Arising from ‘oil shocks’ of the 1970s, many polities in the Global South found themselves at the mercy of international financial and humanitarian players. The utopian high modernist and optimistic technological paths of the immediate post-colony had proven expensive. Most had ended up as‘white elephants’ in the face of booming urban population and exponential rate of poverty. While the role of the state in socio-economic spheres of life in most countries was dwindling, as occasioned by collapsing economies, the vacuum created was fast being filled by developmentalist agencies from the North.
However, the issues of instituting a paradigm shift in managing the social services sector that includes water and sanitation was of necessity rather than choice. External funding, though conceived under the pretext of spurring fast and guided economic growth, left the Global South in a precarious position. Such growth entailed charting independent economic growth paths that tapped into the local potential in terms of indigenous people’s manpower and technical power. A change of tact in terms of not only the question of technologies of provision and development but also on the approach mechanisms adopted by the key actors, mainly the state and international financiers was necessary. If the planning models and technological designs of the period leading to the 1970s had alienated many people and created poverty rather than wealth, ‘appropriate technology’ movement’s basic principle was to try to help people develop out of the situations they were in by providing technologies appropriate to those situations, but which afforded some improvement in users’ economic and social circumstances.405
405Fressoli and Around (2015), p.9.
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The failure by the developmentalist blueprints,406 to translate into any tangible growth, increasing creativity and alleviating poverty, meant that the blueprints themselves and their theories of development had to be subjected to scrutiny, re-questioned, and if possible, overhauled.
It was within such a necessaryre-questioning of technology and the development agenda modalities that ‘appropriate technology’ (AT) found resonance with the economists and planners who sought to redress the failures in the economies of most of the Global South, especially in the period approaching 1980 and onwards. As Fressoli and Arond observe, between the 1970s and 1980s, ‘appropriate technology’ became a worldwide grassroots innovation movement that sought to redefine technology as a tool for development in South America.407
In 1973, Schumacher, a renowned economist, published his mercurial seminal work,
‘Small is beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered’. As a result, debate on the need to rethink development by incorporating ordinary people became common.
Cast against the backdrop of crunching economies, indigenous technologies and, basically, the incorporation of people into planning gained root. The idea of ‘small’
(indigenous) and ‘large’ (Western) technologies had earlier been elucidated in Gandhi’s writings and his vision for India. He had stated clearly that he visualized electricity, shipbuilding, iron works, machine making, and the like existing side by side with village crafts, but if the same work could be done by a small machine, then to him, there was no need to employ a large one.408 Technology had to work for the good of humanity rather than the end goal being large-scale production for profit.
Through the founding of the Intermediate Technology Development Group (ITDG) in London in 1965, Schumacher together with his colleagues, George McRobie and Julia Porter, became the progenitor of ‘intermediate technology’,from which ‘appropriate technology’ as a movement sprouted and gained roots progressively.409 In using the term ‘intermediate technology’, Schumacher envisioned a technology that was an
406See Carr(ed.) (1985)
407Ibid. p. iv.
408Arndt (1987), p.156.
409See Willoughby (1990), p.68.
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between’ or rather one that was midway between, for example, a hand hoe and a tractor.410As propounded, the concept of ‘intermediate technology’ transcended the issue of relative modernity; but the fact that efficiency and modernity were not necessarily correlated reinforced the assumptions concerning technology choice, which was claimed to underlay ‘intermediate technology’.411
A USAID 1976 policy document titled, Proposal For A Program In Appropriate Technology, defined AT to be intensive in the use of domestically produced inputs and also in the use of less capital and few highly trained personnel. Further, it explained that ATs were small scale but efficient, replicable in numerous units, readily operated, maintained and repaired, of low cost and accessible to low-income people. In terms of the users or beneficiaries, appropriate technologies were claimed to have sought to be compatible with local cultural and social environments.412All in all, for the lead proponents of AT, ‘intermediate technology’ as the founding concept had to be simple so that the demands for high skills were minimized not only in the production process itself but also in matters of organization, raw material supply, financing and marketing, and that production had to be mainly from local materials and mainly for local use.413 The economic meltdown of the 1970s gave a new lease of life to the concept of development through small-scale approaches. The future lay in bringing on board indigenous modes of production and sustenance not only in rural agriculture but also in terms of technologies of procuring social services like water and sanitation. It is also important to observe that large and highly sophisticated technologies were slowly being questioned for their ecological impact, hence the attempt to describe some small technologies as ‘eco-technologies’ or ‘humanized technologies’. 414 International monetary agencies and Western governments, as chief financiers of major projects in the so called Least Developed Countries (LDCs), sought to go back to the drawing
410See CSIR Built Environment Unit, Appropriate Technologies in the water Sector in South Africa(position paper), May (2008), p.6.
411 Schumacher in Willoughby (1990),p.132.
412 see USAID (1976), pp.11- 12 ;Thormann (1979) In Robinson (ed.), pp. 280-299
413Ibid.
414See Bookchin (1977), pp. 73-85; Fromm (1968)