Carnival Economy Week 2026: five conversations that read the Jacmel carnival as an economy
From September 24 to 27, 2026, the Carnival Economy Lab (CEL) presents Beyond the Parade: Carnival Economy Week, five public online conversations on the economy of the Jacmel carnival.
The starting point is a change of perspective: seeing carnival not only as a spectacle, but as an economic system in its own right, made of production, services, mobility, transactions, stories, investment and income. Jacmel is the pilot territory.
The five sessions are designed as successive steps in a single chain of decisions: making visible the economy that already exists behind the parade, identifying what makes Jacmel desirable, defining what can become an experience without distorting the culture, assembling the infrastructure no market can work without, and following what happens to spending once it enters the local economy. Each session brings together a moderator and three panelists for 55 to 60 minutes.
The week does not set out to produce figures before the data exists. It documents mechanisms, constraints and hypotheses, and specifies the variables to measure. Its findings will feed the Jacmel Carnival Economy Blueprint 2027.
Carnival Economy Week 2026 is organized in partnership with iHaiti and LANS (Leadership Ayitien pour une Nouvelle Société).
