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.

Development aid is often measured by the resources provided. This essay asks a different question: what happens when money is left on the table? Drawing on political economy and lived experience, it explores how institutional design, power and governance shape access to aid, arguing that development outcomes depend not only on funding, but on the capacity of systems to receive, navigate and transform opportunity.