confirmation by Fabio that we should expect no more.
>
> The fundamental conceptualization of the test and what it purports to 
> report is somehow defective. It has been analysed technically more 
> than conceptually, but I can add that the conceptual problems are 
> large and require a ground-up-reanalysis of what we are trying to 
> ‎assess and how.
>
> Xavier wrote:
>
> "I am appalled that we are in 2017, and again another study shows how 
> much the Water Boiling Test is flawed, and is leading us in the wrong 
> direction(s).‎"
>
> Camilla's point is that you can take it in any direction you want. 
> That is from the horse's mouth, so to speak. The meaning is the race 
> house actually running says that is now to win.
>
> Regards
> Crispin
>
> PS I have pasted Cecil's relevant comment below this for convenience.
>
> ++++++
> ‎Dear fellow cookstove enthusiasts and frustrati,
>
> As an over the hill  back slide applied social anthropologist‎ I whole 
> heartedly agree it is time for the stovers of the world to unite and 
> give the WBT a belated burial.
>
> Why? Because the WBT is beginning to stink. The accumulating human, 
> economic, environmental  and societal costs to prolong the life of the 
> WBT can not be justified. I vote we pull the plug on the life support 
> sophistry and permit the various versions of  a fundamentally 
> defective stove performance test for efficiency to exit the public 
> arena once and for all.
>
> Why? The costs and complexities of prolonging it's existence now far 
> outweigh the benefits of WBTesting to identify candidate stoves that 
> qualify for inclusion in or exclusion from the category of stoves good 
> enough for gov't subsidies, big orders from UNHCR, and investor 
> financing,  It is time for stovers of the world to unite and stop our 
> fiddling while the stoves of Rome continue to burn and emit dangerous 
> smoke!
>
> ‎Fortunately we now have alternative ways to assess the performance of 
> traditional and innovative candidate stoves that are culturally, 
> environmentally, and economically contextualized.  Surely it is time 
> for the "united stover's of the world" to return to a more eclectic 
> and open minded phase of small stove R&D where we allow ourselves the 
> space we need to continue experimenting with stoves as combustion 
> technologies, as heating devices, and as tools for cooking culturally 
> variable foods, and carrying out many different tasks such as small 
> scale agri-processing and commercial food preparation.
>
>  As an anthropologist I tend to focus on the stove operators role and 
> skills, the fuels available and used, the economics of production, etc 
> and how these components combine holistically into a dynamic system 
> that also includes the fabricators and marketing agents. My preference 
> is to step back and to allow traditional and innovative stove 
> technologies, elements, behaviors, and cultures to creatively interact 
> and evolve toward new optima with the smallest possible interventions 
> and costs.
>
> If we "stovers of the world" actually unite, listen to each other and 
> get better at learning from our cantankerously different approaches it 
> should be possible for us to gradually grow an inclusive eclectic 
> approach to stove assessment that will allow us to select those tests 
> and observations which document and compare the different 
> stove/fuel/culture realities. Some time back Crispin referred to a 
> tool kit of different metrics.
>
> So my vote is to retire the WBT as an adequate indicator of a stove's 
> efficency. If we had a plebiscite on this list, what are our choices? 
> What do we replace the WBT with after it is dead and buried? RIP!
>
> Lastly I believe we are collectively learning about the negative 
> consequences ‎of allowing wanna be global authorities to PREMATURELY 
> impose universal metrics to rank the performance of stoves that are 
> ripped out of their various meaning givi


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