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Geoforum 39 (2008) 969979 www.elsevier.com/locate/geoforum

The leisuring of rural landscapes in Barbados: New spatialities and the implications for sustainability in small island states
Michael Bunce
Geography, Department of Social Sciences, University of Toronto at Scarborough, 1265 Military Trail, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M1C 1A4 Received 14 June 2007; received in revised form 3 October 2007

Abstract The transformation of rural areas into up-scale leisure amenity landscapes has become a global phenomenon. Small islands, especially in tropical and subtropical regions, are particularly attractive magnets for this kind of development. Yet it involves land use changes that challenge the sustainability of small island development as set out in the United Nations program for Sustainable Development of Small Island Developing States (SDIDS). Through a case study of Barbados this paper critically examines the leisuring of rural landscapes on small islands. It ties together Lefebvrian concepts of the production of space with the perspective of political ecology to argue that the agendas of global capital impose new spatialities involving social constructions of space and socio-environmental transformations by an oshore elite who are insensitive to local interests as well as the smallness of small islands. This creates conict between space and place between the spaces produced by the global leisure economy and the places that have purpose and meaning for local people. It challenges the possibility of local, community-based development solutions and imposes serious constraints on the implementation of the SDIDS agenda. More research into the nature of the new leisure spaces and how they are perceived and experienced by local populations is needed. 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Geography; Barbados; Leisure landscapes; Spatialities; Political ecology; Sustainability

1. Introduction The concept of post-productivist landscapes has become a dominant theme in the evolving academic discourse of rural restructuring. The common thread in the large and familiar literature on the intersecting processes of population turnaround, peri-urban development, exurbanisation, and agricultural disinvestment is the notion of a shift in rural areas from landscapes of production to landscapes of consumption. While there is good reason to challenge the normative assumptions of this dichotomous concept, there can be no disputing the extent to which the countrysides of industrialized nations have been transformed into landscapes whose meaning and purpose are increasingly dened by their amenity value.

E-mail address: bunce@utsc.utoronto.ca 0016-7185/$ - see front matter 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2007.10.005

This phenomenon has been well-documented in the context of the rich economies of the world, with most of the academic literature focused on the transformation of western European and north American rural landscapes into residential, recreational and aesthetic amenities for metropolitan society (Aitchison et al., 2000). However, as a feature of late capitalism, this is inevitably also an increasingly global process. Driven by global capital serving and exploiting a new and growing leisure class, attractive rural landscapes around the world are being sought out as leisure amenities. I do not mean just as tourist destinations, but rather as landscapes that serve much the same broad and permanent leisure amenity role as rural areas in Europe and North America, in other words, to borrow a term from Michael Woods, a kind of global countryside for the north (Woods, 2007). Among the places that are most obviously and problematically aected by this process are small islands. From the

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Mediterranean and the Caribbean to the Indian and Pacic Oceans, islands have become a magnet, rst for the mass tourist, but now increasingly for longer term, more diverse and up-scale tourism as island states pursue the new leisure classes. As a protable source of income and, arguably, a basis for sustained economic development (Ionnides and Holcomb, 2003), the Caribbean in particular has become one great leisure region as investment ows into golf resorts, timeshares and exclusive villa developments, and a growing number of island governments seek to diversify beyond the mass tourist market. Barbados is a good example of this phenomenon. For 350 years after it was rst colonised by England in 1627, the plantation economy and the plantocracy shaped the physical and cultural landscape of Barbados. The emancipation of slaves, the establishment of free villages and small tenantries, uctuations in the fortunes and technologies of sugar production and the emergence of an urban society produced a slow evolution in social and economic relations (Beckles, 1990). But the islands landscape changed very little. By the 1950s, apart from the growth of the three main towns, the appearance of a few hotels and exclusive estates and some expansion of small-scale agriculture, most of the island remained a rural landscape of the sugar plantation. In the past 40 years however, Barbados has experienced a transformation as rapid and profound as that which occurred during its initial colonisation. With the sugar economy in decline, estate after estate has reduced its acreage or sold up entirely, and a new landscape of resorts, villas, timeshares, residential subdivisions, golf courses and associated services has emerged. This is not a complete transformation because 6674 ha was still planted to sugar in 2006 (Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, 2006), while other agricultural land uses mainly cotton, vegetable and livestock production continue, albeit on a relatively smallscale. Yet, this is a rural landscape in which all the conditions for conversion from productive to consumptive land uses obtain: disinvestment in the dominant agricultural sector, low returns in other agricultural sectors, declining agricultural employment and strong demand for development land. These were among the problems that taxed the rst United Nations conference on the Sustainable Development of Small Island Developing States (SDSIDS) in 1994. Emerging as a special issue out of the 1992 Rio Conference, it was convened to discuss the vulnerability of small island ecosystems to natural hazards and human activity. Appropriately, the SDSIDS conference took place in Barbados where all the pressures that raise questions about sustainable development of small island states were on the door step. The nal communique from the conference (The Barbados Declaration) declared an urgent need in small island developing states to address the constraints to sustainable development, identifying, among other things, scarce land resources, waste management problems, limited fresh water, health and human settlement requirements, pressures on tourism resources, coastal and marine envi-

