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 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 country 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. It an extreme case, though - a country of 70000 inhabitants with limited human resources and infrastructure, little data about itself and expertise to address this global issue.
This research project aims to investigate the knowledge capacity of this small island state and the conditions and challenges it faces to produce and access such knowledge.
The second objective of this project 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 country’ is another one. Accordingly, this project investigates how the new discourse about climate resilience reinforces and challenges existing national discourses and perceptions about nature and environment, starting on accounts of natural disaster 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. It an extreme case, though - a country of 70000 inhabitants with limited human resources and infrastructure, little data about itself and expertise to address this global issue.
This research project aims to investigate the knowledge capacity of this small island state and the conditions and challenges it faces to produce and access such knowledge.
The second objective of this project 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 country’ is another one. Accordingly, this project investigates how the new discourse about climate resilience reinforces and challenges existing national discourses and perceptions about nature and environment, starting on accounts of natural disaster before and during colonialism to the more recent nation branding efforts of Dominica as “the nature island”.