Volume 75
Adaptive Capacity, Governance and Small Island Developing States: a case study of Sargassum management in the Caribbean
Authors
Cumberbatch, J Hinds, C; McConney, P; Speede, R; Tompkins, E; Thomas, B; Van Der Plank, S. Download PDF Open PDF in BrowserOther Information
Date: November, 2022
Pages: 99-100
Event: Proceedings of the Seventy-Five Annual Gulf and Caribbean Fisheries Institute
City: Fort Walton Beach
Country: USA
Abstract
Governance generally, and appropriate operational institutions specifically, are said to be crucial to increasing human adaptive capacity amidst environmental change. But existing conceptualizations tend to assume a universal model of governance will work for states of all sizes with large to small populations (e.g., the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) used by the World Bank). The problem, as Monnereau et al. (2017) show, is that methodological choices about how to measure country level vulnerability often result in socioeconomic indicators that are (i) not scaled to population size; (ii) rely on a small number of indicators, and (iii) most suited to larger developed countries. The goal of this research is to investigate this orthodoxy which disregards the lack of clarity on size-relevant institutional design and functioning.