Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the tensions that arise as the bureaucratic and financial timelines of projects collide with the agricultural and arboreal timescapes of the Haitian countryside. These temporal conflicts between plants and paper are part of the inequalities that arise in project-based aid.

Paper long abstract:

Given critiques of the short-term project cycle in aid work, some contemporary interventions have recast themselves as “initiatives” that bridge government, non-governmental, and international actors, and frame their work as long term cooperations. In Haiti, despite such explicit challenges to the otherwise common short-term funding of aid projects, contractors and so-called beneficiaries experience these initiatives quite differently. The long term and multi-year initiatives are broken down into short-term projects, repeating the model of brief, project-based aid. The bureaucratic and financial deadlines of these projects impose temporal frames that are in stark contrast to narratives of continuity and long-term engagement. These further collide with the temporalities of the Haitian countryside, reinforcing notions of time that are remarkably different from the planting and growth cycles of crops and trees.

This paper explores the tensions that arise as bureaucratic and financial time collide with the agro-arboreal timescapes of the Haitian countryside. While anthropological investigations of conservation have often examined the production of space, the social shaping of time-space has received less attention. By examining the way that aid projects impose particular notions of time, this paper frames a conflict of temporalities as part of larger social inequalities that arise in conservation and aid work. Further, the paper will explore the way that the temporalities of crops and trees often require a re-negotiation of time in aid projects, exposing the mutability and possibilities of project bureaucracies.