ronments and biodiversity. In proposing actions to address these problems, the declaration unsurprisingly armed that all States should reduce and eliminate unsustainable patterns of development (United Nations, 2003). In the decade that has elapsed since the Declaration, the sustainability of Small Island Developing States (SIDS) has become an established component of United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) policy. And, in varying degrees, most small island developing states have incorporated the main recommendations of the declaration into their development and environment policies. In January of 2005, the second SIDS conference held in Mauritius called for additional actions to implement the recommendations of the Barbados Declaration and so further established the sustainability of SIDS as a global environmental policy issue (United Nations, 2005). Because of its economic centrality to many small island developing states, tourism has become an important theme of the SDSIDS process. The Barbados Declaration recognised tourism as one of the main potential sources of environmental and cultural degradation and proposed the adoption of sustainable tourism development policies and actions, a proposal repeated in the Mauritius Declaration. Conferences on sustainable tourism in SIDS, notably that convened by the World Tourism Organisation and UNEP in 1998, have kept the issue on the SDSIDS agenda. The common theme is the repetition of the special vulnerability of small island states to the impacts of tourism and the need for integrated planning of tourism development. At the same time UNESCO has recommended diversication away from the cheaper facilities of the mass tourist market into up-scale resorts aimed at the more auent and discriminating tourist and the list of island destinations that have adopted programmes to improve the quality of their tourism product in the name of sustainability is lengthy (Ionnides and Holcomb, 2003, p. 41). This is the context in which this paper sets out to examine critically the leisuring of rural landscapes in Barbados and to consider what this tells us about the sustainability of this kind of development for small island states in general. My central argument is that it is in these new spatialities of leisure that the challenges to the implementation of the SDSIDS agenda will have to be confronted. The paper rst provides a brief overview of the leisuring of rural space in Barbados concentrating on a cluster of small watersheds on the west coast of the island. It then ties together the concepts of the production of space and political ecology as a framework for examining how the agendas of global leisure capital shape and control the local geographies of rural space and how this aects the prospects for achieving sustainable development on small islands that have invested heavily in the leisure economy. 2. The leisuring of the Barbados rural landscape In coining the term leisuring, my intent is to capture the transformative processes associated with developments

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designed to serve the residential and recreational demands of a new, largely oshore leisure class. To be sure, Barbados has long been a destination for the rich and famous, but the villas, hotels and golf courses to which they came were few in number and largely conned to coastal enclaves. However, in the last 30 years these kinds of development have spread rapidly beyond these enclaves to occupy not only more coastline but also more rural land. To some extent the stage for this was set by a more locally induced shift in rural land use in the 1960s and 1970s. As I have shown in more detail elsewhere (Bunce, 2004), this involved a steady increase in the subdivision of rural land for residential development. By the mid1960s land was being subdivided into residential lots at an increasing rate (Nurse, 1979) and over the next 30 years recurrent real estate booms created a virtually continuous suburban belt from Holetown on the west coast to east of the airport in the south but also extending with low density residential development onto the rural lands beyond. While much of this development in the 1970s and 1980s was aimed at the lower and middle sections of the local housing market, and represented an expansion of the existing rural housing stock, subdivisions with larger lots aimed at the more auent buyer were also approved (Nurse, 1979). Over the last 20 years the dominant trend has been towards this end of the market, with subdivisions oering large lots (Wilms and Shier, 1997). Most of this residential development has involved small subdivisions, generally of less than 15 lots on greeneld sites, in other words on rural lands outside the designated urban corridor; what the 1998 Draft Physical Development Plan describes as signicant suburban residential development in dispersed rural areas (Barbados, 1998, pp. 15). It is this form of residential development that underpins the broader leisuring of rural space that is the focus of this paper. These are exclusive estates oering the layouts, lot sizes and house styles of executive North American suburbia designed to serve as sites of private residential and, above all, leisure lifestyle. Although there is no systematic data on this, the main demand for this kind of property appears to come from a mix of local elites, returning and generally retired emigrants and foreign buyers. Locals, mainly senior civil servants, executives and entrepreneurs, provide a steady but small market for the status property. Barbadians retiring to the island from Britain and North America with plenty of capital and good pensions, are becoming an increasingly important sector of the market (Gmelch and Gmelch, 1997). But it is the foreign buyer who is fuelling the boom in exclusive rural real estate and, in the process, not only driving up property prices but setting new standards in lifestyle living. Custom-built villa estates aimed at long-stay or permanent buyers represent the cutting edge of this market and are promoted through international real estate networks. As the 2005 issue of Ins and Outs of Barbados puts it, for the well-heeled private investor, luxury villas on an island known for the number of celebrities and senior executives that visit regularly, oer a secure investment in a lux-

