Election Season and the Coast: How the February 2016 Election Changed Jamaica’s Coastal Development Conversation

Briefing

• The JLP government that won the February 2016 election was three months into office by the start of Q2.
• Tourism Minister set out plans to accelerate coastal hotel investment approvals.
• Beach access advocates met with new ministerial team; received commitments but no concrete action.
• Harmony Cove developers submitted updated concept plans to the new government.
• NEPA budget allocations for 2016–17 were reduced in the post-election fiscal adjustment.

The JLP government that won Jamaica’s February 2016 general election by a margin of one parliamentary seat inherited a coast in the middle of multiple stories. The tourism development pipeline was full and active; the previous PNP administration’s work on hotel investment had produced a substantial queue of approved and near-approved projects ready to move to construction. Beach access disputes at Winnifred Beach, Bob Marley Beach, and several other sites were at various stages of controversy and, in some cases, preliminary legal activity. The environmental monitoring and enforcement backlog at NEPA was longer than the agency’s resources could systematically address.

New governments typically bring policy emphasis shifts rather than immediate policy reversals, and Jamaica’s coastal policy was no exception. The incoming Tourism Minister’s public statements in Q2 2016 signalled a continued and intensified commitment to tourism investment acceleration, with an emphasis on reducing the friction in the approvals process for resort projects that met investment thresholds. The signal to the development community was clear: the new government wanted more coastal hotels, faster.

Advocates and the New Government

Beach access advocates and environmental groups that had been engaged with the previous government on coastal policy questions requested and received meetings with the new ministerial team in Q2 2016. The meetings were described by participating advocates as productive in tone but limited in substance: the new ministers were listening, asking questions, and committing to review existing positions, but the depth of their engagement with the specific legal and regulatory issues that advocates were raising was still developing. The commitments made in these early meetings — to review the Beach Control Act, to address specific contested sites, to improve EIA quality standards — were the same commitments that had been made by previous administrations. The question was whether anything in the new government’s political calculus would produce different outcomes.

NEPA’s Thinning Budget

The post-election fiscal adjustment that the new government undertook in Q2 2016 included reductions in agency budgets across multiple ministries, and NEPA’s allocation for environmental monitoring and enforcement was among those that was cut. The reduction was not announced as a policy decision on the coast; it was a line item in a broader fiscal exercise. Its practical effect was to further constrain the agency’s capacity to conduct the monitoring, respond to complaints, and process EIA reviews that its mandate required. The irony of cutting NEPA’s budget in the same quarter that the government was announcing an acceleration of coastal development approvals did not produce public comment from within the government.

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