Displaced by the Dream: Q2 2011 and Coastal Communities Under Development Pressure

Briefing

• Land values in coastal communities adjacent to resort belts rising faster than rural averages.
• Fishing community leaders reported loss of customary beach and launching site access.
• Some community members selling coastal land and relocating inland under financial pressure.
• Social research documented decline of community cohesion in resort-adjacent villages.
• Advocates called for community land rights protections in coastal development framework.

The displacement of coastal fishing communities by resort development in Jamaica was not primarily a story of forced eviction, though those events occurred. It was primarily a story of the conditions that made staying untenable. When land values in a coastal village rise because a resort development nearby has transformed the area’s real estate economics, the families that have lived there for generations face a changed calculus: property taxes rise with valuations; the family’s land becomes, in monetary terms, more valuable than any other asset it owns; and the pressure to sell — which comes not from a developer’s lawyer but from the family’s own economic logic — becomes difficult to resist. The result, across hundreds of individual decisions made in dozens of communities over decades, was the progressive thinning of the coastal fishing community presence along Jamaica’s north coast.

The loss of customary access to traditional beach launching sites and fishing grounds was a related but distinct process. Fishing communities had for generations used particular stretches of beach to launch boats, land catch, repair gear, and conduct the onshore activities that fishing requires. These uses had been customary rather than legally documented; the communities’ right to use those sites rested on precedent and mutual recognition rather than on formal title. As resort development consolidated land ownership along the coast, and as new owners unfamiliar with the customary use history of their properties fenced or restricted access, fishing communities found that access to sites they had used for generations was denied. The legal recourse was limited; the customary right was not the same as a legal right.

The Cohesion Research

Social researchers working in resort-adjacent communities in St Ann and Trelawny in 2011 documented patterns that were consistent with the economic and access dynamics. Villages that had historically been tightly integrated fishing communities, with dense social networks, mutual support systems, and shared community institutions, were showing signs of the erosion of those social structures. The residents who remained were increasingly the elderly and those with the fewest options to leave; the younger adults who had sold family land or who had been drawn into resort employment were increasingly living in the resort corridor towns rather than the traditional villages; and the community institutions — the fishing cooperatives, the community meetings, the shared beach maintenance arrangements — were functioning less effectively with reduced and aging memberships.

The Policy Gap

Advocates calling in 2011 for community land rights protections in the coastal development framework were identifying a genuine policy gap. The regulatory system that governed coastal development — NEPA’s environmental assessment process, the planning authorities’ development approvals, the Beach Control Act’s access provisions — was designed to address the environmental and legal dimensions of development. None of it was designed to protect the economic and social rights of coastal communities in the face of development-driven land market transformation. The policy instruments that could have addressed those rights — community land trusts, customary use rights documentation, development impact assessments that captured community economic impacts — were not part of Jamaica’s coastal governance toolkit, and there was no serious political momentum in 2011 to add them.

Related: Property Market Analysis | Latest Jamaica News

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