(Regarding Professor Wilson Laleau's document: « Political Transitions and Constitutional Change – We Got It All Wrong »)
For nearly forty years, Haiti has been in a permanent state of exception. Each crisis announces a transition, each transition promises a refoundation, and each refoundation, inevitably, brings it back to the starting point. This political circularity has transformed transition into a regime and instability into normality. Yet, this repetition is not the result of historical chance, but of a method – or rather, an absence of method.
It is precisely this flaw that Professor Wilson Laleau's text, Political Transitions and Constitutional Change: We Got It All Wrong (2025), highlights. The author offers a historical, institutional, and pragmatic reading of Haiti's political deadlock. He puts forward a bold hypothesis: Haiti's problem lies not in the nature of its constitutions, but in how they are conceived, adopted, and applied. In other words, the issue is procedural before it is textual.
- From the Repetition of Crises to the Crisis of Repetition
Since 1986, the succession of provisional governments, transitional charters, and constitutional promises has produced a singular political model: that of a perpetual transition. This phenomenon, already identified by Pierre-Raymond Dumas as a “transition that has become a regime in itself,” reflects the Haitian state's difficulty in moving from the provisional to the permanent.
Professor Laleau revisits this dynamic by drawing on major works of contemporary political science — Robert Fatton (Haiti’s Predatory Republic, 2002), Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Douglass North, Barry Weingast, Acemoglu and Robinson — to show that the repetition of crises is the product of a vicious cycle combining institutional weakness, hyper-centralization, oligarchic capture, and external dependence.
According to this analytical framework, Haitian transitions fail because they settle for legal reconstruction without institutional transformation. The state redefines itself through law but does not reinvent itself through practice. Constitutions succeed one another, but governance structures — parties, local authorities, public administration, justice, citizen oversight — remain embryonic or instrumentalized.
- The Trap of Constitutional Formalism
Wilson Laleau's critique aligns with the findings of North and Weingast (1989): political institutions produce stability only when they are based on a credible balance between actors, founded on trust and mutual constraint. In Haiti, each Constitution has failed not because of its content, but because of the lack of legitimacy in its political environment.
Thus, the 1987 Constitution — the most durable in national history — carried the seeds of a decentralized and pluralistic state, but without the creation of the bodies intended to bring it to life (Constitutional Court, Permanent Electoral Council, meritocratic civil service, autonomous local authorities). The republican facade was maintained, but the institutional framework remained fragile.
This constitutional formalism has produced a paradox: the more a norm is proclaimed, the less it is applied. Professor Laleau observes that the Haitian debate polarizes between those advocating for the strict application of the 1987 Constitution and those calling for a complete overhaul, without addressing the essential question: in what institutional and social context can a Constitution truly exist?
- Towards an Experimental Constitutional Process: The Constructed Transition
Faced with this impasse, the author proposes a conceptual innovation: the constructed transition.
This involves transforming the transition — generally endured — into a collective learning process, designed as a constitutional laboratory.
This laboratory would take place over a limited period (five years) and would include three successive phases:
- Political stabilization, with the appointment of a custodial president and the formation of a broad coalition government, guaranteeing institutional neutrality and state continuity.
- Institutional experimentation, based on the establishment of departmental governors, assemblies of mayors, and citizen monitoring committees, to test decentralization and accountability mechanisms.
- The national constitutional conference, tasked with drafting a definitive Constitution based on lessons learned from this experimentation, integrating necessary adjustments derived from empirical observation.
This approach is inspired by institutional pragmatism (Evans, 1995; Acemoglu and Robinson, 2012), according to which political stability is built through experimentation, evaluation, and learning, rather than solely through the promulgation of norms. Mr. Laleau thus invites a break from the reflex of rupture – characteristic of endured transitions – to establish a political learning method based on continuous participation and evaluation.
- The Indissociable Link Between Political Refoundation and Economic Transformation
One of the most significant contributions of Professor Laleau's text is to reframe the constitutional question within an economic perspective. The author establishes a direct link between institutional structure and productive structure: a predatory state generates a rentier economy; a cooperative state generates a solidarity economy.
Drawing inspiration from the institutionalist development tradition (Evans, North, World Bank 2023), he advocates for an economic transition parallel to the political transition: moving from a predatory state to cooperative capitalism, based on communes, departmental cooperatives, and the mobilization of the diaspora.
This proposal rehabilitates the territorial dimension of development, long marginalized by Port-au-Prince's centralization. By placing communes at the heart of production and decision-making, it aims to create an economic and social basis for local governance, an indispensable condition for political legitimacy.
- From Method to Political Maturity
What Professor Laleau proposes, fundamentally, is not a constitutional model, but a method of refoundation.
In a society where institutional haste has often served as a vision, he suggests relearning how to govern political time. Transition would no longer be a waiting interval, but a moment of experimentation, memory, and construction.
This approach aligns with Elinor Ostrom's (1990) analyses of collective governance: durable institutions are those that allow for the co-construction of rules, self-organization, and shared responsibility. Similarly, the “constructed transition” according to Wilson Laleau rests on three methodological principles:
• learning (measuring and adjusting),
• participation (involving social and territorial actors),
• evaluation (institutionalizing citizen oversight and accountability).
It is this method, and not a text in itself, that could establish the legitimacy of the next Constitution.
- A Methodological Contribution to Haitian Political Thought
Wilson Laleau's text stands out for its conceptual clarity and its rejection of historical fatalism. Where other diagnoses stop at the observation of a captured state or a disorganized civil society, he proposes an operational framework for moving beyond the provisional.
It is no longer about proclaiming the end of the transition, but about instituting it as a space for political maturation. The true break is not with the text, but with the process: replacing an endured transition with a constructed, framed, documented, collective transition.
Finally: learning to govern our transitions, to govern our destiny
Ultimately, Political Transitions and Constitutional Change – We Got It All Wrong offers a lesson in method and a pedagogy of change. In a country where urgency often serves as an alibi for improvisation, this reflection invites us to slow down to build better, to plan for greater longevity.
Haiti will not emerge from transition through a new Constitution, but through the institutional learning it empowers itself to undertake. Moving from an endured transition to a constructed transition means accepting that stability is not decreed: it is learned, practiced, and measured.
In this, Professor Wilson Laleau's essay aligns with the tradition of pragmatic political thinkers. He doesn't just describe an impasse: he charts a path.
And this path, in Haiti as elsewhere, begins with a simple — yet revolutionary — conviction: to refound the Republic, one must first refound the way it is built.
Emmanuel Jean François
