Hurricane Melissa is a powerful Category Five hurricane that devastated lives, livelihoods, the local economy, and infrastructure in October 2025. The Hurricane affected more than 626,000 people and claimed over 45 lives. It also induced damage and loss between an estimated USD$8 and USD$15 billion which is nearly a quarter of Jamaica’s Gross Domestic Product (UN News, December 17, 2025).

Consequently, post-Hurricane Melissa challenges us to re-think how to put the vulnerable first beyond build back better and resilience narratives in Jamaica.

Most of the dominant narratives focus on grants and loans received from international multi-lateral agencies to finance recovery efforts. Jamaica has received a comprehensive package of US$6.7 billion from the International Monetary Fund for the next 3 years to strengthen recovery and reconstruction efforts (International Monetary Fund, December 1, 2025). The Ministry of Labour and Social Security of Jamaica has also developed procedural requirements to access Hurricane relief grants under the Shelter Recovery Programme (James, 2026). These procedural requirements to determine eligibility undermine the urgency of needs faced especially by those who are disproportionately affected and hardest hit by Hurricane Melissa. This is because affected persons are being asked to complete applications, submit proof of specific documents and the need for home assessment of damages by technocrats in the Ministry of Labour and Social Security Jamaica (Office of the Prime Minister Communications, December 16, 2025).

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Mainstream development measures such as gross domestic product (GDP) and official labour statistics often do not consider how non-governmental and community-based organizations fill the gaps of the role of the state in social protection. This is especially crucial for people who lost jobs due post-disaster restructuring of labour markets in service sectors and become even more marginalized. During Hurricane Melissa, many poor and vulnerable communities have also developed resilience strategies to deal with the impacts and intersections of homelessness, joblessness and being without their basic needs. In my community in Western Hanover, I have witnessed how local shopkeepers act as conduits for distributing relief, water, and food packages with urgency in collaboration with non-governmental organizations. This shows us that community-based knowledges and practices should inform inclusive social development and disaster recovery policies. Formulating inclusive social development and just post-disaster recovery policies could be more impactful and attuned to local, lived experiences and small island developing (SID) country contexts like Jamaica.

This case study is not meant to generalize but meant to underscore the need for inclusive development in post-disaster. Additionally, our social protection system inherits the English Victorian model of the deserving and non-deserving poor and these moral, individualizing assumptions inform eligibility criteria for social programmes within bureaucratic procedures and processes. This model is also extended to the implementation of neo liberal austerity policies. The caring role of the state is repealed to elevate the interests of private capital and external donor accountability rather than meeting the needs of people. 

Professor Mimi Sheller (2025) also makes a vital contribution on the vulnerability of Caribbean small island developing states (SIDS) like Jamaica to natural disasters. She mentions that dominant development discourses and practices often focus on immediate recovery and resilience strategies often pushed by international actors on Caribbean country governments. Little is discussed about how fossil fuel capitalism accelerates environmental devastation, climate injustices, and global warming. Fossil fuel capitalism’s connection with neo-liberal, capitalist austerity policies that reduces standard of living for persons to prepared before and after natural disasters hit. 

Therefore, in this post disaster period, we should not only be talking about building back better and how vulnerable communities should adapt to broken systems. Resilience narratives emphasize how to survive crises. Moreover, building back better and resilience narratives do not contribute to broader institutional and structural accountability and transformation because these narratives shift responsibility to those already on the margins. We should be talking about how to formulate and implement inclusive social development and socially just recovery policies that put the vulnerable first in post-disaster Jamaica. Inclusive social development formulation and implementation in post-disaster Jamaica should encompass decentralizing decision-making to local community councils and trusted community organizations, with trained community assessors empowered to verify needs quickly and simplifying eligibility criteria by using flexible proof of damage system instead of rigid document requirement. It should also encompass implementing conditional cash transfers, temporary wage subsidies, or microgrants targeted to households, informal and service sector workers affected by disasters and including local leaders, NGOs, and community-based organizations in planning, monitoring, and evaluation of recovery programs.

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Tina Renier is an Afro-Jamaican scholar-activist. She is also a Research Fellow for the Sustainable Leadership and Positive Peace Research Fellowship Programme, a UNESCO Inclusive Policy Lab expert and a regular contributor to Global Research. She received a Master of Arts in International Development Studies from Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.

Sources

International Monetary Fund. (2025, 1 December). Jamaica Secures a Package of US$6.7 Billion Over Three Years in International Support for Recovery and Reconstruction after Hurricane Melissa. Press Release No. 25/400. 

James, V. (2026, 16 January). Government of Jamaica Launches Shelter Recovery Programme to aid Hurricane Melissa Victims. Jamaica Information Service.

Office of the Prime Minister Communications. (2025, 16 December). Official Damage Assessment Required for Hurricane Melissa Housing Repair or Reconstruction Assistance. 

Sheller, M. (2025). Caribbean Islands and the Coloniality of Climate Change: Navigating the “Anthropocene” through the Historical Legacies of the Plantation in (eds). Noxolo, P. et. al (2025). Routledge Handbook on Caribbean Studies. Routledge.

UN News. (2025, December 17). Fifty Days on, Jamaica struggles to re-build after Hurricane Melissa’s Unprecedented Destruction. Climate and Environment.  UN News Reader.  

Featured image: Damage in Bethel Town, Westmoreland Parish, Jamaica (Public Domain)

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