When public choices collide: territorial mesoeconomics and uneven development in Haiti and the French Caribbean

Abstract

This article argues that international political economy (IPE) needs a stronger meso-territorial lens to explain why formally different policy regimes generate comparable patterns of uneven development. It develops territorial mesoeconomics and introduces public-choice incompatibility to describe situations in which policy objectives and instruments formulated at different scales undermine one another. The article asks how such incompatibilities reproduce territorial dependency in Haiti, Martinique and Guadeloupe. Methodologically, it combines concept formation with a structured, focused comparison based on secondary scholarship and recent statistics from the World Bank, IMF, OEC, IPC, INSEE, and IEDOM. Haiti exemplifies sovereignty without territorial capacity; the French Caribbean illustrates integration without productive transformation. Despite major differences in constitutional status and public spending, the two configurations reveal a shared contradiction: higher-scale policy arrangements can weaken local productive diversification and the capacity to negotiate development priorities. The article restores the meso-territorial scale to IPE debates on dependency and uneven development, identifies public-choice incompatibility as a mechanism linking macro policy to territorial outcomes and presents territorial mesoeconomics as an analytical framework with political implications.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Third World Quarterly, 2026 · DOI ↗