Rethinking recipient agency: what can we learn from Haitian accounts?

Abstract

Development settings have always been uneven fields of power where recipient agency is limited. However, since the late 1990s, ideas of recipient participation and ownership gained popularity among international financial institutions, donor and recipient governments and aid practitioners. At the same time, with the ‘rise of the South’, the development cooperation landscape became much more polycentric. At least in theory, there is more choice, giving recipients more bargaining power and thus more agency. ‘Emerging’ donors talk about horizontality, sovereignty and shared identities, but what are the actual practices on the ground? How do recipients see themselves in interactions with different Northern/Southern donors? Are North/South categories relevant when analysing recipient agency, or are there other factors that are more analytically useful? This paper approaches recipient agency by looking at agricultural cooperation in Haiti. It is based on interviews conducted with an extended spectrum of Haitian actors involved in projects with four donors/partners: the United States, France, Brazil and Cuba. It looks into recipient perceptions and experiences of agency in relation to Northern donors and Southern partners by exploring project conceptualisation, execution, financing and everyday interactions.