| Over the past two decades rural development has been a major concern for many Third World governments. Yet most of the attempted rural development initiatives have failed. A major cause has been the deteriorating rural energy situation, characterized both by the growing shortage of traditional fuels (primarily fuelwood, charcoal, animal dung and agricultural residues) and the rising cost of commercial fuels (mainly kerosene, diesel and electricity).;Several approaches to a solution of the rural energy problem have been attempted. These include centralized rural electrification, policies for improving rural energy end-use efficiency, and technologies based on renewable energy resources. Yet, again, there have been many outright failures. These failures can be attributed to deficiencies, found at several levels, in the rural energy planning approaches which have been adopted. At the highest level there are flaws in the overall "top-down" development planning framework within which rural energy planning has been practised; at the intermediate level there are limitations in the philosophical approaches used in the planning of the rural energy projects themselves; and at the lowest level there are weaknesses in the techniques used for rural energy project evaluation.;An alternative model for Third World rural energy planning is proposed. Based on the theory of multicriteria evaluation, this new approach remedies several of the defects of past rural energy planning approaches. It is predicated on a "bottom-up" paradigm of development planning, and uses a rural energy evaluation technique very different from the now dominant cost-benefit approaches.;The new rural energy planning model is operationalized for the case of rural Kenya. Using household data from a 1981 rural energy survey of Kenya, six households are selected representing three different ecological zones and several different socioeconomic groups. Their energy decision-making behavior is then analyzed for several sets of assumptions. The resulting energy decisions are found to be quite similar to recommendations made in the literature. The multicriteria evaluation approach is also shown to be quite promising for planning in other Third World resource sectors. |
