Where sewers cannot be laid and pit latrines will not work, one option is to catch waste in sealed containers and haul it away to a treatment site. Tilmans and colleagues report on a pilot of that arrangement, delivered to households in Cap Haitien.

Their measurements cover a densely built informal settlement: how much excreta the population produces in a week, what share of it is safely carried off by household and shared container toilets, and what the operation costs. Unmanaged faeces dropped by roughly three and a half times, and among households on the service, open defecation and bagged waste thrown into the street all but disappeared.

Costs ran above those of conventional piped sewerage at scale, though the authors expect that gap to narrow as such services grow. They end by weighing what it would take for planners and policymakers to treat container systems as one of the standard choices available to fast-growing cities.

Gros works through Haiti's condition as a case in the study of failed states. The book first asks what the concept of state failure actually means, then places Haiti's version of it in historical perspective.

From there it offers a rational-choice account of Duvalierism, follows the disorder and foreign intervention that came after the Duvaliers, and weighs geological catastrophe against an enfeebled state. A closing chapter takes up what remaking a failed state would require, in theory and in policy.

Written after the 2010 earthquake, this report begins from the observation that Haiti had been improving before the disaster — several years of growth and slowly better governance — and that recovery therefore turns on policy rather than luck.

Its method is appraisal rather than invention. Plans already produced by the Haitian government and its donors are examined function by function: public administration, justice, policing, economic and fiscal policy, infrastructure, education, health care, and finally the coordination of donors themselves. Police reform, the authors note, has produced real gains in crime and public trust, while courts and prisons have not; private and religious providers carry most of the burden in schooling and medicine.

Recommendations are held to stated tests. They must be affordable, within the government's actual administrative capacity, achievable within three to five years, mutually consistent, and aimed at making the Haitian state effective rather than deepening its reliance on outsiders.

Poor households do not chiefly need small sums, Rutherford argues; they need occasional large ones. Life-cycle obligations, emergencies from illness and bereavement to fire, flood or the bulldozing of a slum, and opportunities ranging from a business to a better roof or a bribe for a secure job all demand more cash than a home can hold.

Since the poor own little to sell or pawn, the dependable route to a lump sum is to build it out of savings. Rutherford calls this basic personal financial intermediation and reduces it to three moves: saving up, borrowing against savings not yet made, and combinations of the two. The rest of the book follows from that.

He then surveys what people have devised without banks, from rotating and accumulating savings clubs to deposit collectors paid handsomely to take money away and keep it safe, and describes SafeSave, designed around tiny, irregular, daily transactions.

Ardener sets out to make comparison possible across institutions that anthropologists had described piecemeal under names such as esusu and contribution club. Geertz's definition is too narrow, she argues: contributions are not always fixed, the entire fund is not always handed over, and payment is not always in cash. What is essential is regularity and rotation, a standing group of contributors paying in at set intervals into a fund that passes, entire or partly, to each of them by turns.

A survey of the literature follows, from nineteenth-century China through Japan, India, Africa and the Caribbean, with attention to how the fund is allocated: by lot, by dice, by auctioning a discount, by written tender.

She keeps returning to the point that members do not benefit equally. The first recipient owes the rest until the cycle closes; the last is owed throughout. A tentative field guide for future study closes the paper.

Payton began with a narrow question, why Port-au-Prince's buildings failed so completely in 2010, and ended with a history of how the city was made. Taking the capital's explosive growth after 1950 as her point of departure, she reads its geographic and material forms as expressions of the same processes that underpinned the Duvalier regime between 1957 and 1986.

Some of the evidence is explicit, such as the politics behind the airport's construction and the ideological meaning invested in it. Some is oblique: elite neighborhoods raised over fragile aquifers in the 1970s reveal a deliberate environmental neglect that kept powerful interests satisfied.

Working from historical maps, archival and printed sources, oral histories collected from earthquake survivors and her own years living in the city, she treats slum clearance, transport infrastructure and the politics of cement as ways into the dictatorship's logic and its international setting, and into what she calls its infrastructures of corruption.