[Stoves] New NAS report highlights cookstove problem

[Paul Arveson]

An important new Consensus Study Report was released this week (in
preliminary form) by the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and
Medicine, called "Branches of the Same Tree".  

 

http://www8.nationalacademies.org/onpinews/newsitem.aspx?RecordID=24988  

 

This report,  two years in the making, was based on scholarly input from an
unusually large committee of 22 academics from a wide span covering the
sciences, technology, engineering, math, medicine, the arts and humanities.
The Chair of the committee was David Skorton, Secretary of the Smithsonian
Institution.  Participants included Norman Augustine and many other
illustrious leaders; truly a blue-ribbon panel.  The report is large -- over
250 pages.  

 

Very briefly, the charge of the committee was to find out if there is
evidence to indicate that integrating these diverse fields leads, or could
lead to significant benefits for society.  

 

It was very interesting to discover, on page 50 of this report, an example
"box" highlighting a problem that we all know about: increasing social
acceptance of improved cookstoves.  The box suggests that engineers have
succeeded in the easy part -- designing new cookstoves -- but continue to
fail at the hard part -- increasing adoption and impact.  

 

Here is the quote from the report:
-------

"BOX 2-2

Cook Stoves and the Need for Integration

The world's poor have experienced a long-standing need for better cook

stoves. Smoke from cooking and heating kills 4 million people a year and
contributes

to pollution and deforestation. Yet despite years of effort and a plethora

of creative designs, engineers have not yet produced a technology that meets

existing needs.

The failure, according to former United Nations deputy high commissioner

for refugees T. Alexander Aleinikoff, lies in the disconnect between
designers'

imaginations of what makes for a good technology and the actual conditions-

physical, social, and cultural-in which they will be used (Parthasarathy,
2016).

"We're in the situation where everybody and his brother has invented a
cookstove

and none of them have really worked well for us" (Confino and Paddison,
2014).

This failure traces, at least in part, to the segregation of the
disciplines. The designer

may see only the material and technical parameters of a technology and

not the dimensions of lived experience and social reality that are the focus
of the

cultural anthropologist. This is an unsurprising outcome of an educational
system

that discourages rather than encourages engineers to see stoves as
culturally

embedded artifacts-that is, to attend to the human dimensions and context of

an apparently technical problem."

-------



We in the improved cookstove community know that cooking practices impact
many fields, including child and maternal health, women's rights, nutrition,
safety, economic development, deforestation, refugees, disaster relief and
climate change.  At least it is nice to know that these senior experts in a
wide range of disciplines recognize the need to collaborate to achieve an
important goal.  Anthropology -- currently one of the least popular college
curricula -- turns out to be crucial in guiding development in this and many
other humanitarian efforts.   Researchers need to greatly increase our
knowledge of the daily routines of women all over the world -- work that is
generally taken for granted and not considered a worthwhile subject of
research.  

 

This report and its message ought to be leveraged by those of us who are in
a position to influence potential sponsors and donors to support research on
what I call the "cooking facts" of the world.   

 

Paul Arveson

Director of Research

Solar Household Energy, Inc.

www.she-inc.org <http://www.she-inc.org/>  

301-523-4540

 

 

 

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