So much is wrong in Haiti, even finding the language to describe how to fix it is complicated.

It's not reconstruction. That would mean rebuilding slums and despair. There is no "getting Haiti back on its feet." It wasn't able to stand on its own even before the Earth ruptured.

Transformation is the word Paul Collier chooses now. Collier is a professor of economics at Oxford and the author of The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It.

He was also UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon's special representative for Haiti and may well be a key player in determining what comes next.

A four-year-old Haitian boy, Joicy, waits for treatment at a makeshift hospital in a suburb of Port-au-Prince. (Wolfgang Rattay/Reuters)

How this will be done may be the most confusing element. "Typically, the aid agencies are a zoo," Collier says, explaining how all these aid-delivering groups have such different mandates and reporting structures.

That inevitably means duplication, omissions and mistakes. All of which could be dangerously costly now.

Collier hopes that in a short while, potentially even at next week's Montreal summit on Haiti, a common central authority will be established and that all aid groups and international actors will cede decision-making authority to that entity.

Look for the U.S, Canada, the European Union and, of course, Haiti, however enfeebled its government, to form the group's core leadership, he says.

As for what to do next, Collier is oddly optimistic.

He says there's actually a concrete plan effectively sitting in a drawer waiting to be used.

In the works

"It's very fortunate," he says, to have such a plan. But those who might want to implement it "have not got long. One lesson from international catastrophes is that the energy rapidly dissipates."

The plan that he is referring to was conceived after the series of four hurricanes, which devastated Haiti in 2008.

At that point, Haiti and a handful of key international agencies spent seven months trying to sort out how best to protect the Caribbean nation from its recurring bouts with natural and man-made disasters.

The consensus was that it is about jobs and communities and building institutions from scratch.

The political will to enact the plan had faded by the time it was ready in 2009. But that will and money seem to be there now to actually do something about the problem.

What needs to happen

Collier's concerns are myriad. He worries relief efforts will be centred too much in Port-au-Prince, which could end up sucking more people into the city at a time when they need to be relocated to areas less prone to earthquakes and hurricanes.

Aftershock exodus: Many Haitians flee Port-au-Prince on Wednesday, Jan. 20, 2010, as a big aftershock rumbles the country's largest city. (Reuters)

"People should be spread out to areas where they have a chance for new economic opportunities," he says. Places where we can match people with fresh investment and jobs and new residential structures.

But what sort of economic future are we talking about here.

To understand the Haiti action plan, it helps to look at the not so distant past, which, incredibly, is full of baseballs and Rubik's cubes.

Haiti used to make the bulk of those objects. In fact, in 1984, according to the report, 125,000 Haitians were employed in light manufacturing.

But within 10 years those jobs were gone, the result of a toxic mix of corrupt, incapable governments and resulting trade embargoes.

In Collier's view, though, good access to the North American market coupled with a strong pool of trainable labour could bring it all back and help create communities and opportunities.

He also wants to remind the world of Haiti's mangoes.

"Haiti grows the best mangoes in the world," says Collier. "There's a market on its doorstep, that market hasn't been realized in the past."

Market opportunities

Failing states, Collier notes, don't typically have market opportunities. But if the world is willing, Haiti's prospects look good, at least on paper.

Oxford economist Paul Collier, the UN's former special representative to Haiti, believes Haiti can be fixed. (CBC)

Still, while people need work, they first need homes.

This is where those who've worked in reconstruction efforts before step in with cautionary takes.

Jo da Silva, the director of international development for the engineering firm ARUP, spent a year in Sri Lanka following the 2004 tsunami and also studied the good and bad from the development efforts in Indonesia's hard-hit region Banda Aceh.

Some lessons were heartbreaking, she says. In Indonesia, rebuilding focused on how to protect people from what they feared the most — another tsunami.

But, she says, "the biggest risks in Aceh were actually earthquakes and flooding as a result of deforestation. Yet that had been overlooked for over a year in reconstruction."

What not to do

Flipping through a report called "The Lessons from Aceh," her fingers stop at a picture of an unfinished building.

In the centre is a tangle of rebar. This, she insists, is an example of good intentions with bad consequences.

"There's so much steel in there," she says, "they're never going to be able to build the concrete around that.

"It was a building designed by somebody who knew seismic design, but hadn't thought through the practicalities of building on the ground."

Similar kinds of missteps happened in Sri Lanka, too.

Lovely new homes were built for survivors, but built so far from the sea that the fishermen could no longer work.

The long what-not-to-do lists from past disasters amount to a single warning that money and time and goodwill can all be lost when coordination fails.

In Haiti's case, with five disasters in 15 years, too much has already gone wrong. But much yet could go right.

Whether the decline is reversed could depend largely on what gets decided in the next weeks.

Some very prominent world leaders will be in Montreal next week to discuss what's next for Haiti.

If you have some ideas for them, now is the time to let them fly.