The Regional Planning Authority

This presentation names the obstacle that the rest of the CIAT planning corpus keeps running into. Haiti produces territorial plans; they are not implemented. Michèle Oriol's diagnosis is institutional rather than technical. Making a plan does not make it applied. The investments that would give a plan effect are decided in isolation by sectoral ministries, each on its own logic, so no plan governs them. A multitude of actors is managed from the capital, which puts the decision far from the territory it changes. The proposed answer is a regional planning authority, an institution at the scale at which plans are actually drawn but with real standing over investment. Read against CIAT's Centre-Artibonite and North/North-East plans, the argument is uncomfortable and useful: those documents are careful, costed and detailed, and this paper explains the mechanism by which such documents come to sit unused.