Climate change and sustainable technology: re-linking poverty, gender, and governance

Abstract

This article examines the role of sustainable technology in tackling climate change in developing countries. Drawing on solar home systems in Bangladesh as an example, it argues that increasing women's visibility in technology committees is not necessarily effective in challenging gender stereotypes. Crafting new rules may fail to confront power inequalities. Sustainable technology can exert additional workloads on women. This article proposes a gender-sensitive framework for technological interventions, suggesting that extra resources are needed to strengthen institutions at the post-project stage, and that developing alternative livelihood strategies with poor people is crucial to reduce their reliance on local elites for survival.

Keywords:

• gender
• climate change
• governance
• institution
• technology
• power

Notes

1. Murphy's analytical framework explains how social practices mediate the effectiveness of technological systems. The first component of the framework is technology. Murphy argues that technology can be seen as a means to achieve sustainability, but the process of selecting technology is not apolitical. He challenges technological determinism, and underlines the fact that technologies are socially constructed, shaped by people's perceptions and cultural contexts. He suggests that there has been a paradigm shift, moving away from the top-down, hierarchical, and expert-driven approach to a more local, decentralised, and participatory direction (although there are many obstacles in achieving this). The second component is governance. He defines governance as the relationships between the state and people. The shifting emphasis from government to governance marks the changing roles of the state, market, NGOs, and community in managing technology. The institutional arrangements, he argues, shape, and are shaped by, how people and technology interact. The third component is people. He argues for a deeper understanding of the multiple identities of people and the complexity of their motivation in adopting sustainable innovations. He criticises the rational choice model for over-simplifying human actions. He suggests that most of our decisions are not made consciously, and that we tend to follow routines, habits, and social conventions in our everyday lives.

2. The gross national income per capita in Bangladesh was $1,230.00 in 2006, equivalent to 581 taka per month. Asking each household to contribute 40 taka per month for the solar lighting seemed reasonable, since the payment was less than 7 per cent of their total incomes. However, these statistics could be misleading. My research suggested that this Hindu community was much poorer than its Muslim counterparts. People living in rural areas also tended to be poorer than those living in urban areas. Furthermore, the failure to pay monthly contributions led to the accumulation of debts, and this is why the payment systems collapsed.