APPROPRIATE TECHNOLOGY? at SCIENCE GALLERY

Patrick Bond and Ralph Borland: Appropriate Technology?
26:10:11-18:00 - 19:00

What happens when first-world solutions fail in developing countries? Why do some innovations look good on paper, but fall short for users?

Political economist Professor Patrick Bond and SURFACE TENSION curator Ralph Borland will present from their research on water-related 'appropriate technologies' as received by communities on the ground in South Africa, and explore why 'innovative solutions' are sometimes anything but.

Prof. Patrick Bond, director of the Centre for Civil Society at the University of Kwazulu Natal in Durban, South Africa, will argue against Durban's internationally renowned water policies given their context: "A society even more unequal and disease-ridden than during apartheid-- when far-sighted ecological innovations in waterless sanitation are the cover for neoliberal water-denial strategies and hence are only provided in poor black areas instead of the rich white areas where water-wasting is world-class", writes Bond, "these ecological objectives are subverted and the economic rationales are resisted, from below".

Ralph Borland will draw on his PhD thesis, 'Radical Plumbers and PlayPumps - Objects in development', to demonstrate how the PlayPump (a children's roundabout which pumps water) was successful as a story-telling object for first world audiences, but failed for its users on the ground. What are the consequences of relying on support from first world audiences to fund technology for people in the developing world to use? How might projects caught up within this system of unequal power relationships be favoured for their ability to tell stories to funders, rather than do work for their users?

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• Patrick Bond
• Ralph Borland
• Appropriate Technology
• science
• gallery
• science gallery
• trinity
• trinity college
• dublin
• ireland
• play pump
• water
• surface tension
• water politics
• durban