Sustainable knowledge and discourses of resilience in Dominica
Dominica (in its full name the Commonwealth of Dominica, not to be confounded with the Dominican Republic) is a Caribbean small-island state in the Lesser Antilles. In 2017, Dominica became the first country to be entirely destroyed by an event identified as related to climate change (category 5 hurricane Maria). Two weeks after the catastrophe, Dominican Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit announced his aim to make Dominica the ‘first climate resilient nation in the world’, during the visit of UN Secretary general António Guterres to the island.
The stakes are high and the challenges are massive. In that sense, Dominica can be perceived as a ‘natural experiment’ regarding states’ and societies’ responses to climate change: a country of 70,000 inhabitants with limited human resources and infrastructure, little data about itself and expertise to address this global issue.
The aim of this project is two-fold:
- The first objective is to investigate the knowledge capacity of small island states and the conditions and challenges they face to produce and access knowledge for sustainability.
- The second objective deals with the discursive dimensions of Dominica’s environmental programme. Saying that the country needs to become more resilient is one thing, saying that the country will become the ‘first climate-resilient nation in the world’ is another one. Accordingly, this project investigates how the new discourse about climate resilience reinforces and challenges existing national discourses and perceptions about national identity, nature and the environment, starting with accounts of natural disasters before and during colonialism to the more recent nation-branding efforts of Dominica as “the nature island”.
The stakes are high and the challenges are massive. In that sense, Dominica can be perceived as a ‘natural experiment’ regarding states’ and societies’ responses to climate change: a country of 70,000 inhabitants with limited human resources and infrastructure, little data about itself and expertise to address this global issue.
The aim of this project is two-fold:
- The first objective is to investigate the knowledge capacity of small island states and the conditions and challenges they face to produce and access knowledge for sustainability.
- The second objective deals with the discursive dimensions of Dominica’s environmental programme. Saying that the country needs to become more resilient is one thing, saying that the country will become the ‘first climate-resilient nation in the world’ is another one. Accordingly, this project investigates how the new discourse about climate resilience reinforces and challenges existing national discourses and perceptions about national identity, nature and the environment, starting with accounts of natural disasters before and during colonialism to the more recent nation-branding efforts of Dominica as “the nature island”.