Abstract

A group from Portland State University, Environmental Sciences and Management program is collaborating with other organizations to promote the use of renewable energy in rural Nicaraguan community development. There are multiple technology and process components that can be mixed and matched in innovative ways to meet the local demands. Inorder to go beyond trial and error attempts, our group is attempting to provide high quality environmental information on weather (rainfall and evaporation balance), well water depth, soil types and vegetation. This information will support decision processes and innovative trials of communities and individuals. Our project plan is to proceed from problem definition and engagement to bringing in other community partners that can help to finally supporting the process of local entrepreurism to provide locally-adapted solutions.

Introduction

Although many people think of "innovations" as brilliant new devices or processes that are a quantum step better than anything that currently exists, there is another class of innovations - putting tried and tested components together in a new combination. For the purposes of our project, this means working to improve water and food resources in rural Nicaragua by drawing on a toolbox of ecological, technological and community processes. We are initially looking for robust components that can work well together to address the immediate problems of water availability over the full year and resiliency of local food production. But our full criteria for success includes the objective that we want these components not only need to work together now but they have to be flexible and address future, ever-changing and developing needs of the community. Thus our goal is to help a community improve current conditions and at the same time establish a pattern of community action and technology selection that will be able to deal with their changing values. Addressing such a "wicked problem" requires using an entrepreneurial approach that is flexible and adaptable. In our case, the flexiblity comes from using technologies that are perfectly servicable now but can be re-arranged or re-purposed in the future.

Our project focuses on combinatorial innovation in the context of social and environmental entrepreneurial framework and addresses six major questions:

1. Why do we think that an entrepreneurial approach is valuable in this situation?
2. What are the technology components that may choose to combine?
3. What information will be needed to make good immediate choices and to create a adaptive plan that will serve the community into of the future?
4. How innovation, testing and implimentation will take place?
5. How will community institutions be involved?
6. What are the conditions that might be required to get this overall process moving along?

1. The entrepreneurial approach to coupled human-environment problems

There are many different types and scales of social and environmental problems but we can use a simply typology to demonstrate how different general approaches maybe more appropriate with some types of problems. A useful typology sorts these problems by the amount of information and by the degree of agreement on possible solutions.

"simple problems": We have the information we need and everybody agrees on the action that should be taken. Example: getting lead out of house paint.

"complex information problems": We need more information to choose between the possible solutions that are being proposed, but we all agree on the actions that are being proposed. Example: wetland remediation requires more study

"resource contention problems": We have enough information to know that we need to reduce exploitation or manage the resource more cooperatively, but we don't agree on who should get access to the resource. There may also be a conflict between individual access and the best outcome for a larger community. Example: The exploitation of a resource as described in the "tragedy of the commons" is a good example of this.

"wicked problems": We don't have enough information, but even if we did, people can't agree on the suggested solutions because of fundamental differences in their values. In addition, this type of problem has the characteristic that as more information is discovered or new solutions proposed, people may change their values. Example: urban transportation issues are a good example of value conflicts that are respond to ever-changing information.

Appropriate approaches for these problems also range in their dependence on science and policy institutions. Traditional science that informs clear policies is sufficient for simple problems. Complex information problems will probably require that policy be linked to problem-based or mission-based science because there is just too much information that has to be determined to depend on available curiosity-based science from universities and other research groups. Resource problems almost always entail information being used to help support or create institutions that will implement political solutions. Finally, wicked problems represent many of the coupled human-ecology situations. This class of problems is best addressed with problem based science in the context of scientific adaptive management and with solutions across multiple scales. Because wicked problems involve shifting values they require adapting policies and institutions. This is an arena where an entrepreneurial approach to implementation can be extremely desirable. "Entrepreneurial" in this case is the broader definition in which the actions of the entrepreneur in the absence of fixed structure helps build new institutions and change current practice. There is inherent uncertainty in these actions that require testing through trial and error and for the individuals and organizations involved to be continually learning. The combination of scientific uncertainty, shifting values, lack of clear policy direction and absence of community structure to deal with these problems is a perfect vacuum that will draw in a wide variety of participants, and some consideration of the entrepreneurial avenues for solutions would be time well spent.

2. Effective combination of components require immediate value and extensibility

There are single products that are truly innovative, but this project focuses on using novel and powerful combinations of available technologies and processes to address the problem of water and food security in rural Nicaragua. For example, putting a solar panel on a house to provide electricity for light and entertainment is a microcosm of this idea. The solar panels just on their own are new technology with many uses and they become even more useful to households when combined with energy efficient CF bulbs or, better yet, affordable LED bulbs. The modular nature of these installations allows households to adapt the technology to their particular best use. Our project looks at the next scale up, combinations of a variety of household or small farm scale innovations that could be much more than just the sum of the individual parts. For example, we'd like to see communities use combinations of the following technologies or processes:

