The Doctor Who Went to the Beach: How Dr Devon Taylor and JaBBEM Built Jamaica’s Most Consequential Coastal Rights Movement

Briefing

• JaBBEM was established by Dr Devon Taylor, a Jamaican physician, to contest coastal privatisation.
• The movement uses a combination of litigation, media advocacy, and community mobilisation.
• Active court cases include Bob Marley Beach and Little Dunn’s River in St Ann parish.
• JaBBEM’s work has attracted international media coverage including an Australian SBS documentary.
• The organisation argues beach access is a constitutional right, not merely a policy preference.

There is nothing in Devon Taylor’s professional background that marks him out as a likely coastal rights campaigner. He trained as a physician. He built a career in medicine. He was not, by his own account, an environmental activist before the experience that changed that — the experience of arriving at a Jamaican beach he had visited his entire life and finding it fenced, gated, and inaccessible behind the infrastructure of a resort development. That experience, repeated at site after site around the island, produced a conviction that became a movement.

The Jamaica Beach Birthright Environmental Movement, which Taylor founded and leads, operates on a theory of change that is more strategic and more legally specific than the term “movement” might suggest. JaBBEM is not primarily a protest organisation, though it organises protests. It is not primarily a lobbying operation, though it lobbies. Its central work is litigation — the use of Jamaica’s existing legal system to establish that the public has rights to coastal access that have been extinguished by development, and that those rights can be restored by the courts even without new legislation.

The Legal Theory

JaBBEM’s legal theory rests on the Prescription Act of 1882. Taylor and his legal team argue that at each of the sites JaBBEM contests, the Jamaican public used the beach openly, continuously, without force, and without permission for periods far exceeding the twelve-year threshold the Act requires to establish a prescriptive right. If the courts accept this argument, those prescriptive rights survive the subsequent private acquisition of the adjacent land. The beach was publicly used before the resort arrived, that use established a legal right, and no sale can extinguish a right that the seller did not own.

The constitutional dimension Taylor adds to this legal argument elevates it from a property dispute to a claim about fundamental rights. Jamaica’s Constitution protects a range of rights and freedoms. Taylor argues that the practical ability to access the coast — for recreation, for livelihood, for cultural expression — is connected to those constitutional protections in ways that the courts should be prepared to recognise. This argument has not yet been tested in a final ruling, but it shapes the framing of JaBBEM’s advocacy and the political resonance of its campaigns.