1. Project background
2. Socio-economic and environmental conditions*
3. Action maps for energy-related action
4. Institutional diagnoses
5. Potentialities evaluated
6. Demonstrating potentialities: Two experiences
7. Animating in Cuz Cuz: Results on fuelwood equipment
This section begins with some background information about PRIEN and its Coquimbo project, and an overview of the agricultural communities. Then, a review follows of experiences related to each phase of the methodology in which work has been done.
The interest in the Coquimbo Region arose for the PRIEN team as a consequence of the conclusions it reached in the first study made of rural energy conditions in Chile. This was done under the institutional aegis of CIPMA, a private research centre in Santiago, and was part of an international energy research effort supported by the Commission of the European Communities. The study (EEC Network, 1934, pp. 233-252) showed that the "agricultural communities" of this region were the second poorest rural group of the country, that the aridity of their environment made fuelwood a critical resource and that neither in-depth studies nor action existed to deal with this situation.
In parallel, another research project had been established by the same team at the Engineering Faculty of Universidad de Chile, supported by Canada's IDRC, and having as purpose to work on alternative methodologies for energy planning in developing countries. The project involved conceptual and methodological work, as well as four case studies to give it empirical grounds. One of the case studies was devoted to Coquimbo and involved detailed surveys and resource studies in 14 communities (Sáez, 1936). The project's general aspects (Del Valle, 1986-b) led to the initial formulations of the planning approach presented in this paper. An international seminar (Del Valle, ed., 1983), held in 1936 and sponsored by the two mentioned agencies, put the approach to the test of peer review and enriched its ideas considerably.
PRIEN was formally established by Universidad de Chile in 1984, and kept its links with CIPMA. Rural energy was naturally one of its central fields of interest, and once the above-mentioned studies had been completed the conditions were ready to move into action-research in Coquimbo. Three sources of support made this possible at the beginning of 1936: a new grant from IDRC to PRIEN for applications of its planning approach, an institutional grant from Sweden's SAREC to CIPMA for continuation of research by its groups (including the energy one, i.e. the PRIEN team), and the request from an international agency to CIPMA to submit a proposal for a three-year field-work project on "energy and improvement of family living conditions in the agricultural communities of Coquimbo", along with the funds to start operations.
Five institutions of the Coquimbo region were contacted by PRIEN at different times, and became highly interested and cooperative: the National Forest Service (CONAF), the University of La Serena, the Social Action Department of the (Catholic) Bishopry of Illapel (DASOI) and the technical high-schools of Illapel and Ovalle. Taking advantage of existing work by CONAF, on afforestation and water resources management, the communities of Cuz Cuz and Huentelauquén (Choapa province) and Monte Patria (Limarí province) were selected as pilot ones. Substantive details of the work done in 1986-87 will be provided in the following sections.
A change of office head in the international agency that provided most of the field-work funding, which occurred in 1987, was highly destructive for the project. Funding was unilaterally stopped at the end of the first year, with no substantive evaluation or field visits to the project, and with no consideration for the commitments made with communities and regional institutions. The project had to be interrupted and special efforts had to be initiated in search of new sources of support. For this reason, the experiences to be presented are not as advanced as they could be and have suffered a severe lack of continuity. At the time of writing this (May 1938), there are reasonable hopes that new funds will become available to go ahead.
*Information for this section comes chiefly from Sáez (1936).
The 150 "historical" agricultural communities of Coquimbo are located about 400 km north of Santiago in an arid zone (0-250 mm precipitation a year) and occupying the non-irrigated and poorest parts of it. They cover 957,000 hectares, with a population of 68,000. Their origin and communitary form of land tenure goes back to the 17th century, i.e. the time of the Spanish colonization. The following indicators characterize their socio-economic situation.
- High rates of emigration of active population. The index of masculinity is 94 per 100 women, while the rural averages are 113 in the region and 117 at the national level. The average age of family heads is 59.- Illiteracy rate of 34% among family heads, a very high one in Chile.
- Per capita income around US$ 100 per year.
- Crowded conditions (6 or more people per bedroom) in 21% of the households.
- Only 11% of the population has liquid waste disposal available.
- Only 25% of the population is connected to the electric power grid.
- 96% of final energy consumed is fuelwood and charcoal, which is a serious condition for an arid region.
