ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with the ways in which the governments of different Anglophone Caribbean countries have responded to the changing discourses of physical development planning coming from first the colonial office, then ‘the West’ more generally. It shows how local governing elites from the Cabinets of these countries are adept at re-appropriating these discourses. In many cases, they have done so in order to build up their own power, at the expense of the power of local planning expertise. I specifically describe the ways in which the formal centralized power of many Anglophone Caribbean States has been maintained through various planning procedures and Acts, and re-articulated in various forms, from the 1930s, to the new era of institutional capacity building which has developed since the 1990s. The latter puts emphasis upon creating local solutions to local problems, building up the capacity of Caribbean States to become more proficient in developing their own expertise and solutions for environmental planning, rather than substantive development regimes and policies being dictated from the West.
