The Caribbean bears a disproportionate share of climate change’s human and economic consequences, accounting for 92% of climate-attributable deaths and 93% of estimated loss and damage across 37 SIDS. Yet the deepest cost is not only what the region has lost, but what repeated recovery prevents it from becoming. Reconstruction must do more than restore what existed before. It must build regional capacity, retain value to create the foundations for a different future.

Development reports often present the Caribbean’s challenges as technical problems requiring more investment, exports, integration and resilience. But what disappears when history and power are removed from the diagnosis? This essay asks whether familiar policy prescriptions can transform economies shaped by extraction or whether they simply help us manage the same structures until the next report is published.