The Slow Recovery: Q1 2012 and Jamaica Tourism’s Post-Crisis Rebuild

Briefing

• Jamaica stopover tourism arrivals rose year-on-year for the third consecutive quarter.
• New hotel project announcements resumed after two years of near-silence.
• NEPA published revised coastal development guidelines for the first time since 2005.
• All-inclusive sector reported occupancy recovery to near-2007 levels.

The recovery of Jamaica’s tourism sector from the 2008–2011 contraction was gradual and uneven, but by early 2012 the direction was clear. Stopover arrivals — the metric most closely correlated with hotel revenue and employment — were rising. The all-inclusive sector, which had weathered the contraction better than the independently owned accommodation sector because of its stronger linkage to American and European tour operators who had maintained promotional commitments, was reporting occupancy levels approaching those of the pre-crisis peak. And the development pipeline, which had been nearly empty of new projects for two years, was beginning to fill again as investors who had been monitoring Jamaica’s performance indicators decided that the risk of new commitment had sufficiently declined.

The question that advocates and planners were asking in 2012 was whether the governance institutions that had presided over the pre-2008 boom — the institutions that had approved the seawalls, permitted the corridor violations, licensed the sand mining, and produced the degraded coast that the boom had left as its physical legacy — had changed in ways that would produce different outcomes in the next cycle. The revised NEPA coastal development guidelines published in early 2012 were one piece of evidence to assess. They were more detailed than the 2005 guidelines they replaced, more explicit about cumulative impact requirements, and more specific about the conditions under which coastal vegetation clearance would and would not be approved.

The Implementation Question

The sceptical reading of the revised guidelines — advanced by environmental advocates who had seen previous rounds of improved guidelines fail to produce improved outcomes — was that guidelines are not enforcement. The 2005 guidelines had also been an improvement on what preceded them, and the coastal degradation that had occurred under their watch was not primarily attributable to inadequate guideline content. The problem had been implementation: the capacity of NEPA to enforce conditions it had imposed, the willingness of other agencies to defer to NEPA’s coastal management role, and the broader political economy in which investment-driven development imperatives consistently outweighed the enforcement of environmental conditions when conflicts arose. None of those institutional dynamics had obviously changed in the transition from 2005 to 2012 guidelines.

The North Coast Development Corridor

The new hotel project announcements that began appearing in the first quarter of 2012 were concentrated, as Jamaica’s coastal development invariably was, on the north coast. The corridor between Montego Bay and Ocho Rios remained the most intensively developed stretch of Jamaica’s coastline and the one where the cumulative impacts of decades of resort development were most visible. It was also the stretch where the tourism industry’s commercial infrastructure was most established — airlift, tours, ground transport — and where the logic of continued investment was, for developers, most compelling. The environmental and access challenges that had accumulated on that corridor over decades were not arguments against further development in the industry’s calculus; they were challenges to be managed around rather than resolved.

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