From the plantation to the deep blue sea: Naturalising debt, ordinary disasters, and postplantation ecologies in the Caribbean

Abstract

This paper critically assesses debt as a response to ecological, fiscal, and climate disasters that have emerged within the “blue economy” agenda in the Caribbean. Caribbean countries routinely suffer major losses of life, internal social and economic displacement, increased debt burdens, and significant economic damages due to hurricanes and ecological disasters in the context of an ongoing fiscal crisis. In response, regional public and national agencies have proposed “blue economy” initiatives to address the regional need for finance, to rejuvenate financial flows, and to compensate for extremely constrained fiscal resources and externally imposed austerity (or debt bondage). Major recent hurricanes and ecological shocks illustrate uneven and interconnected spatial histories of anti‐Black dispossession, disenfranchisement, and deprivation, offering important empirical terrain from which to appreciate how contemporary ‘disasters’ have become new means to extend hierarchical plantation formations to the seascape through debt‐driven finance and austerity. The paper demonstrates the ways in which coercive financial instruments like catastrophe insurance, debt swaps, ‘blue bonds’, and traditional public debt constitute tools to further integrate these societies differentially into racialised financial geographies and entrench a coloniality of being. As traditional plantation structures become exhausted and lack capacity to effectively ensure growth, these innovative finance mechanisms are required for “blue” accumulation. We situate spiralling debt burdens and these new instruments spurred by socially produced and postcolonial disasters within postplantation ecologies that describe socio‐political relations and spatial dependencies linked to interwoven logics of disaster‐based financial capitalism that seek to extend the extractive capacity of the plantation anew. These arrangements tend to naturalise and render disaster, death, and debt as ordinary events and obligations arising from postcolonial statehood, and take for granted their origins in racialised plantation structures.

State capacity and the ‘value’ of sustainable finance: Understanding the state-mediated rent and value production through the Seychelles Blue Bonds

“…Others argue more broadly that although the Blue Economy is officially said to be about social, environmental and economic sustainability, economic imperatives dominate the Blue Economy (Baker et al, 2023; Schutter and Hicks, 2019) and the central role of extractive fisheries jeopardises sustainability objectives (Andriamahefazafy et al, 2020). Some critics specifically argue that the use of Blue Bonds in SIDS’ fiscal policies is primarily a form of neo-colonialism (Perry, 2022). Regardless of how one judges Blue Bonds, it is nonetheless relevant to examine how the transaction became structured as it did and planning exercises related thereto, which is what the following sections explores.…”

Modernity's Antillean ecologies: Dispossession, disasters, justice, and repair across the Caribbean archipelago

“…The archipelago of (in)security suggests a need to listen to the voices of the drowned and drowning to understand the climate (im)mobilities and the island futures ushered in by disaster, coloniality, and debt (Sheller 2018(Sheller , 2020Bonilla 2020a;Griffen and Robinson. 2023;Perry 2023).…”

The contours of environmental justice in the Caribbean

“…Evidence of this was highlighted in several articles in the collection. Perry (2023, p. 9), in arguing that blue bonds and debt‐for‐nature swaps are the new plantation ecology, pinpoints ‘the racial politics of domination, its accumulative regime and uneven spatial integrations into the world economy’ alongside environmental objectives in the region being defined in consultation with third‐party political entities and creditors. Moore and Koski‐Karell (2023, p. 8) note that Haiti was pressured by donors and international financial institutions ‘to reform its economy in keeping with policies promoting trade liberalization, privatization of public enterprises, and balanced budgets’.…”

“…Moore and Koski‐Karell (2023) address agricultural intensification in Haiti. Kirby‐Straker et al (2023) and Perry (2023) use examples from Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Grenada, and St Vincent and the Grenadines, with Kirby‐Straker et al (2023) focusing on knowledge repatriation and Perry (2023) discussing debt and disasters. Pimentel Rivera (2023) and Robinson et al (2023) centre Puerto Rico, with the former studying passenger ferry governance and the latter Hurricane Maria's impact.…”