Table of Contents

ABSTRACT

Improved cooking stove (ICS) offers clean cooking at a reasonably cheap cost, uses traditional fuel efficiently, and thereby, reduces health risks, pollution, and resource misuse. Households can be motivated by the comparison of prices of ICS and a modern cooking technology, and adopt ICS if they value it close to the modern technology. However, price of alternative cooking technologies relative to a modern technology influences household to use an energy mixture while sticking to the traditional cooking technology, i.e., to show energy stacking behavior. This discourages clean cooking. So our main focus is to explore household’s attitudes toward ICS adoption using a recursive bivariate probit model by collecting primary data from suburban areas of the Sylhet district in Bangladesh. The study result shows small influence of income on household’s adoption of ICS does not ensure quick switching to clean cooking for poor households in Bangladesh. Public support is necessary to encourage adoption of clean cooking technology like ICS for a better resource management and a cleaner environment. It will be better for the government to pay incentives to ICS users indirectly through easier access to the modern energy sources rather than subsidizing cooking technologies.

Keywords: Energy stacking, Relative price, Appropriate Technology, Improve Cooking Stove