Jamaica’s National Reconstruction and Resilience Authority Act has been welcomed as a vehicle for post-hurricane rebuilding, but the Jamaica Beach Birthright Environmental Movement warns the legislation could permanently dispossess tens of thousands of coastal fisherfolk and informal landholders.

Jamaica’s government reaffirms public beach access commitments in Montego Bay and Ocho Rios, but the Jamaica Beach Birthright Environmental Movement says the new Beach Access Policy entrenches coastal privatisation rather than reversing it.

When a barbed wire fence appeared across a section of Negril’s iconic Seven Mile Beach in April 2026, the viral outrage it generated was not really about the fence. It was about everything that had been building for years along Jamaica’s most celebrated shoreline.

A government proposal to encourage hotels to charge Jamaicans a fee to access hotel-controlled beaches has drawn fierce opposition from campaigners, who argue it would formalise the privatisation of the country’s foreshore and turn a legal right into a commercial transaction.

Jamaica has formally tabled its Beach Access and Management Policy in Parliament, replacing a 1956 Act and setting out how the government intends to balance public coastal rights with tourism investment — but the framework has drawn immediate and substantial criticism.

In October 2025, residents of Flanker and surrounding communities filed legal action in the St James Parish Court to protect their right of access to Providence Beach, as Sandals Montego Bay prepared to build overwater bungalows and wetland modifications that campaigners say will permanently alter the coastline.

Jamaica’s National Environment and Planning Agency is the gatekeeper for major coastal development approvals. But environmental advocates, researchers, and affected communities have raised persistent questions about whether its EIA process is sufficiently robust to protect the island’s coast from the cumulative impacts of the current development boom.

From Priory in St Ann to Whitehouse in Westmoreland, fishing villages and farming communities along Jamaica’s coast are facing a convergence of threats that no single policy or project has yet been designed to address together.

Heavy equipment has moved into the Mammee Bay watershed in St Ann, beginning preparatory earthworks for the China Harbour Engineering Company’s controversial mixed-use coastal development. Environmental groups say the process has bypassed meaningful community consultation.

Jamaica’s beaches have been ‘public’ since 1956 under the Beach Control Act. Yet generations of Jamaicans have been locked out of them. An explainer on what the Act says, why it has failed, and what replacing it would actually require.