Biomass Fuel at the Nexus: Policy Lessons from Bottom-Up Perspectives in Urban Ghana

80 percent of sub-Saharan households are estimated to rely on solid biomass as fuel for cooking. Worldwide, biomass fuel use is disproportionately rural. But in sub-Saharan Africa, the International Energy Agency estimates that 60 percent of urban dwellers use wood or wood-based products (charcoal). Biomass fuel use is linked to premature death from pollution, environmental problems of deforestation and emissions linked to climate change. Hence, the Sustainable Development Goal 7 promises to "ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all" by 2030.

Policy initiatives have tended to take a siloed approach to this problem, targeting 'clean energy' from specific artefacts (improved cookstoves, biogas digesters) or cleaner fuels. In 2010, the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves set a target for take-up of cleaner stoves and fuels in a "100 million households by 2020". Yet, improved stove designs have been promoted since the late 1940s with limited success. Where biomass fuel has been considered within a wider nexus, a top-down approach has led to misleading assumptions. In the 1970s, fuelwood gathering was equated with deforestation; no consideration was given to whether rural dwellers managed the process in harmonious ways as social scientists discovered in some cases. Studies of local attitudes to policy-defined problems are now common, but results of structured questionnaires are open to question with poorer householders likely to feel constrained to answer in ways 'expected' of them. Qualitative researchers have highlighted unexpected findings from a more open-ended approach focusing on the tensions and harmonies constituting the daily hum of life in households.

Three factors point to the value of a bottom-up nexus approach to biomass fuel policies. First, designers associate the stove with cooking food and aim to optimise the use of wood or charcoal. Yet, in practice, lighting, heating, water purification, food preparation, and food waste management are all potentially relevant. Rather than focus on 'clean energy' or even food, understanding how households manage the nexus between food, fuel and waste is important. Second, this nexus must be placed in the context of other household realities. Our previous work shows that the ability to adopt cleaner fuels/stoves is shaped by competing priorities, aspirations and constraints that cut across livelihoods, income and social structures (notably, gender). Third, policies targeting fuels (as opposed to stoves or digesters) would also benefit from a bottom-up perspective on the nexus between how fuel production and management, and the environment. For example, some charcoal producers contest that wood-clearing necessarily leads to deforestation.

We will address these challenges by co-creating and disseminating a policy-relevant nexus-based understanding through a partnership between the University of Nottingham team leading the project and academics and stakeholders in West Africa. The research will focus on urban Ghana where there is a resurgence of policy interest in cleaner stoves and fuels. Our partners include the University of Ibadan, Ho Polytechnic, the Ghana Alliance for Clean Cookstoves (GHACCO) and Gyapa, a social enterprise working across the sustainable energy supply chain. We will explore a.) how householders view clean energy in relation to other aspects of resource management, and what their choices reveal about their priorities and aspirations; b.) how charcoal producers and retailers manage priorities of forest conservation, fuel-users and others along the supply chain; and c.) how insights from this analysis might be used to refine national- and global-level policies targeting cleaner stoves and fuels.

Target beneficiaries are, in the first instance, our stakeholder partners in West Africa, GHACCO and Gyapa. GHACCO, the Ghana Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, is a public-private partnership funded by the United Nations Foundation to create a platform for mobilizing a revolution in the adoption of clean cookstoves and fuels in Ghana. Gyapa Enterprises is a social enterprise, working with small-scale entrepreneurs to market and distribute sustainable technologies to low-income households across Ghana and West Africa. By working with these stakeholders, we aim to contribute to the welfare of low-income urban households in Ghana who rely on traditional biomass for fuel; charcoal producers and retailers; and clean cookstove manufacturers and distributors. We will also aim to feed into the Ghanaian government's sustainable energy policy goals, and in the longer term, the development of global clean energy policy activities (notably, around the Sustainable Energy for All initiative and the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves).

The primary mechanisms for creating impact are built into the project lifetime from co-design of the proposal with our stakeholder partners through collaboration in conducting the fieldwork, and co-production of outputs for non-academic audiences.

Co-Design: The idea for the project arose from conversations with representatives from our two main stakeholder partners, GHACCO and Gyapa. We have liaised closely with them in developing the proposal for this project.

Fieldwork Collaboration: These stakeholders will also act as researchers working alongside our academic partners in Ghana (Ho Polytechnic) in connecting with urban householders using charcoal fuel; charcoal producers and retailers; and new-generation businesses working towards more appropriate ways of meeting the fuel needs of the poor. Stakeholders are more likely to recognise and value insights from 'bottom-up' ethnographic and in-depth interview research through this experience of learning-by-doing. This type of co-production of research is likely to be more effective in generating impact than the traditional presentation-style activities delivered to stakeholders.

Research Capacity: The research activity will also help build longer-term capacity within these stakeholder groups in qualitative research. This will help them go beyond the limitations of traditional questionnaire-based surveys that constrain the ways in which people respond and where there is a tendency, especially in situations of unequal power relationships, to respond in 'expected' ways.

Co-Produced Outputs: For engaging with policymakers in Ghana involved in different aspects of the sustainable energy nexus, we will produce a briefing. To disseminate insights for different actors in the clean energy and fuels supply chain, we will develop information leaflets.