Clean Cookstoves for a Billion Cooks: Designing Diverse Laws to Solve a Worldwide Problem

摘要

Roughly half the world's people use solid biomass fuel for cooking and heating. Most cook over open fires or with stoves that burn the fuel incompletely. Nearly two million people, mostly women and children, die prematurely from inhaling the smoke and particulates. Millions of others are sickened or disabled from chronic or acute disease or disfiguring burns. The cookstoves problem also has other serious consequences. The search for fuel obliges women and children to spend much of their time gathering fuel, often in dangerous places, and strains the incomes of poor families. The burning of wood and other biomass also exacerbates problems of deforestation and produces black carbon, a pollutant associated with climate change. Many policies are being developed to address the cookstoves problem, and each will need laws to guide their implementation. The problem's vast scope raises the question: how can one draft effective laws to meet a challenge of this scale? The cookstoves problem poses one example of a more general challenge: even where a problem appears similar in many places, the behavior that creates the problem may differ from place to place. To address the problem effectively, different places may need different laws. In addition, the rule of law demands transparency. Justifying a law's legitimacy requires showing that the law's requirements reflect rational, rather than arbitrary, decision-making. This Article presents a theory and methodology for designing and justifying effective laws. The theory posits that laws solve problems only by changing patterns of behavior. Designing an effective law, and justifying it rationally, requires identifying those patterns of behavior, responding to their causes, and showing the relationship between the reasons for the behavior and the requirements of the proposed law. The methodology offers a four-step checklist of evidence-based questions to guide a drafting team in designing and justifying an effective law: 1. STEP 1: PROBLEM Define the problem: both its harmful symptoms and the underlying behavior. 2. STEP 2: EXPLANATIONS Identify the reasons for the behavior. The following categories suggest reasons that laws can address: 2.1 Intentions 2.1.1 Reason 1: practicality (weighing burdens versus benefits) 2.1.2 Reason 2: principles (ideas, values, goals, organizational mission) 2.2 Freedom and Limitations 2.2.1 Reason 3: freedom of action 2.2.2 Reason 4: limited capacity (physical, intellectual, time, etc.) 2.3 Rules 2.3.1 Reason 5: laws on the books 2.3.2 Reason 6: laws as understood (or not) 2.4 The Decision-Making Process 2.4.1 Reason 7 for groups: how a group reaches a meeting of the minds (procedurally) 2.4.2 Reason 7 for individuals: how individuals make up their minds (subconsciously) 3. STEP 3: SOLUTION AND JUSTIFICATION Design a law that responds to the reasons for the behavior. Justify the law by showing the connection between those reasons and the law's requirements. 4. STEP 4: MONITORING AND EVALUATION Provide for monitoring and evaluation of the law's effects. The theory and methodology address behavior: the element that the cookstoves problem shares with all social problems. While the answers may differ from place to place, the checklist's questions about behavior apply universally.