Conservation and Conflict in the Cockpit Country, Jamaica, 1962-2022.

Abstract

Cockpit Country in west central Jamaica is a unique karst landscape. Based on a wide range of published and online sources, this article examines threats to the area’s biodiversity and attempts to conserve it, from Jamaica’s independence in 1962 to the declaration of the Cockpit Country Protected Area in 2022. It focusses on several stakeholders – the government, international organisations, environmental groups, and Cockpit communities –, and argues that their interplay made conservation of the area a far from straightforward trajectory. It will show that by the late 1980s, international organisations increasingly used mainstream conservation approaches in their work to protect the Cockpit Country and that local environmental groups gradually also came to embrace mainstream conservation. But it will also highlight that Cockpit communities have had a more ambivalent attitude towards conservation of the area than local environmental groups and international organisations, and that a focus on short-term gain has made the government a reluctant and even obstructive stakeholder in the preservation of the area’s biodiversity.