Rural Haiti has long carried a reputation as the least promising place on earth for voluntary cooperation, resting partly on a 1962 aid report that called the peasant incapable of group action. White and Runge test that reputation against survey and treatment data from a Save the Children watershed project at Maissade, comparing watersheds where erosion works were completed, partial or scant. Group size, watershed area, number of landholders, wealth measured in pigs, cattle and land, age, formal religious affiliation and years of project activity all fail to predict whether collective action emerged. Three things do predict it: where parcels sit in the watershed, prior adoption of soil conservation techniques, and involvement in labour exchange arrangements. Insecure tenure deterred nobody, though jointly held ravines, effectively open access, drew widespread defection. More than thirty per cent of the labour came from people holding no land in the watershed at all.