Experimental evidence on promotion of electric and improved biomass cookstoves
Abstract
<jats:p>Improved cookstoves (ICS) can deliver “triple wins” by improving household health, local environments, and global climate. Yet their potential is in doubt because of low and slow diffusion, likely because of constraints imposed by differences in culture, geography, institutions, and missing markets. We offer insights about this challenge based on a multiyear, multiphase study with nearly 1,000 households in the Indian Himalayas. In phase I, we combined desk reviews, simulations, and focus groups to diagnose barriers to ICS adoption. In phase II, we implemented a set of pilots to simulate a mature market and designed an intervention that upgraded the supply chain (combining marketing and home delivery), provided rebates and financing to lower income and liquidity constraints, and allowed households a choice among ICS. In phase III, we used findings from these pilots to implement a field experiment to rigorously test whether this combination of upgraded supply and demand promotion stimulates adoption. The experiment showed that, compared with zero purchase in control villages, over half of intervention households bought an ICS, although demand was highly price-sensitive. Demand was at least twice as high for electric stoves relative to biomass ICS. Even among households that received a negligible price discount, the upgraded supply chain alone induced a 28 percentage-point increase in ICS ownership. Although the bundled intervention is resource-intensive, the full costs are lower than the social benefits of ICS promotion. Our findings suggest that market analysis, robust supply chains, and price discounts are critical for ICS diffusion.</jats:p>
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Pattanayak, SK, M Jeuland, JJ Lewis, F Usmani, N Brooks, V Bhojvaid, A Kar, L Lipinski, et al. (n.d.). Experimental evidence on promotion of electric and improved biomass cookstoves. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. pp. 201808827–201808827. 10.1073/pnas.1808827116 Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/18579.
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Subhrendu K. Pattanayak
Subhrendu K. Pattanayak is the Oak Professor of Environmental and Energy Policy at Duke University. He studies the causes and consequences of human behaviors related to the natural environment to help design and evaluate policy interventions in low-income tropical countries. His research is in three domains at the intersection of environment, development, health and energy: forest ecosystem services, environmental health (diarrhea, malaria, respiratory infections) and household energy transitions. He has focused on design of institutions and policies that are motivated by enormous inequities and a range of efficiency concerns (externalities, public goods and imperfect information and competition).
Dr. Pattanayak approaches these problems through systematic reviews of the literature (meta-analyses) and statistical modeling with high-resolution objective data collected in the field. He then uses those data to test hypotheses salient to policy manipulation, developed both from economic frameworks, stakeholder discussions and direct observations in the field. He employs empirical methods that exploit quasi-experimental variation (or experiments where feasible and appropriate), captured through household, community and institutional surveys. He typically matches these survey data with meso-scale secondary statistics and estimates econometric models to generate policy parameters. Dr. Pattanayak has collaborated closely with multi-lateral agencies, NGOs, governments, and local academics in Brazil, Costa Rica, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Nepal, Sri Lanka and the U.S.

Marc A. Jeuland
Marc Jeuland is a Professor in the Sanford School of Public Policy, with a joint appointment in the Duke Global Health Institute. His research interests include nonmarket valuation, water and sanitation, environmental health, energy poverty and transitions, trans-boundary water resource planning and management, and the impacts and economics of climate change.
Jeuland's recent research includes work to understand the economic implications of climate change for water resources projects on transboundary river systems, a range of primary data collection projects related to analysis of adoption of environmental health improving technology, and analysis of the costs and benefits of environmental health interventions in developing countries. He has conducted multiple field experiments on issues such as: the role of water quality information in affecting household water and hygiene behaviors; the demand for, and impacts of cleaner cookstoves on household well-being; the long-term sustainability and effects of rural sanitation and water supply projects. He has also collected data on preferences for a range of environmental health improvements including cholera vaccines, household water treatment technologies and improved cookstoves. In the energy and development domain, he is currently working on several projects with the Energy Access Project at Duke, and is a co-founder of the Sustainable Energy Transitions Initiative (SETI), along with Professor Subhrendu Pattanayak and scholars from Chile, China and Ethiopia. His energy portfolio includes work related to evaluation of cleaner cooking interventions, measuring energy access and reliability, and reviews of the drivers and impacts literature related to energy.
Jeuland has worked in the past with the World Bank, USAID, the Millennium Challenge Corporation, UNICEF, and many field-based NGOs and community-based implementing organizations.
Prior to his graduate studies and work with the World Bank, Jeuland was a Peace Corps volunteer in Mali, West Africa, where he designed and monitored construction of a pilot wastewater treatment system and trained management personnel at the plant’s managing firm.
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