Organizing for rural energy development: Improved cookstoves, local organizations, and the state in Gujarat, Indi

Proponents of the "sustainable development" of Third World States frequently urge the integration of local non-governmental organizations (NGOs) into State-sponsored, centrally administered programs of rural-resource development. They do so in the belief that local NGOs, working in concert with national and international agencies of rural development, can under many conditions foster active village participation in State-sponsored rural-resource programs, thus bringing greater effectiveness to historically disappointing efforts of eco-development. This belief, often taken as fact in the contemporary literature of environment and economic development, has been little analyzed. This study offers such an analysis through scrutiny of India's National Program for Improved Chulhas (NPIC), an India-wide effort to disseminate improved cookstoves capable of conserving biomass energy resources. NPIC is one of few Third World programs now underway that systematically incorporates local NGOs in a State-sponsored program of sustainable development.;The study draws on literatures on energy use, biomass technologies, and organization theory, and on interviews, archival research, and organizational surveys of eight Gujarati NGOs conducted in India in 1986 and 1987. It concludes that, for NPIC (and similarly structured programs), the conventional wisdom guiding State-NGO collaboration is in important ways flawed. Though driven by political and fiscal imperatives to integrate local NGOs in State programs, national planners are ill-equipped to cope with the uncertainty and vulnerability such collaboration brings. Their understandable response is to structure collaboration in ways inimical to overarching goals of local participation and flexible administration. Simultaneously, at the local level, unmanaged systems of collaboration--organized around a view of local organizations as self-guiding and self-correcting--generates a "degradation of capacity." This dynamic prompts many local NGOs to undercut the broad aims of sustainable development and local participation sought by NPIC. Some NGOs, however, escape this dynamic and succeed in fulfilling the goals of NPIC. Their internal structures and operating procedures are reviewed.;The study concludes that the organizational assumptions driving the "sustainable development" of India's (and much of the Third World's) rural energy resources must be re-evaluated. It encourages such re-evaluation by delineating needed changes in dominant but implicit theories of NGO behavior in systems of interdependency and by suggesting alternative research agendas. It also provides a comprehensive overview of India's improved cookstove program, an ambitious effort to improve the efficiency of end-use of biomass resources in the rural energy household sector.