Decentralization has circulated in Haitian political talk as a development tool for more than thirty years, since the twenty-nine-year Duvalier dictatorship ended in 1986. Recent fiscal gains have been credited largely to a USAID program, LOKAL+, but whether the extra local revenue actually changed what municipalities spent was never clear.

Léon tests this with a mixed-methods case study of two of the program's nine target communes, supported by descriptive statistics for all nine and a dataset of annual budgets covering each of Haiti's 140 communes from 2012 to 2015. Saint Marc, where the intervention began, and Delmas, reckoned the country's most successful local government, both show modest improvement in public service delivery.

Two cautions follow. Without parallel accountability measures such as citizen engagement, local capture and personalism can distort who gets served. And Haiti's authoritarian legacy, showing up as an absence of political will among central government actors, keeps limiting what decentralization can accomplish.