Appropriate Technology

Historical development

E. F. Schumacher was an economist who had advised Britain’s National Coal Board. In 1966 he founded the Intermediate Technology Development Group, now called Practical Action, to develop technology suited to poor countries. He set out the philosophy in Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered (1973), drawing on Gandhi and on Buddhist economics. Ivan Illich’s Tools for Conviviality (1973) argued that tools beyond a certain scale end up enslaving the people who use them. Amory Lovins applied the idea to energy with his “soft energy path” (1976).

The movement flourished in the 1970s, in development agencies, in the counterculture and in the Whole Earth Catalog, and faded in the 1980s. It lives on in Practical Action and similar groups, in the open-hardware and maker movements, in off-grid renewable energy, and as a strand of degrowth and agroecology. Langdon Winner’s The Whale and the Reactor (1986) gave its politics a classic form. Artefacts have politics, Winner argued: nuclear power needs a centralised, hierarchical society, and solar power does not.

Principal claims

• Technology is never neutral. Its scale and design decide who controls it and what kind of society it needs.
• For most purposes the right technology is small, simple, local, repairable and uses human labour.
• Decentralised renewable energy and small-scale production are better for the environment and for society than centralised systems.
• Development means helping people produce for themselves. Supplying them from outside does not count.
• Economics should work “as if people mattered”. The goals are work, community and having enough. Output is a means.

Policy implications

Supporters back small-scale and off-grid renewable energy, and water, sanitation and farming technology that works at village level. They favour local manufacturing and repair, open designs, and cooperative and community ownership. They want limits on centralised, capital-heavy systems and an economy aimed at sufficiency and local self-reliance.

Internal disagreements

Supporters disagree about how far the critique should go, for instance whether electricity grids or vaccines are acceptable. They differ over markets and over the state, and over whether appropriate technology is meant for poor countries only or for everyone. They also differ over the digital and maker movements, which share their spirit but not their distrust of complexity.

Criticisms and controversies

Critics argue that intermediate technology kept poor countries poor and that small-scale solutions could not serve growing populations. They say it romanticised village life, and that modern renewable energy succeeded by becoming large and industrial. Supporters point to the success of decentralised solar power, the failure of many large projects, and the movement’s influence on how sustainable development is designed.

Relationships to other traditions

Appropriate technology is the technological programme of degrowth, social ecology and agrarian conservatism. It shares precautionary environmentalism’s distrust of large systems and food sovereignty’s localism. It is the opposite of ecomodernism, eco-accelerationism and centralised planetary stewardship, and a more cautious relative of bright green design.