urious tropical setting (Miller Publishing Company, 2005, p. 268). The most aggressive marketing of these kinds of properties is increasingly associated with a new generation of golf estates and resorts. There are now four Professional Golf Association championship golf courses on the island (Miller Publishing Company, 2005) with another currently under construction. Laid out by internationally renowned golf course designers, the golf courses themselves occupy large amounts of land. But these are more than just golf courses. As Barbados Property News puts it, whether you are a local or an overseas purchaser, many people (sic) prefer a new property and more and more customers are opting for new lifestyle developments. . . living alongside golf fairways is by far the major lifestyle real estate preference (Barbados Property News, 2003). Embedded in the concept of a one-stop leisure facility, as the proposal for the Apes Hill development was initially described (Venable, 2001), they take the leisuring of the rural landscape to a new level. 3. Case study: the Holetown watersheds The developments that I have just described have not, at least as yet, spread across the whole of Barbados. Rather, they have extended inland from the established suburban and tourist strip which runs along the south and west coast, with a few scattered developments elsewhere. In general, the island landscape now gives the impression of being split in two, between the suburban and leisure landscapes of the south and west half and the mainly rural and agricultural landscapes of the north and east. In the south and west, the transformation of rural areas into leisure landscapes occurs in several clusters with remnants of the old plantation landscape in between. The most signicant of these clusters is located in an area concentrated in a group of small watersheds which drain into the Caribbean around Holetown on the west coast (Fig. 1). Until the early 1990s, this area consisted of a mix of land uses, including the urban centre of Holetown and its suburbs, several villages and large areas of agricultural, mostly sugar land, owned by three plantations. The leisure landscape was limited to exclusive private villas, hotels and resorts on the coast and in Holetown itself, a few small greeneld residential subdivisions and the nine-hole Sandy Lane golf course. Development then began to spread inland up the watersheds to the Westmoreland Ridge. Several large lot residential subdivisions on greeneld sites were laid out, notably on the ridge, and several more have received recent approval. But the most signicant change has come from golf and leisure developments. In 1994, the 194 ha Westmoreland Plantation was sold for the development of the Royal Westmoreland Golf Resort which was fully operational 3 years later. What was mainly sugar land, is now a resort consisting of an 18-hole golf course and 350 villas (Potter and Phillips, 2004), which together occupy about two-thirds of the Weston and

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Fig. 1. The Holetown watershed cluster.

Porters watersheds. The villas sell for between US$600,000 and US$7.5 million and rent for between $8000 and $28,000 a week in high season (Elegant Properties, 2006). Across the road from the golf course, another 20 ha has been transformed into Sugar Hill, a resort community of large villas surrounding the David and John Lloyd Tennis Village, with its state-of-the-art tness centre, world class tennis club, complete with luxury condominiums and townhouses (Altman Real Estate, 2005).

At about the same time that the Royal Westmoreland project began, plans were initiated for a major renovation and expansion of Sandy Lane in the southern portion of the study area. Sandy Lane is now billing itself as the premier luxury resort in the world. From the luxury hotel and spa on the coast, the resort now extends beyond the original 1960s golf course and villas to include two additional 18-hole championship golf courses (Sandy Lane, 2007). The new Green Monkey Golf Course will have 118 proper-

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ties in the US$8 million range (Barbados Property News, 2003). Like Royal Westmoreland, the Sandy Lane expansion involved the acquisition of an entire sugar plantation and the conversion of agricultural land in what constitutes the majority of the southern part of the watershed cluster. With the completion of the Waterhall Polo Centre and the golf resort now under construction at Apes Hill, the leisuring of this watershed cluster will be virtually complete. The Polo Centre, developed on 21 ha on the Westmoreland Ridge by the well-known local entrepreneur, Sir Charles (Cow) Williams and opened in 2004, features a worldclass polo facility surrounded by luxury villas. But this is just one part of the Apes Hill Club developed by Williams in partnership with the American Landmark Land Company and the British Wentworth Golf Club. Occupying the 190 ha of the former Apes Hill Plantation, this Wentworth Landmark Community is designed as a complete residential leisure facility oering quality, relaxed lifestyle focused on indoor/outdoor living and the pleasure of many diverse activities, including an 18-hole golf course, a tennis centre, horse riding, the polo centre and lavish spa facilities (Apes Hill, 2007). In little over a decade then, much of this watershed cluster has been transformed from predominantly agricultural to recreational and lifestyle land uses; a fundamental transformation of local geographies. A few agricultural smallholdings and sugar cane elds survive as do several villages which now sit anachronistically hard against the security fences of villa estates and golf resorts instead of amidst agricultural land. A new built environment of residential subdivisions, luxury villas, designer golf courses, extravagant golf club houses, ceremonial gateways to resorts, widened and re-aligned roads have profoundly altered the physical and cultural landscape. The negative externalities associated with these kinds of development are well-documented (Ionnides and Holcomb, 2003). The late Barbadian environmentalist, Colin Hudson led the way locally in arguing that they are unsustainable in terms of biotic degradation, the reduction of the agricultural land base, increased demands on energy and water, generation of waste, and growth in trac (Hudson, 1987). The conversion of agricultural land to golf resorts development has been a public issue since the early nineties when the urry of proposals for new resorts occurred. In a 1991 paper that I discovered recently in the library of the Barbados Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, Andrew Lewis argued that the economic benets of golf course expansion were outweighed by the costs of irreversible conversion of agricultural and the threat to the economic and social viability of agriculture (Lewis, 1991). Other assessments of the impacts of the kinds of development that have occurred in the Holetown watersheds have focused on problems of water and waste. Huge increases in demand for water from luxury housing to golf greens have brought the island water system to the brink of crisis. The National Physical Development Plan recognizes that the growing number of golf courses and their water

