déchets. stigmatisations, commerces, politiques ... - Viva Rio en Haiti

54 | GARBAGE
adoxically, sometimes only in the denunciation of
the failure to address the problem adequately (a
denunciation that was, in fact, unthinkable when
this population remained ‘invisible’).
The contemporary associations between politics
and garbage are shaped by international agendas
that connect fi ghting poverty with promoting
health, protecting the environment, eliminating violence
and mitigating unemployment. This is a disputed
fi eld in which there is no consensus concerning
the formulation of the problem and involving, it
should be added, competition between specialists,
models of action, sources of funding and actors (international,
national, municipal and community)
linked or looking to be linked to these sources.
The social universe of garbage in the researched
area is permeated with these tensions, echoing debates
and disputes, and not just in the action of
the politicians, international cooperation agencies
and NGOs present there. They are also found
in the speech and actions of the population that is,
or should be, the recipient of these policies. We can
identify the following factors that heavily infl uence
the debates and actions in the region.
Firstly we should note the absence of coordination,
defi nition of tasks or clear hierarchies on
the part of the Haitian state agencies. The national
government intervenes in the garbage sector
through the work of at least two ministries (Public
Works and the Environment) in garbage collection,
street cleaning and the management of the Truitier
dump. However waste is also the responsibility
of local councils, which complicates the matter further
because the policies of the latter, and the relations
they have with each ministry, are far from
streamlined or coordinated. The creation of the Solid
Waste Management Group and the Solid Waste
Management Sector Roundtable in 2009 under the
auspices of the Ministry of Public Works seems to
have been an attempt to coordinate actions in the
sector through the creation of higher bodies responsible
for policy formulation. As we were able
to learn in meetings with a number of the actors involved
in the Group and at the meeting of the Sector
Roundtable itself, while the difference in viewpoints
and the complexity of the issues mean that
the initiative must be taken seriously, they also demand
a degree of caution in terms of the concrete
results that they can generate.
The international cooperation agencies also
present a variety of viewpoints and actions. Some
concentrate their work on fi nancing the elaboration
and implementation of wide-ranging and strategic
projects to be run by the State. This is notably
the case of the AFD. The other multilateral agencies
pursue more diversifi ed initiatives. At the IADB, for
example, one of the sectors fully coincides with
the AFD and only supports national government
projects such as improving access to the Truitier
dump. However other IADB departments fund oneoff
projects implemented by NGOs, notably some
of Viva Rio’s initiatives in Bel Air.
A very different case is that of the UNDP, which,
despite being a multilateral agency and not an
NGO, is involved in the implementation of a community
intervention initiative being developed for
three years now in the Carrefour Feuille district:
street cleaning, installation of waste bins, garbage
collection, recycling and, supposedly too, commercialization
of recycled objects. With the support of
a south-south cooperation program (also involving
the Brazilian government), the project has gained
enormous visibility in the local and international
media, won awards and is the showcase project for
the UN’s actions in Haiti, even receiving a public
promise of support in 2009 from the new UN special
envoy in the country, Bill Clinton. 36
This is a highly polemical initiative, heavily
criticized by other agencies and actors. While the
project director and members of the local management
committee speak about the success in
cleaning up the district (comparing it explicitly
with other areas of the city), generating employment
and creating possibilities for selling recycled
garbage, the project’s critics refer to it as a
‘counter-example’ essentially because of its unsustainability
and the fact it is designed to substitute
for the actions of public institutions rather
than work in partnership with them. This coincides
with the ideas expressed by the project directors
themselves who, when they imagine replicating
the experiment in other communities in the
metropolitan zone, declare that in these cases the
garbage “would be our responsibility,” not only in
detriment to the state but also the other NGOs who
work in these areas.
There is an important question here, which
prompts the criticisms made by some cooperation
institutions (like the AFD) and some state bodies:
one of the effects of the initiatives of NGOs (or, in
this case, the UNDP) is, they claim, to produce a
territorial division where projects and NGOs hold