Regarding environmental conditions, most of the communities' land shows signs of advanced deforestation, which is due at present to overextraction of fuelwood and charcoal by the population. But it has historical origins: mining activities and railways carried out intensive exploitation of forests in search for fuel since the 18th and 19th centuries, respectively. As a consequence, the main economic activity is raising caprine livestock, since only goats can survive in this environment. There is also some production of wheat, which has to wait for the scarce rain to grow, and some horticulture in the small tracts of land that have irrigation available.
A series of five action maps for energy-related work with the communities has been formulated by the PRIEN team during the period covered by this paper. The first one was presented in section III-1, when the concept of an action map was introduced. Subsequent interaction with the communities and the regional institutions has led to the following one, which is under current consideration by PRIEN and which is in a language that may be understood by community members.
A Management of fuelwood-collection areas
B Fuelwood from plantations
C Solar water heating
D Solar drying of agricultural products
E Improving insulation of houses
F Improved fuelwood ovens and stoves
G Wind power generation
H Animal traction
I Water supply for irrigation
Particular lines of action have only been formulated systematically for the lines which were selected for initial work, i.e. "improved fuelwood ovens and stoves" (Espinoza and Diaz, 1938), "animal traction" (Groen and Sáez, 1987) and "water supply for irrigation" (Diaz and Espinoza, 1983).
F Improved fuelwood ovens and stoves
F-1 Selecting and improving designs
F-2 Supplying building materials
F-3 Training oven and stove builders
F-4 Building ovens and stoves
F-5 Adapting cooking habits
H Animal traction
H-1 Raising draught animals
H-2 Manufacturing and maintaining draught equipment
H-3 Training draught operators
I Water supply for irrigation
I-1 Improving efficiency of current irrigation
I-2 Searching for new water resources
I-3 Accumulating irrigation water
a. Communities
There are three traditional lines of action that are presently established in all agricultural communities with which PRIEN has interacted. The institutional structure around which these lines are organized is currently regulated by law and involves an assembly ("junta general") and a directorate ("directiva"). These traditional lines are:
- regulating land tenure and related conflicts;
- regulating water rights;
- regulating private use of community land.
There are two other types of organization in the communities, that were originally promoted from the state as intermediate ones, the neighbours' unions ("juntas de vecinos") and the mothers' centres ("centros de madres"). Under the military regime they do not correspond properly to lines of action of the community members ("comuneros"), since they are not the true actors, but to the most particular level in lines of action of the government. They are now called "functional organizations" and their objectives are, respectively:
- representation vis-a-vis local authorities; and
- training of mothers on household matters and crafts.
Only a few "advanced" communities have taken development initiatives and established other lines of action than the traditional ones. The following lines have been found: legal representation, social action, foraging plantations (promoted by CONAF), community undertakings (dairy, cheese-making), irrigation, agricultural programming.
b. Regional institutions
A brief review of possible sources of support for energy-related activity is the following.
Church agencies: the social action departments of Catholic dioceses in the region are moving from a current aid-giving role to a promotional role (technologies, productive alternatives).NGOs: one NGO is supporting the regional organization of comuneros and promoting plantations and orcharis. Another has relevant technology available but is working with other social groups.
State agencies: the central policy is to provide subsidies to individual farmers (irrigation, house repair, afforestation); almost no use of them is made by comuneros. Special efforts are being made to regularize land titles. Selective support is provided to "functional organizations". The only promotional actions are the ones by CONAF: afforestation and water basin management.
Educational institutions: usable technical capacity is available at technical high schools, which are not acting towards the communities but are interested in doing so. A general interest in the communities, and some potentially useful technological developments, exist at the regional university.
This section refers to the general process of evaluation of potentialities within the experience of PRIEN in Coquimbo. Technical information may be found in the sources to be quoted. PRIEN evaluated in depth the potentialities of two lines of action for the communities: "improved fuelwood ovens and stoves" and "water supply for irrigation". It also studied in lesser detail most lines of the action map shown in section III-1 (Sáez, 1936, pp. 113-126). From experiences of CONAF with pilot foraging plantations of Atriplex spp., which led to unforeseen availability of fuelwood, there is also some knowledge of potentialities in line "fuelwood from plantations".
