Seminar : Cooking up change in the Himalayas, evidence from mixing quasi-experiments with an experiment on cookstove promotion

Presented by : Subhrendu K Pattanayak, Duke University.

Abstract : 

Household preferences and relationships with promoting institutions should influence adoption of environmental health‐improving technologies, but there has been limited empirical research to isolate their importance, perhaps due to challenges of measurement and attribution. This paper explores first the heterogeneity in household preferences for different features of improved cookstoves (ICS). Second, we assess the degree to which preferences and relationships with the promoting institution are associated with actual adoption of ICS (electric and biomass‐burning) during a randomized ICS promotion campaign in northern India. Analyzing data from a discrete choice experiment (DCE) conducted during baseline surveys with 1060 households, we identify three distinct preference types using latent class analysis (LCA). These can be characterized as 1) disinterested in ICS (54%); 2) low demand but primarily interested in reduced smoke emissions (27%); and 3) high demand with interest in most features of the ICS (20%). The ICS intervention, which was stratified according to communities’ prior history working with the NGO marketing the stoves, was then randomized to 762 of thesehouseholds. We find that preference class and prior institutional history are both related to the ICS purchase decision. Distaste for smoke emissions appears to be a particularly strong driver for adoption of the electric ICS. Interestingly, the effect of preference class changes over time, which may indicate that initially recalcitrant households are influenced by the adoption decisions taken by those around them. Lastly, conditional on purchase, use of ICS observed during follow‐up surveys is greater in communities that have had previous interactions with the stove‐promoting NGO, but is unrelated to common socioeconomic drivers of adoption and preference class. This suggests that long term environmental and health benefits may be closely related to institutional support.