Banking on the market: Mobile phones and social goods provision in Haiti

Abstract

The role of the market in the provision of “social goods” (Söderbaum 2005) has been at the fore of academic discussions over the past few decades as governments and other state actors outsource their provisioning to corporations and other market mechanisms (Schwittay 2011). In Haiti, information and communication technologies (ICTs) have played a significant role in this shift, due to their capacity to act as “platforms” for service delivery (Kendall et al. 2012). However, the “marketization” of services is by no means complete. Drawing upon research carried out in Haiti between 2010–2012, we demonstrate how the models that promote the use of ICTs for social purposes tend to bring together alliances of market and non-market forces, relying on the different affordances of each to structure service delivery for commercial and non-commercial ends. Rather than a one-way shift from state provisioning to the commercialization of social goods, their delivery mechanisms have changed routinely throughout Haitian history. We argue that these features are often overlooked in analyses of “neoliberalism” that present the decline of state service provision as a one-directional movement towards marketization.