[Stoves] Response to Ron (about Leaping)- role of stove anthropologists in empowering stove users/producers to form & ask own questions

[Cecil Cook]

Dear interlocutors,

Thank you for devoting so much time to the issue of how to observe and
involve stove users in a meaningful back and forth discussion with stove
experts ...... who are determined - for what ever reason - to innovate and
successfully disseminate what they consider to be improved stoves. It may
help if I provide a little background. I am not trying to imprison
villagers and city dwellers in the past when I urge stovers to learn as
much as they can about and from the folks they want to help improve their
lives before they attempt to innovate a stove for cooking, space heating,
and other essential household, agricultural, and work tasks.

So I respect the noble intentions of many stovers, like Paul, Ron, Crispin,
Nikhil and other contributors to the BioEnergy Stove Discussion List who
are deeply committed to the advancement of stove science and its
application to the design of improved small scale combustion devices to
perform particular tasks. I was trying share what Crispin PP and I have
learned in the course of a 40 year relationship about how to marry the
social and physical science approaches to *in situ* technology
development.  Here is my version of what we have learned over the years
mostly in southern Africa working with small public sector budgets
dedicated to the creation of more prosperous and sustainable rural
economies that maximized the use of local knowledge, resources, governance
and minimized dependence on outside expertise, money, or political mandates
and government officials.

Crispin and I met and have collaborated in the world view context created
by the Gandhian critique of the whiteman's burden, his belief in the
superior efficiency of local production by the masses in villages rather
than mass production in factories in world cities, and his faith in the
power of institutions of local self governance to generate full employment
by combining labour and skill intensive craft production with highly
technologized and automated forms of mass production. Fritz 'small is
beautiful' Schumacher was a direct ideological descendent of Gandhi and the
work of many appropriate technology organizations such as VITA, ATI, ITDG,
GATE, GERES,NCAT and Aprovecho have continued to explore what might be
called the backside or trailing edge of the industrial revolution .....;and
...... yes there is something quixotic in this quest for a more inclusive
and diversified prosperity that recognizes the necessity for many different
paths to achieve this prosperity and well being.

The earlier quest in the 1960's and 1970's for more *appropriate* stove
technologies was and continues to be informed by the understanding that all
humans swim and act in a rich medium of culture and realize that stove
science and technologies are specialized expressions of culture.

Stoves can be usefully viewed as technological products but they must also
be understood as integral parts of complicated socio-economic and culture
mediated systems of traditional ethno-science. My harping on the importance
of respecting and researching the baseline traditional stoves as the
essential first step in applied stove science is based not on surveys. It
is based on common sense. I have interviewed myself and discovered that
stove development and transfer of innovations is an inherently consultative
process that must engage all the major actors within the local, regional
and national stove system. I have a personal and professional
responsibility as social scientist - much like a medical doctor - to cause
no harm to any of these role players in the name of stove progress (and we
can and will argue till the cows come home about how who gets to define
meta-progress: is it the golden mean that averages the perspectives and
interests of all parties?)

At best the long suffering and respectful and open eared consultative
approach to technology development - such as the one practiced by Crispin
and me over the years in many different kinds of village scale self help
implemented appropriate technology aims to enable the different technology
protagonists - here stovers - to gradually figure out how to increase the
benefits and reduce costs of higher functioning stove technologies either
by replicating or tweaking the familiar stove designs or by innovating a
radically new combination of stove/fuel/operator/
producer elements. It is obvious to me (see a paper I wrote in 1980/81 for
the USAID Africa Bureau on* Spontaneous Technology Transfer*) that the
greater the number of changes needed to successfully implement a new stove
program whether by simply tweaking it in situ, gradually introducing small
incremental changes, or by inserting a totally new type of stove that
requires fundamental changes in the entire traditional stove culture and
multi-actor stove system, the more complex becomes the innovation process
itself.

