Freedom and/or development? Scale and intersectionality in an industrial public debate

ABSTRACT

Industrialization projects have been promoted as one of the main drivers of economic regional integration for the Caribbean region. However, surrounding residents to industrial projects are often concerned about the impact on their community, health and the physical environment. Their opinions often become part of a public discourse involving a range of stakeholders, including the community, state and international actors. Using a politics of scale and intersectionality framework, grounded in environmental justice, this article examines how scale and marginality play a role in explaining why regional industrial projects are often difficult to implement, using the case of a proposed Alutrint smelter in Trinidad. Content analysis and thematic coding was applied to 296 national newspaper articles that documented the public discourse on the Alutrint smelter. Quotes on the arguments made by various stakeholders were categorized into international, regional, national and local scales. The results indicate that themes of rights, economic effects, and concerns for health and safety were central to the discourse. However, there was a breakdown in communication across the scales resulting on local community choosing freedom over development.

KEYWORDS:

• Intersectionality
• politics of scale
• regional industrialization
• Trinidad
• environmental justice

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Colgate University’s Research Council and the Picker Interdisciplinary Institute for supporting this research. We would like to thank Yasmin Mannan for her assistance with data preparation and finally we are grateful to the multiple reviewers both known and anonymous for their invaluable comments on this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Given the relatively small size of the villages, census data was only available for the three largest recognized villages and hence these are reported here.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a Picker Interdisciplinary Institute Fellowship from Colgate University.

Notes on contributors

April Karen Baptiste

April Karen Baptiste is currently an associate professor of environmental studies at Colgate University. Her research interests lies at the nexus of environmental psychology and environmental justice. Her current research explores worldviews to environmental problems in the Caribbean with a focus on fishers’ perceptions to climate change.

Hubert Devonish

Hubert Devonish is retired professor of linguistics and coordinator of the Jamaican Language Unit at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica. His research interests includes phenology of Caribbean creole languages, linguistic description of Caribbean languages, socio-linguistics, language standardization, language rights and Caribbean discourse. His current research project includes bi-lingual education in Caribbean language situations, the history of atlantic creole languages and the inter-relationship between Caribbean languages and Caribbean worldviews.