Knowing and Managing the State Domain

Every Haitian land document in this collection runs into the same wall: nobody can say with confidence where the state domain begins and ends. This presentation, given by Ronald Deshommes of the Ministry of Economy and Finance to the coastal workshop at the Marriott in Port-au-Prince on 8 September 2015, addresses that directly, and its method is historical. The domain is presented as an inheritance of the sequestrations beginning in 1796 and of the ancestral land struggles of independence, rather than as an administrative register that simply fell out of date. That framing has a practical consequence for anyone proposing to fix it: the uncertainty is not a filing failure to be corrected by better record-keeping, but the residue of two centuries of contested claim, which is why the CIAT's cadastre papers treat locating the domain as a substantive investigation rather than a data-entry task.