Appropriate technology (AT) movement

DEFINITION: Technology that is developed with the needs of the intended users and potential impacts on the environment taken into account

The rise of the appropriate technology movement during the 1970’s was a response to a growing appreciation of the idea that the people most qualified to find technological solutions to their societies’ needs are the people who live in the societies and understand how various technologies will affect their environment.

The beginning of what would become the appropriate technology (AT) movement is commonly credited to Mohandas Gandhi, who helped lead India to independence from Great Britain during the 1930’s and 1940’s. Gandhi advocated the use of small, local, and mostly community-based technological solutions as a way to help people become self-reliant and independent. He rejected the common belief that modern, industrialized technological development always amounts to progress. Instead, he thought that technology is best produced in a decentralized manner and best used in ways that benefit the people as much as possible. Gandhi believed in a radical revolution of production; he rejected the factory model of industrialization, which values the product and production over the individual worker.

Intermediate Technology

Gandhi’s ideas had a great influence on E. F. Schumacher, who is best known for his 1973 book Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered and for coining the phrase “intermediate technology” (IT) and later creating the Intermediate Technology Development Group (ITDG). Intermediate technologies, in Schumacher’s usage, are technologies and tools that are more effective and expensive than traditional or indigenous methods and techniques but ultimately much cheaper than technologies of the developed world. Intermediate technologies, whether hard or soft, can presumably be acquired and used by poor people and can lead to increased productivity with minimal social and environmental costs. They are usually labor-intensive, rather than capital-intensive, and make use of local skills and materials. They are conducive to decentralization and empowerment of the people, compatible with ecological considerations, and better able to serve the interests of the poor than more advanced technologies. More important, they do not contribute to making the people who use them dependent and subservient to machines over which they have no control.

Schumacher’s formulation of an alternative approach came at a time of world energy crisis and a time of growing disenchantment with the broad social, political, and ecological implications of advanced technology; in particular, awareness was growing of the undesirable consequences of the wholesale transfer of such technologies to the less developed countries (LDCs). This may explain why, despite its problematic nature, it had a very substantial impact on the thinking of administrators and planners within aid agencies, as well as officials within the LDCs themselves. Later years witnessed a rapid expansion in the scale and scope of activities undertaken by ITDG (which in 2005 was renamed Practical Action) and the creation of similar organizations in many parts of the world.

Beginnings of AT

Around the time that Schumacher’s concept of intermediate technology was catching on, the closely related concept of appropriate technology became enshrined in the operating principles of such agencies as the United Nations Environment Programme and the United Nations Industrial Development Organization, as well as other development organizations. The AT movement had taken off.

The concept of AT is not solely applicable to the nonmodern (as opposed to the modern) sectors of LDCs. In the developed countries, technological and engineering solutions that have minimal impacts on the and society are referred to as AT as well, in the sense that they are considered to be sustainable. Although Schumacher’s proposal had an unquestionable impact, critics have been keen to point out that his construal of IT or AT excludes from consideration a whole range of issues relating to the interplay of political, social, and economic factors with technology. They have objected to his characterization of the dual economies of LDCs, in which the modern and nonmodern sectors are regarded as separate entities, such that activities designed to alleviate poverty in the latter are unaffected by the nature of the former, or of the forces giving rise to an apparently dual economy in the first place. Some observers have also questioned the underlying conception of technology at work in Schumacher’s proposal, namely, that technology can somehow be regarded as a wholly independent variable in the development process, determining social, economic, and political relations, but in no sense being determined by them.

Some have even undermined Schumacher’s position by turning it against itself. If the choice of industry is governed, according to Schumacher, by powerful forces that include entrepreneurial interests, why is it that these forces cease to operate somehow when the question of technology arises? Clearly, they cannot. By assuming otherwise, Schumacher is led into the contradictory position of arguing that radical social change in the form of alleviation of mass poverty in the LDCs can, by implication, be brought about without prior change or alteration of other elements in the political, economic, and social contexts within which it arises.

Resolving Contradictions

Despite efforts made over the years to reformulate Schumacher’s view, proponents of AT have never really managed to escape fully from the contradiction of his original argument. The problem is both determined by and reflected in the way in which the concept of AT has taken over from its intermediate predecessor, assuming in the process a rather rigid set of connotations. It is difficult to locate the precise point in time at which AT replaced IT, and some would even argue that a valid distinction can still be drawn between the concepts. In general usage, however, the two terms have come to be virtually interchangeable, and the root of the problem may be traceable back to Schumacher himself and the clear impression he gives that IT is the appropriate solution for LDCs to pursue.

All these problems notwithstanding, some observers have argued, a renewed and strengthened effort can and must be made to reconceptualize the notion of appropriate, progressive, and sustainable technology and set it on new foundations. Proponents of this view assert that, given the morally outrageous and avoidable poverty plaguing the world, not to mention the dwindling supplies of some natural resources and the looming ecological catastrophe caused by runaway industrialization and technological explosion, such a task is a moral imperative. They argue that greater attention needs to be paid to questions of how technology is created, adapted, and modified in specific physical, social, cultural, political, and economic contexts, and by whom.

Bibliography

"Appropriate Technology." Pachamama Alliance, 2024, pachamama.org/appropriate-technology. Accessed 12 July 2024.

Darrow, Ken, and Mike Saxenian. Appropriate Technology Sourcebook: A Guide to Practical Books for Village and Small Community Technology. Rev. ed. Stanford, Calif.: Appropriate Technology Project, Volunteers in Asia Press, 1993.

Howes, Michael. “Appropriate Technology: A Critical Evaluation of the Concept and the Movement.” Development and Change 10 (1979): 115-124.

Jequier, Nicholas. Appropriate Technology: Problems and Promises. Paris: OECD, 1976.

Schumacher, E. F. Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered. 1973. Reprint. Point Roberts, Wash.: Hartley & Marks, 1999.