• photovoltaic panels
• votage/current controllers
• direct solar powered deep-well pumps (for potable water)
• community organization to support water delivery
• direct solar powered shallow-well pumps (for drip irrigation)
• drip irrigation tape and pressure controllers
• new agricultural techniques for the region that utilize drip irrigation
• improved cookstoves and kitchen ventillation
• biogas generators for cooking
• home/farm layout for hygiene and biogas purposes
• vegetable garden courtyards
• fruit tree orchard cooperative agreements
• small check dams in the watershed for use and aquifer recharge
• watershed remediation for continuous water available and other ecosystem services
• DC and other low power consumption appliances
• and others

There are several important aspects of combinatorial innovation. First, the components on their own are valuable and in use. This means that someone might just have one or two components and the attending process or social organization to use that resource. This requirement is usually the easiest to meet. Second, the components must be able to be used in some combination. Each individual technology or process should have some sort of "hooks" that allows it to be used more effectively with other components. For example, a solar drip irrigation system could easily be used to power some other appliance outside of the crop growing season. However, this may require a more expensive controller in the first place or different home appliances. This second requirement is difficult to establish, in large part because single-purpose consumer products are almost always much cheaper than extensible components. This is a major challenge which we will be addressing.

3. Higher quality information is required to support innovation

Living in an information-rich, or at least and information-saturated, economy it's hard to imagine that the required information or product isn't available somewhere. Our American lifestyle provides a huge subsidy for information available but it is not very high quality. We have individual buildings, housing server farms for search engine and web companies, that consume the amount of energy of a small American city. We can drive over to Home Depot and look at all the pipes and connectors and then take back the stuff we bought that was wrong. Although this information and product rich economy promotes innovation, it's not a practical pre-condition for rural development activities. Instead there are many projects, including this one, that are trying to provide higher quality information to targeted audiences to support community development.

High quality information on processes and products we (PSU group) will to participate in providing are:

• technologies
  • solar power options that can serve multiple purposes (modular panels and controllers)
  • drip irrigation technologies
  • composting and soil building processes (such as worm bins)
  • check dam siting and construction
• soil and crop
  • soil condition surveys for the immediate basins at the farm plot scale
  • hydro-geology of the deeper substrate
  • alternate crops
• weather and climate
  • general weather and climate conditions for the full basin
• including drought, cyclic and trend climate predictions
• specific weather for several specific, crucial spots
• water
  • water balance for the basin (precipitation, runoff, evapotranspiration and storage
  • deep well capacity and use on an annual basis
  • shallow well or catchment storage
  • aquifer recharge estimates
  • detailed surface water availability map for the basin

As part of our study we are interviewing residents and participants in development efforts in the area to determine where they are obtaining their information. We will attempt to identify primary and secondary channels of information and the reliability of these sources. This information will be useful in promoting local networks for the diffusion of the innovations from farm to farm or community to community.

Fortunately the information and support required is related to the phase of the project (see section 4 beow) and these have increasingly difficult user demands that we will be able to meet incrementally. During the first phases we need to provide information and concept testing for American and in-country NGOs, granting agencies, community partners and a small number of people in rural communities in Nicaragua. In the next phases of the project the target audience expands as does the range of product information required.

4. Project phases from innovation through implementation involve different groups

From our group's (i.e. Portland State University) perspective, we are in the first and second phases of a four stage project.

• problem identification and initial action
• institutionalization of the program to enable continuing engagement
• incorporating wider range of Portland State University community and grant support
• expanding to multiple villages in the Nicaragua basin

The first phase is to work with Green Empowerment and Asofenix to describe the problem and get PSU students engaged in solving the problem. We have accomplished this by establishing a PSU Senior Capstone (service-learning) course that travels to Nicaragua and works along with Asofenix, Green Empowement, and village members on household and farm-use solar power and wind power projects.

We are moving into the second stage of this project which entails creating a program at PSU that can continue over multiple years and have a continuing relationship with all of the participating organizations. Internal funding for this has come from offering an international Capstone. Our first several attempts at the Capstone were great learning experiences which we have used to make changes and craft a more solid course. We've learned for ourselves what probably everyone eles knows, which is that there's a big difference between volunteerism (take it or leave it) and a required service learning course. Green Empowerment is working with both Environmental Sciences and Management (ESM) and the School of Business Administration (SBA) on courses in Nicaragua. We have figured out how to have Masters of International Management students from the SBA and Master's of Environmental Management from ESM involved in multiple trips and across our schools. We are seeking longer term funding for the project so that it can be better integrated into the curriculum of both units.

The third phase of this project will be to coordinate with a larger group of faculty, campus groups, PSU community volunteers, and funding organizations. We are informally networking with faculty and groups from PSU who work in Nicaragua. For example we have LinkedIn, MyPSU, and Facebook groups that help us communicate with the PSU community. We are creating a "co-laboratory" which will include social science and social work, public administration, engineering, international programs, and environmental science group who work on problems in Latin America. This "co-laboratory" will host quarterly gatherings to share stories and progress and to have an interdisciplinary panel critique a proposed or on-going project.

