Portland Bight

The first quarter of 2014 saw formal announcements of hotel investment that, while years in the pipeline, represented a genuine shift in the pattern of post-2008 caution. Developers were moving again on north coast projects, and the planning system was being asked to process applications it had not seen the like of since before the financial crisis.

The first quarter of 2009 marked the effective end of Jamaica’s north coast resort development boom. The financial crisis that had begun in the autumn of 2008 had dried up the international financing that had funded the boom’s later stages, and the development applications that continued to be filed were being processed in an environment where the prospect of construction finance had become remote. The boom, as a period of actual construction activity, was over.

As the north coast resort boom accelerated in early 2005, the Portland Bight Protected Area on Jamaica’s south-central coast offered a striking counterpoint: a large coastal and marine protected area where the governance frameworks that were failing spectacularly on the north coast had, imperfectly but meaningfully, produced a different outcome.

The first quarter of 2002 saw the Portland Bight Protected Area, designated in 1999, confronting the fundamental challenge facing Jamaica’s marine protected areas: designation on paper had not been matched by management capacity on the water.

The opening quarter of 2000 offered a moment for stock-taking on Jamaica’s coastal development trajectory. The decade of the 1990s had transformed the north coast’s resort landscape; the institutional framework that would manage the next decade was still taking shape.

The final quarter of 1999 saw the gazettal of the Portland Bight Protected Area, a designation that represented Jamaica’s most significant coastal conservation commitment of the decade. The 187,000-acre protected area encompassed the island’s largest mangrove system and extensive coastal wetlands.