History of Watershed Management Interventions and Lessons Learned

The value of this short paper is that it treats Haiti's watershed work as a history with distinct doctrines rather than as a single continuing effort, which makes the failures legible. Its periodisation runs: 1950-60, a multiplicity of uncoordinated actions; 1960-80, emphasis on mechanical structures such as dry walls and contour canals, delivered through food-for-work and cash-for-work; and 1980-2000, a shift to agroforestry and biological structures with a participatory approach. Read as a sequence, it shows a field that changed its central technique roughly every twenty years, each time in reaction to the previous doctrine's shortcomings, and the lessons-learned framing invites the obvious question about whatever came next. Presented to the CIAT colloquium of June 2010 that sought to establish a national watershed policy, its function in that session was to stop the exercise starting from zero.