A Multi-Criteria Framework for the Ex Ante Evaluation of Development Projects in Highly Vulnerable Territories: Methodological Design from Canaan (Haiti)

Development projects in highly vulnerable territories frequently underperform not because of poor technical design but because the organizational, territorial and contextual conditions required for implementation are not in place. In Canaan (Haiti), for example, many post-earthquake interventions were fragmented, duplicated one another and failed to deliver durable improvements, which is the practical problem addressed here. This article develops and operationalizes an ex ante multi-criteria framework, HEP-ZAV (an assessment tool for development projects in high-vulnerability zones), that assesses the suitability of a development project before implementation. Rather than treating weighting as the core task, the framework first transforms an integrated territorial diagnosis into a structured evaluation matrix of three levels, eleven factors and fifty-six sub-factors operationalized through indicators. The relative importance of the elements is established through a group Analytic Hierarchy Process with consistency and consensus diagnostics, and the model is implemented in a transparent decision-support tool that reports a three-component suitability profile instead of a single score. Because retrospective project data are unavailable, the behavior of the instrument is characterized through a Monte Carlo experiment of 100,000 projects and two sensitivity analyses, which show that, under the simulation assumptions, the three dimensions remain computationally separated and that the expert-derived weights increase score dispersion while the factor-importance ranking remains robust. The framework is a transferable ex ante screening instrument, not yet a validated predictor of project success.