The ‘leisuring’ of rural landscapes in Barbados: New spatialities and the implications for sustainability in small island states

Abstract

The transformation of rural areas into up-scale leisure amenity landscapes has become a global phenomenon. Small islands, especially in tropical and subtropical regions, are particularly attractive magnets for this kind of development. Yet it involves land use changes that challenge the sustainability of small island development as set out in the United Nations program for Sustainable Development of Small Island Developing States (SDIDS). Through a case study of Barbados this paper critically examines the ‘leisuring’ of rural landscapes on small islands. It ties together Lefebvrian concepts of the production of space with the perspective of political ecology to argue that the agendas of global capital impose new spatialities involving social constructions of space and socio-environmental transformations by an offshore elite who are insensitive to local interests as well as the smallness of small islands. This creates conflict between space and place – between the spaces produced by the global leisure economy and the places that have purpose and meaning for local people. It challenges the possibility of local, community-based development solutions and imposes serious constraints on the implementation of the SDIDS agenda. More research into the nature of the new leisure spaces and how they are perceived and experienced by local populations is needed.

Introduction

The concept of post-productivist landscapes has become a dominant theme in the evolving academic discourse of rural restructuring. The common thread in the large and familiar literature on the intersecting processes of population turnaround, peri-urban development, exurbanisation, and agricultural disinvestment is the notion of a shift in rural areas from landscapes of production to landscapes of consumption. While there is good reason to challenge the normative assumptions of this dichotomous concept, there can be no disputing the extent to which the countrysides of industrialized nations have been transformed into landscapes whose meaning and purpose are increasingly defined by their amenity value.

This phenomenon has been well-documented in the context of the rich economies of the world, with most of the academic literature focused on the transformation of western European and north American rural landscapes into residential, recreational and aesthetic amenities for metropolitan society (Aitchison et al., 2000). However, as a feature of late capitalism, this is inevitably also an increasingly global process. Driven by global capital serving and exploiting a new and growing leisure class, attractive rural landscapes around the world are being sought out as leisure amenities. I do not mean just as tourist destinations, but rather as landscapes that serve much the same broad and permanent leisure amenity role as rural areas in Europe and North America, in other words, to borrow a term from Michael Woods, a kind of global countryside for the north (Woods, 2007).

Among the places that are most obviously and problematically affected by this process are small islands. From the Mediterranean and the Caribbean to the Indian and Pacific Oceans, islands have become a magnet, first for the mass tourist, but now increasingly for longer term, more diverse and up-scale tourism as island states pursue the new leisure classes. As a profitable source of income and, arguably, a basis for sustained economic development (Ionnides and Holcomb, 2003), the Caribbean in particular has become one great leisure region as investment flows into golf resorts, timeshares and exclusive villa developments, and a growing number of island governments seek to diversify beyond the mass tourist market. Barbados is a good example of this phenomenon.

For 350 years after it was first colonised by England in 1627, the plantation economy and the plantocracy shaped the physical and cultural landscape of Barbados. The emancipation of slaves, the establishment of free villages and small tenantries, fluctuations in the fortunes and technologies of sugar production and the emergence of an urban society produced a slow evolution in social and economic relations (Beckles, 1990). But the island’s landscape changed very little. By the 1950s, apart from the growth of the three main towns, the appearance of a few hotels and exclusive estates and some expansion of small-scale agriculture, most of the island remained a rural landscape of the sugar plantation.

In the past 40 years however, Barbados has experienced a transformation as rapid and profound as that which occurred during its initial colonisation. With the sugar economy in decline, estate after estate has reduced its acreage or sold up entirely, and a new landscape of resorts, villas, timeshares, residential subdivisions, golf courses and associated services has emerged. This is not a complete transformation because 6674 ha was still planted to sugar in 2006 (Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, 2006), while other agricultural land uses – mainly cotton, vegetable and livestock production – continue, albeit on a relatively small-scale. Yet, this is a rural landscape in which all the conditions for conversion from productive to consumptive land uses obtain: disinvestment in the dominant agricultural sector, low returns in other agricultural sectors, declining agricultural employment and strong demand for development land.

These were among the problems that taxed the first United Nations conference on the Sustainable Development of Small Island Developing States (SDSIDS) in 1994. Emerging as a special issue out of the 1992 Rio Conference, it was convened to discuss the vulnerability of small island ecosystems to natural hazards and human activity. Appropriately, the SDSIDS conference took place in Barbados where all the pressures that raise questions about sustainable development of small island states were on the doorstep. The final communiqué from the conference (The Barbados Declaration) declared “an urgent need in small island developing states to address the constraints to sustainable development”, identifying, among other things, scarce land resources, waste management problems, limited fresh water, health and human settlement requirements, pressures on tourism resources, coastal and marine environments and biodiversity. In proposing actions to address these problems, the declaration unsurprisingly affirmed that “all States should reduce and eliminate unsustainable patterns of development” (United Nations, 2003).

In the decade that has elapsed since the Declaration, the sustainability of Small Island Developing States (SIDS) has become an established component of United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) policy. And, in varying degrees, most small island developing states have incorporated the main recommendations of the declaration into their development and environment policies. In January of 2005, the second SIDS conference held in Mauritius called for additional actions to implement the recommendations of the Barbados Declaration and so further established the sustainability of SIDS as a global environmental policy issue (United Nations, 2005).

Because of its economic centrality to many small island developing states, tourism has become an important theme of the SDSIDS process. The Barbados Declaration recognised tourism as one of the main potential sources of environmental and cultural degradation and proposed the adoption of sustainable tourism development policies and actions, a proposal repeated in the Mauritius Declaration. Conferences on sustainable tourism in SIDS, notably that convened by the World Tourism Organisation and UNEP in 1998, have kept the issue on the SDSIDS agenda. The common theme is the repetition of the special vulnerability of small island states to the impacts of tourism and the need for integrated planning of tourism development. At the same time UNESCO has recommended diversification away from the cheaper facilities of the mass tourist market into up-scale resorts aimed at the more affluent and discriminating tourist and “the list of island destinations that have adopted programmes to improve the quality of their tourism product in the name of sustainability is lengthy” (Ionnides and Holcomb, 2003, p. 41).

This is the context in which this paper sets out to examine critically the leisuring of rural landscapes in Barbados and to consider what this tells us about the sustainability of this kind of development for small island states in general. My central argument is that it is in these new spatialities of leisure that the challenges to the implementation of the SDSIDS agenda will have to be confronted. The paper first provides a brief overview of the leisuring of rural space in Barbados concentrating on a cluster of small watersheds on the west coast of the island. It then ties together the concepts of the production of space and political ecology as a framework for examining how the agendas of global leisure capital shape and control the local geographies of rural space and how this affects the prospects for achieving sustainable development on small islands that have invested heavily in the leisure economy.