The initial study of fuelwood-related potentialities (Sáez, 1986) dealt with the overall relationship between forest resources of the communities, patterns of resource exploitation and patterns of household energy use. It showed that under current conditions (consumption of 11 tons per family per year, no afforestation and poor management of collection areas), wood resources would be exhausted in some 12 years and the process of land abandonment by communities would be accelerated. This was a regional study and found a region-wide potentiality (involving three lines of action and three objectives), i.e. by (a) introducing efficient fuelwood equipment, (b) managing appropriately the collection areas and (c) developing plantations for fuelwood, it is possible at the same time to (1) reduce fuelwood consumption by 30%, (2) improve domestic living conditions and (3) assure the permanent sustainability of the resource.
The latter is not a potentiality for the comuneros, but for regional actors. CONAF became highly motivated and with its scarce regional resources committed full support to the line of action that PRIEN found most promising for starting work: "efficient fuelwood ovens and stoves". The specific potentiality of this line, and its demonstrability to the comuneros, was also clear from the study: the average efficiency of fuelwood equipment was about 6% and technology available at alternative centres permitted raising it to at least 12%.
Once animation began, the line of action on fuelwood equipment proved of great interest to women and children, who are the ones who cook and who walk to collect wood. Men, however, were more interested in their "problem of water" and put strong pressure on the PRIEN team to deal with it. As mentioned at the beginning of the paper (section II-2), this led to the detailed review of one local basin in Cuz Cuz community ("Quebrada El Peral") and to the finding of a significant potentiality, i.e. by (a) using water more efficiently, (b) using currently unemployed water resources and (c) accumulating water, the irrigated area could be increased from 30 to 100 hectares (Díaz and Espinoza, 1988).
a. Wrong: water pump in Monte Patria
While the water resources study of Cuz Cuz was under way, PRIEN researchers made a preliminary survey of a local basin in Monte Patria. This coincided with a review being made by this community of a possible purchase of shares for eventual spare water from a neighbouring channel, and aroused interest as a possible alternative. The community proposed to discuss the subject, and as an incentive CONAF offered and showed a series of slides about alternative water-related technologies. All this created a great expectation and at the discussion it was easy to arrange the demonstration of a balance-beam pimp to irrigate some terraces that CONAF was also demonstrating at the community's school, by using water from a nearby spring made willingly available by its owners. The pump was installed with funds provided by an NGO... and that was the end of it. No development effect at all came out of the whole exercise.
With reference to the methodology presented in this paper, it is easy to identify the mistakes made: (1) the whole purpose was to demonstrate a technique rather than a potentiality; (2) no potentiality had been studied, which might have made the demonstration meaningful to the comuneros; (3) it was only meaningful to the technicians from PRIEN, CONAF and the NGO; (4) the community was in fact utilized by them for this test; (5) the pump was brought in from the outside and the comuneros were just spectators who could not see themselves purchasing and installing future pumps.
b. Right: fuelwood equipment workshops
What was to be demonstrated in this case was the potentiality of wood efficiency in locally-built equipment. The initial idea was to carry this out by means of an available design - from an NGO - of a clay stove for one tightly-adjusted pot. This generated no interest, since the people use several pots at the same time.
Another technique was then brought in from the same NGO, i.e. an oven with adobe structure and an iron drum as chamber for food heating. This one did raise curiosity once the comuneros saw the team building it in a few hours and then roasting a full goat with just a few sticks of wood. It was agreed to organize workshops at several community places (social headquarters, mothers' centres, dairy, schools) in order to train interested groups from the three participating communities.
The workshops proved lively, and excellent communication was established through them. Requests for workshops were received from two additional communities for their schools. Illustrated booklets with detailed building instructions were prepared in versions which evolved along the process. While the initial participants were men, slowly the audiences became dominated by women and children. And also clear technical progress was achieved: from a complex "urban" oven to a "comunero" one that only required hammer and nail to build (Espinoza and Díaz, 1988).
The proof that communication, and thus animation, was effectively established was provided by the comuneros themselves in Cuz Cuz. At an evaluative discussion of the last demonstration of ovens, the community representatives requested that a next step be taken, with some characteristics which are now presented systematically in terms of our framework (Espinoza and Díaz, 1988):
Objectives: to reach the family level rather than the community one, by means of a mixed stove-oven with flexibility;Technique; a spoken design which coincided to a great extent with one made by a peasant who worked jointly with an NGO in another region of the country;
Organization: two old men and two young ones from the community could set up a workshop and a bank of materials, and build the stove-ovens for whoever requested them in the community. It ought to be a business-like operation from which the participants should be able to make a living.
Something similar also started to occur in the community of Huentelauquén.
At this time, PRIEN received the communication, already mentioned, that there would be no additional financing for field work.
