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

Tue May 30 10:47:27 CDT 2017

Thanks Cecil, that was pretty good. The link to the summary on enabling change was just excellent. The more we promote stoves and fuels with confusing complexity the less likely we are to get adoption. The more we promote stoves with profound simplicity in design and function the easier the adoption. 

The health agenda folks need to be told to get into the back seat as they do not have the skill set to drive the complex development process forward with communities..   The most toxic situation is where we have the health promoting agencies being fed money by the fossil fuel industry to promote their vision of clean cooking. It's like watching a drunk driver get behind the wheel....they think they know where they are going and they are all fueled up and in a hurry. 

regards

roger

--------------------------------------------
On Tue, 5/30/17, Cecil Cook <cec1863 at gmail.com> wrote:

 Subject: Re: [Stoves] Response to Ron (about Leaping)- role of stove anthropologists in empowering stove users/producers to form & ask own questions
 To: "Nikhil Desai" <ndesai at alum.mit.edu>, "Ronal W. Larson" <rongretlarson at comcast.net>, "Paul Anderson" <psanders at ilstu.edu>, "Crispin Pembert-Pigott" <crispinpigott at outlook.com>
 Cc: "Discussion of biomass cooking stoves" <stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org>
 Received: Tuesday, May 30, 2017, 10:04 AM

 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 CookTechnoShare 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
 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
 Website:  www.drtlud.com

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