The final implementation phase of this project will be to make information about solar and wind power, soil quality, weather, and watershed processes available at the farm plot scale to residents of the basin. By this time we will have a repertoire of tried and tested technology components, villages and the local NGO will have set up committees and local governance, and we will be ready to provide the information to the villagers. The information will be able to be delivered over the internet, but in this location it will be necessary to provide hands-on workshops and short training courses in the towns around the larger watershed basin.

These phases should take about a year each and each new phase will be added to the previous phases. The overall project is like building a house, starting with building and maintaining the foundation and adding new features to the hous as you go along. We are in our 2nd year now and in phase 2. We expect to adding the other two develoment paths over the next two years and then continuing on with that scale of a project.

5. It is important to involve local and community institutions

Local communities are important for innovations for several reasons. First, private and shared resources need to be managed in a stable manner in order for the effort put into innovations to pay off. The governance and agreements over land, water and access to solar power will need to be transparent and fair. Second, the spread of innovative combinations of these technologies and practices will probably depend on social and non-farm interactions more than technical presenatations or discussions. This means that the fabric of interactions between the people of the basin, the local technology NGO and other groups (churches, athletic leagues, etc.) will be important to recognize as an important factor. Finally, successful implementation of new technologies may effect the current balance of the community. It is important to acknowledge that this may be an unintended consequence of technology implementation and recognize this as a potential issue. We're hoping that the work of other groups affiliated with Green Empowerment and Asofenix will help us understand the social dimensions of these problems.

Rheingold-2002. Marc Smith states

"Whenever communication medium lowers the costs of solving collective action dilemmas, it becomes possible for more people to pool resources. And

'more people pooling resources in new ways'

is the history of civilization in ..." pause " ..seven words".

6. Our main job is to use some outside support to set up the conditions for on-going Nicaraguan driven adaptation and innovation

The main value that we (our PSU group) can bring to this international group effort is that we can help provide and organize information about natural resources such as ground water and soil quality. This information will include historical perspectives on the watershed, its natural history and history of agricultural uses. Essentially we will be creating a repertoire of reliable processes and products that would work in the context of the local natural capital and renewable energy resources. This information will also help people make better decisions on whether the best choice is to copy current successes or pursue some innovateive combinations of the technologies and practices.

We think that the way combinations of innovative pieces of technology and process propagate through the community can be described as a transition in network connectivty, going from minimal to medium connectivity. Additional people or communities will adopt the technology based on what they see working and information from others they trust. All of this information is highly place-dependent and we will need to help people working in these communities to make these connections.

Development and improvement of the health and well-being of people in these rural areas of the dry-tropical forest region will require creativity. As Florida and Tinagli (2004) stated: "... creativity is a broad social process and requires teamwork. It’s stimulated by human exchange and networks; it takes place in real communities and places."

Current challenges and directions

At Portland State University we have joined into a collaborative effort with Green Empowerment, and Asofenix to promote the use of renewable energy in community development. Our focus is several rural agricultural communities in the dry tropical forest ecoregion of Central Nicaragua. Part of PSU's participation was funded by a grant from NCIIA. Additional participation was through a senior capstone course that uses university incentives to support international travel courses. Although we have submitted several proposals to fund future work, the only funding we can count on now is from the capstone course. It will be important to develop longer term financial support to continue information gathering and dissemination.

This project has been framed in the context of a "wicked problem" of resource use by a community in the face of changing climate and technologies. The trajectory has been to identify narratives for food, water, forestation, soil and the local economy that demonstrate how, although everything is connected, there are small scale projects that will enhance the availability and security of these resources. There are many technologies that can be employed and combined to address some aspects of this problem. For example the combination of solar panels, surface pump and drip irrigation allows new and valuable crops to be grown in areas and seasons not previously possible. Given the right set of technology and process components and some quality information about the local weather and soils, local farmers should be able to use these components in new and innovative ways to improve their farming and the environment. Even in the sub-basins of this one rather small area there will be place specific variations in best practices. This is definitely a problem suited to adaptive learning and innovation. We feel that if their is enough choices and useful information for the individual farmers and communities that this will support the emergence of entrepreneurial efforts to provide these products and practices. The challenge will be to provide the enough of the right type of support (and not too much of it) to promote local entrepreneurism. If we can accomplish that, we will have helped launch a place-specific and continuing way for the local economy to support this effort.

References

Arthur, W. B. (2009). The Nature of Technology: What it is and how it evolves. New York, Free Press.

Florida, R., and Irene Tinagli (2004). Europe in the Creative Age, Carnegie Mellon Software Industry Center: 48.

Metcalfe, Bob. 1999. Invention is a flower, innovation is a weed. Technology Review. Nov/Dec 1999, pages 54-57.

Page, S. E. (2007). The Difference: How the power of diversity creates better groups, firms, schools, and societies. Princeton, Princeton University Press.

Rheingold, Howard. 2002. Smart Mobs: the next social revolution. Perseus Publishing. Cambridge, MA.