Humanitarian Aid and Local Power Structures: Lessons From Haiti's "Shadow Disaster".

This article interrogates the confluence of humanitarian aid, centralization, and politics. Haiti's 2010 earthquake triggered over $16 billion in pledges. In the shadows almost seven years later, category-four Hurricane Matthew made landfall on October 4, 2016 receiving only one percent of the funding of the earthquake response. While the earthquake exhibited one face of centralization, Hurricane Matthew laid bare the rural vulnerabilities shaped by postcolonial state neglect reinforced by the influx of NGOs in the "Republic of Port-au-Prince." The article discusses data from four case studies in two provinces illuminating legacies of hyper-centralization in Haiti. Also, Matthew made landfall in the middle of an extended election season that the international community attempted to control yet again. In this context, we argue that disaster aid and politics is uncomfortably close, while reflecting on the momentary decentralization of aid after Matthew and its effectiveness. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.