Appropriate Technology

Appropriate technology is a concept that makes people reach for their guns. Supporters defend appropriate technology as ecological and job creating. Opponents (many of them come from the third-world) criticize it as a plot to persuade them to accept second best, third rate methods which will stop them competing with the West.

Overall, the supporters of appropriate technology are winning through, especially in United Nations organizations, which can directly influence the choice of technology through their own projects. But the spread of appropriate technologies beyond the experimental project stage doesn't depend on their intellectual appeal. It depends on whether they really work out in the field in the hard climate of the physical, economic and social realities of the third world.

The fact is, however, that even on a purely mechanical level they often don't work. This is shown very clearly by a new study of a UN organization. Their processes and products are sometimes socially unacceptable. And they may be economically unpractical. There may, to a westernized government officer, seem to be a real need for an innovation. But for success, local people themselves must feel a need for it, be able to pay for it, run it and repair it, and find it useful and profitable in their own lives.

Appropriate technology products are rarely thoroughly tested and evaluated—the money isn't there yet to do this. This means that performance in its original place is rarely known in advance. The user of appropriate technology usually cannot bear the risk involved in adopting an innovation that may ruin him.

More testing means that a great proportion of research and development in developing countries should go towards appropriate technology. It won't help developing countries much for advanced countries to invent technologies for them. Even if these are successful they simply increase the dependence on western technological talents. All in all, the lesson of this report is that alternative technology is bound to fail in a high proportion of cases if it is considered as a purely technical problem. Appropriate technology also has to be looked at in its social and economic context.