Elsevier

Journal of Cleaner Production

Volume 232, 20 September 2019, Pages 1167-1175
Journal of Cleaner Production

Appropriate technology for grassroots innovation in developing countries for sustainable development: The case of Laos

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2019.05.336Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Sustainability of appropriate technology can be grounded on a grassroots innovation.

  • The concept of strategic niche management is applied to appropriate technology.

  • Context, driving force, niche, organizational form, and resource base are common constructs of the framework.

  • The case of Laos identifies the relationship between appropriate technology and grassroots innovation.

Abstract

Appropriate technology for sustainable development in developing countries should consider comprehensive societal aspects of the target area and, at the same time, ensure target areas are capable of sustainable transformation. However, appropriate technology has mainly been approached from the engineering or technological aspects, thus becoming a short-term or one-time technology transfer or, despite the social science approach, it has no definite theoretical background. For successful and sustainable appropriate technology activities, appropriate technology should be approached theoretically. Therefore, this study applies the theory of grassroots innovation to appropriate technology, examines how the concepts of grassroots innovation based on local community units can relate to appropriate technology activities in developing countries, and analyzes a case of appropriate technology activity to show that future appropriate technology activities should involve grassroots innovation. The results show that the principles of grassroots innovation underlie successful appropriate technology projects.

Introduction

In an increasingly sociotechnical world, local and context-appropriate technology implementations are important for sustainable development. At the same time, the Sustainable Development Goals have replaced the Millennium Development Goals, declaring more sustainable methods are required and emphasizing inclusive development (United Nations (UN), 2017). Therefore, appropriate technology has a strong potential in developing countries.

The concept of appropriate technology (AT) was established along with that of sustainable development in that it considers the capacity of recipients for resilience and persistence. However, failures are many, mostly because it is carried out as a temporary, short-term technology transfer in practice (Murphy et al., 2009, Smith et al., 2014). Thus, several studies examine the comprehensive and social aspects of AT (Martí-Herrero et al., 2014, Wicklein, 1998).

However, although the results of AT research share mostly common aspects (e.g., technological, structural and local behavioral), there is no formal consensus, but only implicit agreement. This is because this research strand lacks a theoretical background (Buatsi, 1988, Martí-Herrero et al., 2014, Park and Ohm, 2015, Muga and Mihelcic, 2008). As such, study based on its theoretical background will show more systematic and objective results and gain attention.

Therefore, this paper analyzes the sustainability of AT for a grassroots innovation background. Grassroots innovation (GI) is introduced as a community level bottom-up innovation for sustainability (Seyfang and Smith, 2007) and seeks socially inclusive innovation processes within local communities in terms of knowledge, process, and outcomes. People and organizations outside the local area are also included, yet the local community and its knowledge lead the collaborative innovation process (Smith et al., 2014). We thus aim to identify relationships between AT and GI by conducting a case study of an AT project under the framework of GI and elicit implications for AT.

The remainder of the paper is structured as follows. Section 2 reviews the literature and the relationships between AT and GI. In Section 3, a qualitative method is proposed in terms of a framework and data. Section 4 describes the case within the framework in Section 3. The results are discussed in Section 5. Finally, Section 6 concludes the paper.

Section snippets

Appropriate technology

The concept of AT was first introduced as an “intermediate technology” in Small is beautiful (Schumacher, 1973). Technologies from industrialized countries which focused on innovative efforts of capital-intensive and large-scale technologies were not appropriate for less developed countries. Instead, intermediate technologies, that is small-scale, labor-intensive, and thus simple and environmentally friendly, would benefit a wider range of individuals by creating jobs, solving poverty problems,

Framework: common constructs

To bridge GI and AT, this paper suggests five common constructs: context, driving force, niche, organizational form, and resource base based on Seyfang and Smith (2007) and typically used when comparing market to GI. These criteria show differences between market and GI and, thus, highlight the unique properties of GI. The authors also identify the relationships between AT and GI.

Case study

Here, the case of GI in AT in a community in Laos is described. This AT case was selected because the case makes it possible to go over issues regarding the five constructs from GI. In other words, the case contains aspects of GI, which is presumed to be the key factor of success. Context and driving force are requisites that should be considered in AT, however which are usually omitted. However in this case, driving force remains active because it was based on sufficient understanding of

Discussion

The case of AT has shown how GI can emerge in developing countries. This approach's uniqueness is that it considered continuous activities and sustainable transition, unlike extant studies related to AT, which have mostly considered only the technical aspects and short-term activities or outcomes.

As a result of the case study, features of GIs were found. First, it seeks further innovativeness and capabilities of fulfilling needs and solving problems by cultivating grassroots niches. Second, the

Conclusions

Although the role of AT has been emphasized for sustainable development in developing countries, there has been limited academic attention paid to AT. Additionally, to the best of our knowledge, the literature on AT lacks theoretical background. Therefore, this study applied the theoretical background of GI to AT to show that developing countries can reach sustainable development through AT since AT and GI share the same vision and complement each other.

By reviewing a successful case of AT,

Acknowledgement

This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2016S1A5A2A03926786).

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