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.

Keywords:

• Recipient agency
• South–South cooperation
• North–South cooperation
• Haiti
• agriculture

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to respondents who took part in my research and shared their time and opinions. I also thank Emma Mawdsley, Helena Achcar and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive and insightful comments on the earlier versions of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding

Research underpinning this paper was financially supported by the Royal Geographical Society and the University of Cambridge.

Notes

1 The painting was most likely painted in 2009 as a part of an artistic project run by the Brazilian NGO Viva Rio in Bel Air, Port-au-Price. Unfortunately, I was unable to identify the artist and secure permission to reproduce their art.

2 Brazilian cooperation providers often claim to be oriented by values of horizontality, neutrality, non-conditionality and mutual benefits. They aim to be demand driven and share knowledge and experiences successful in Brazil, which in practice can be problematic as the ideas do not always travel easily across different contexts (Shankland and Gonçalves 2016).

3 Haiti is one of the 15 countries that still have diplomatic relations with Taiwan.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Katarzyna Baran

Katarzyna Baran is a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on recipient agency in development cooperation, with a geographic focus on Haiti. Prior to her PhD she worked in the development sector in Haiti.