Appropriate Technology: Club or Toll Goods

Source of table: Legal Theory Lexicon

This is the fourth in a series of postings giving examples of different kinds of Appropriate Technologies according to the typology above. The prior postings were:

• Appropriate Technology as a Public Good
• High Technology as Appropriate Technology
• Private Goods Forms of Appropriate Technology

Toll roads are examples of "toll goods" since, until traffic becomes very heavy, one vehicles use of a road does not interfere with the use by other vehicles, but those who do not pay tolls may be excluded from use of the road. Golf clubs are examples of "club goods" since one member's use of the links does not interfere with their use by another member, but only club members may use the club course.

Toll roads are a means of using private finance to support the investment needed to provide an expensive nonrivalrous good. Consider a rural community dependent on unprotected surface water that upgrades to a community water supply and uses water fees to pay for the costs of the installation of the system. This could be regarded as an example of a toll system to pay for a technological innovation, and one that simply was a installation of an established, appropriate technology in place of a less appropriate technology. In general such a system is not meant to ration a scarce resource -- water. Here I am separating the charges involved in defraying operating costs from those required by the investors to defray the investment needed to install the new, more technologically advanced system.

The medieval guilds might be considered as institutions which membership in the guild was used to control access to or use of technology, including technologies that we would now see at appropriate. Thus many guild members were using similar techniques that were neither newly invented nor beyond the abilities of people with relatively little special training. However, guilds provided a means of training new craftsmen, and of certifying the quality of crafts products improving the market information available to consumers.

The point is that the institutionalization of means to exclude people from the use of a nonrivalrous technology may provide the means to finance the investments needed to introduce the technology or to maintain it. Indeed, I see no reason why that approach might not be used to develop the technology. I suspect, for example, that some agricultural cooperatives use member dues to pay for the development of improved crop varieties or other technologies in service of the cooperatives products.

The concept of a club good or a toll good might be of use in creating the social innovation needed to institutionalize means to access an appropriate technology.