In the winter of 2006, I was working as an engineer in the Bolivian Plateau trying to convince Quechua and Aymara communities to use photovoltaic panels. I was hanging around in one of the biggest open-air markets in Latin America, the cancha of Cochabamba, when my attention was captured by a set of five nice wicker baskets displayed on a small table. A sleepy cholita was sitting beside the table placidly talking to her neighbor. I enthusiastically asked the lady to sell me all the baskets. She nodded as a sign of rejection. When I insisted, she added: “Caserito, son las 9 de la mañana, si te vendo todo que voy a hacer todo el día?” – “Boy, it’s 9 in the morning, if I sell you all these what am I’m going to do for the rest of the day?” Sitting and chatting in the market for her was evidently more appealing than selling her products all at once and going home. Those words echoed in the back of my mind for years until the day I met Pedro, the Chilean-Dutch manager of an Ecuadorian NGO called Ekorural, in his house near Quito. I was looking for local “frugal innovators” and I came across Ekorural since I was told they were researching the socio-technical changes undertaken by farmers’ communities in the Andes as a strategy of adaptation to global warming. When I started talking about my research on frugal innovation, he suddenly stopped me: “What is this thing that you call ‘innovation’? We are fed up with this word. Innovation for us is synonymous with commodification of our traditional ways of production. It means marketable goods, imported technology and destruction of our commons. Since development has miserably failed, they have now invented this new word, ‘innovation’”. After the encounter with Pedro, I began a journey that would take me from South America to the Indian subcontinent to see whether he was right.

When I reached India several years later, I met Corrine Kumar, the founder of the forum for human rights, Vimochana, in her house in Bangalore. I told her about my experience in the Andes. She smiled and said: “you are standing on the slopes of the big mountain of Western universalism. It takes a long time and much effort to climb to the top and realise that it’s just a mountain surrounded by many others”.

Mario PANSERA