The Quiet Enclosure: Q2 2015 and How Jamaica’s North Coast Beaches Were Being Claimed Without Anyone Announcing It

Briefing

• Three north coast hotel expansion projects received planning approval in the second quarter.
• An advocacy group published a community survey documenting access loss at 23 sites in St Ann alone.
• Fishing communities in Trelawny reported new obstructions to traditional landing sites.
• NEPA confirmed it was not systematically monitoring compliance with beach access corridor conditions.
• First sargassum of the 2015 season arrived on Jamaica’s eastern coast in June.

The advocacy report that documented beach access loss at 23 specific sites in St Ann parish was not, in itself, a legal document. It was a community survey: structured interviews with residents, fishers, and regular beach users at sites where access had changed in recent years, supplemented by photographic evidence of the physical changes — fences, gates, construction hoarding, landscaping that redirected foot traffic — that had produced the change. It described a process that, site by site, had been proceeding quietly and without significant public notice for years.

No individual decision in the survey was necessarily unlawful. A hotel extending its beach area, a landowner putting up a fence at the boundary of their property, a resort redesigning its guest entry to route visitors away from a previously open section of shore — each of these actions might be entirely within the rights of the entities taking them. The survey documented their cumulative effect: a stretch of St Ann coastline where, twenty years earlier, there had been multiple points of informal public access, and where there were now substantially fewer. The access had not been formally closed. It had been quietly removed, one increment at a time, by people who understood that no one was keeping a cumulative account.

NEPA and the Corridor Problem

When asked whether it was monitoring compliance with the beach access corridor conditions attached to coastal hotel approvals, NEPA‘s formal response confirmed that it was not conducting systematic corridor compliance monitoring. The corridors — strips of land that hotel developers were required to maintain as public access routes to the beach as conditions of their planning approval — existed on the approval documents. Whether they existed on the ground, whether they were signed and accessible, and whether the public could actually use them was not being checked in any systematic way. The gap between the condition on the document and the reality on the coast was not being measured.

Trelawny’s Fishing Communities

Fishing community representatives from Trelawny raised concerns in Q2 2015 about new physical obstructions to traditional landing sites and access routes to the sea in their parish. The concerns were linked to development activity in the Duncans Bay area — the proposed location of the Harmony Cove development — where land preparation work and fence-building had begun in anticipation of formal approval processes that were still ongoing. The communities’ experience was of a coast being changed on the ground before the regulatory processes designed to manage the change had concluded. The physical changes were creating facts that the regulatory process would then be asked to ratify.

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