The greater the complexity of the changes necessary to achieve a desired
upgrade or transformation, the more dependent such a stove change process
becomes upon imported expertise, big subsidies, and governmental power. The
relative costs and differing degree of difficulty required to successfully
implement a comparatively simple stove change program that tweaks or
incrementally changes only a few elements in a traditional stove system
typically requires less money, governance, and risk of failure when
compared to multi level and multi-constituency campaigns of stove
innovation when the aim is to totally replace an already institutionalized
traditional stove system with a completely new stove/operator/fuel
/producer system.

Equally important in determining the degree of difficulty of a complex
versus a simple stove change program is the size and the internal self
governability of the political and economic communities or units involved
in the implementation of stove change programs and campaigns. To repeat
myself, the question here is about the implementation of what I see as
a *bottom
up globalization strategy* whereby the benefits of modern stove science and
technology are first translated into and then integrated into local stove
culture and local capacity to reconfigure the elements of the traditional
stove system to incorporate and accommodate more "appropriate" stove
innovations and products.

E M Rogers spent many years studying the 'diffusion of innovations' by
different kinds of societies. (See for example:

https://www.enablingchange.com.au/Summary_Diffusion_Theory.pdf)

Rogers uses the concept of the indigenous "*reinvention*" by the recipients
of an externally sourced innovations to account for differences in
receptivity and rates of uptake of different types of innovation. There is
a corpus of thousands of studies documenting and assessing the role of
different socio-economic and cultural and psychological variables to
account for the critical differences in adoption rates.

What is at issue here?  Surely it is not the objective of the bioenergy
discussion list to treat human beings as guinea pigs or to manipulatively
impose inferior stoves on millions of families. The least we can do is
listen respectfully to each other and learn AMAP (as much as possible) from
our collective experience which is vast. My contribution to the multlogue
is to echo and reinforce Fritz Schumcher's long ago critique of the
inherent wastefulness of one size fits all centralization full stop! Let us
help each other to combine our different experiences and expertise to
create the next generation of diversified and client centered improved
stove technologies as humanly possible ASAP.

My newest definition of* appropriate technology is the* *noble quest to
democratize access to powers and benefits of science.* Think about what
kind of an improved stove your client would design, fabricate and buy if he
or she had access to all the different sciences and capacities which are
represented on the BioEnergy Stove Discussion List! Diversity is a terrible
thing to waste so let's get out of the way, improve our communication
quotient and let the good times roll! Or is that "happy days are here
again" I hear in the background??

In search and service,
Cecil E Cook
TechnoShare SA & USA .  :



On Mon, May 29, 2017 at 2:57 AM, Nikhil Desai <pienergy2008 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Paul:
>
> Thank you for your courageous opinion exposing the underbelly of stove
> science funding. It has much more to do with the cycle of preconceived
> notions generating failed recommendations than just whether or not
> anthropologists are consulted or marketers placed between designers and
> vendors.
>
> First about anthropology. I remember the pop sloganeering  "observe and
> report, but do not alter the society." prevalent at the time (40 years
> ago). What seems to have happened - especially with anthropologists in what
> is called "sub-altern studies" and some renegades from the academe - is, if
> not "alter the society", at least alter the narratives about the history
> and the future of societies. A whole new wave of re-interpretation of the
> colonial experience has been going on for the last 30-odd years.
>
> About stoves, I do think that "the people should design the stove" is
> quaint romanticism of a generation gone by. We can keep the spirit of
> inquiry without the baggage of teenage fancies. Social anthropologists have
> probably recognized that the slogan shouldn't be "the people should design
> the stove" but simply that "the people should be listened to, because only
> when they feel heard they would accept your questions and dare to challenge
> your questions and teach you what to ask."
>
> All of it in vernacular languages, not in standard forms printed in
> English or French.
>
> It is the joule-counters - doing energy balances and not collective mass
> balances or balance sheets -- who have continued to relish their infantile
> fantasies of protecting forests, chastity, lives, and climate ad nauseum.
>
> Why? Why is it that tens of millions of dollars are wasted on purported
> "health impacts", secret contracts of UN Foundation, and advocating
> billions of dollars of subsidies for LPG and electricity, even marketing
> ludicrous "voluntary carbon" credits and aDALYs, but pathetically little on
> basic engineering of usable biomass stoves for households and non-household
> users?
>
> We need to follow the money to understand how propaganda influences
> research funding decisions. Why else would the WBT have survived as long as
> it has, or ISO TC 285 work reduced to what Ranyee Chiang now calls "Living
> with Diversity" (ETHOS 2017)?
>
> Living. With. Diversity. Code for acknowledging that it is not possible to
> force groupthink over scientists with an open mind.
>
> How about that? :-)
>
> Chiang shows three stages of alleged harmonization - "Discussions have led
> to greater agreement", "Try to reach agreement, and live with areas that
> can’t be aligned", and "When we have different priorities, be clear about
> what each of us means."
>
> These are code words, respectively, for "We can't get people to agree" to
> "Give up trying to force slavish compliance to the indefensible", and "Some
> renegades must have ulterior motives".
>
> Nice progress at the TC after more than five years.
>
> I think bureaucrats of the aid industry -- principal culprits are in the
> US and European governments, with the make-merry charity foundations in the
> wine-dine-and-shine parties -- need to be held accountable for fooling too
> many people far too long.
>
> With nothing to show.
>
> Nikhil
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Nikhil Desai
> (India +91) 909 995 2080 <+91%2090999%2052080>
> *Skype: nikhildesai888*
>
>
> On Sun, May 28, 2017 at 8:02 AM, Paul Anderson <psanders at ilstu.edu> wrote:
>
>> Stovers,
>>
>> Relating to Ron's quest for questionnaires about stove research, he
>> wrote:
>>
>>  I am NOT interested in standard stoves;  I want to know what was
>> considered in the framework of TLUDs and biochar -both by Probec and World
>> Bank (and anyone else).
>>
>> [Here is my OPINION, without much documentation.]   When the people
>> (stove users) and the researchers do NOT have awareness of what are TLUD
>> stoves and their char-making capabilities, neither the people nor the
>> researchers will include in questionnaires the issues that are most
>> relevant to TLUDs / char making stoves.
>>
>> Back in my student days (1964), I considered becoming an anthropologist.
>> But I rejected that profession for me because the instruction basically
>> said "observe and report, but do not alter the society."   I wanted then
>> and still do want to alter societies in beneficial ways.  I would not have
>> been a good anthropologist.
>>
>> When NEW material is intentionally not presented because the thinking is
>> that "the people should design the stove", there is no way that a regular
>> cook is going to say "I would like a stove that produces charcoal."   Too
>> foreign a concept.  And if a questionnaire asked "Would you like a stove
>> that *makes *charcoal while you are cooking?", there would certainly be
>> puzzled looks, maybe a few laughs, and the researcher would need to be
>> prepared to justify the absurdity of such a question.
>>
>> There are many die-hard knowledgeable Stovers (including those who
>> administer stove projects) who resist every aspect of TLUD stoves.  Why
>> would they want questionnaires with questions that touch upon TLUD issues?
>>
>> Even when research projects are being designed, for many years TLUD
>> micro-gasifier stoves were not included in the stoves for consideration.
>> And there are examples of projects that included (and spent money on)
>> poorly designed stoves that are marginally TLUDs (Sampada is a leading
>> example), and certainly did not include the strongest TLUD-ND design
>> (Champion, from India).    Or they think that ACE / Philips or Biolite
>> represent forced air TLUD-FA stoves.
>>
>> About the above paragraph, some readers of this message do not know the
>> differences between those named stoves, and yet they will make decisions
>> about what stoves to include in funded research.   And the results are weak
>> because of poor decisions at the beginning.
>>
>> Ron, the questionnaires (if you find them) will not include many, if any,
>> questions that relate to TLUD issues.
>>
>> As I said, that is my OPINION.
>>
>> Paul
>>
>> Doc  /  Dr TLUD  /  Prof. Paul S. Anderson, PhD
>> Email:  psanders at ilstu.edu
>> Skype:   paultlud    Phone: +1-309-452-7072 <(309)%20452-7072>
>> Website:  www.drtlud.com
>>
>>
>>
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>>
>
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