requirements will impact the supply and quality of potable water resources (Barbados, 2003, pp. 116). De-salinisation plants have been introduced to supplement the public system while Sandy Lane has had to implement its own private de-salinisation plant for golf course irrigation and Apes Hill has been given permission to construct a reservoir to supply its needs (Morris, 2006). Increased water consumption is accompanied by growing concerns over the chemical contamination of ground and surface water and the resultant degradation of coastal zone environments (Brewster and Mwansa, 2001). Of particular concern is the spread of golf course and residential development inland which may increase pollution loading and therefore negatively impact on environmental quality in the coastal zone (p. 14). Adding to water resource problems (Barbados, 2001), is the rapid increase in septic and solid waste. Only the south coast has a full sewage treatment system. Along the resortdominated west coast, including the Holetown area, untreated sewage is mostly still dumped into the sea, and the construction of a sewage treatment system for this coastal zone is only in the preliminary stages. As for solid waste, the single operating landll site is not only close to capacity but also close to the Holetown watersheds. A new landll site away from these areas in the Scotland district may never open because of concerns over its environmental impact. Problems of waste disposal notwithstanding, the Barbados government does have a record of attempting to address specic environmental issues. But, in common with most public environmental policy around the world, it has done so with a problem and sector specic focus, implementing legislation and developing strategies for water and waste, golf courses, the coastal zone and so on. At the same time it has declared its commitment to more integrated approaches to environmental problems (Barbados, 2004). This is consistent with the draft strategy agreed to at the Mauritius SDIDS conference which calls for an holistic and integrated approach. . . (United Nations, 2005, p. 1). This approach echoes the vague rhetoric of sustainable development that pervades the SDSIDS discourse, but it also draws more practically on ecosystem management principles. Approaching the leisuring of the Holetown watersheds and of any other area aected by similar landscape transformations through an ecosystem lens would be one way to try to unravel the complex process relationships involved. After all, the intention of modern ecosytem methodology is to consider the whole system, including human activity, in the context of natural geographic units, such as watersheds and islands, and to focus on the dynamic interrelationships among the systems elements (Slocombe, 1993). But this limits the assessment of the leisuring process to the description of physical and social energy ows and to the measurement of ecosystem health. Moreover, the ecosystem approach has been developed primarily as a methodology for environmental management, with a

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strong emphasis on remediation and conservation based on scientic assessment of ecological relationships. While this may represent a signicant step towards the more integrated approach demanded by the SDSIDS agenda, it is still focused on the management of environmental impacts rather than on the underlying socio-economic and political forces that produce the new spaces which establish the context for ecosystem change. Who controls the production and reproduction of these spaces and how this aects local socio-ecologies is the signicant question that needs to be addressed in assessing the sustainability of the new leisure landscape. 4. Changing spatialities The leisuring of the Holetown watersheds involves profound changes to the geography of rural space. Old boundaries, practices and meanings are being broken down and replaced by new spatial dynamics. This involves a re-ordering of space, changing its material composition and relations as well as its symbolic meaning. Central to these geographical re-orderings and restructuring (Harvey, 2000, p. 31) is the notion of space as socially-produced; the created space of social organization and production (Soja, 1989, p. 79). It is in this socially-based spatiality, in space produced and reproduced as part of capitalist accumulation strategies that the distributions of power over spaces and, by extension, over ecosytems, are revealed and explained (Harvey, 1985, p. 186). Both Harvey and Soja draw on the ideas of the French social philosophers, Foucault and Lefebvre. In arguing for the interpretive signicance of space and its reassertion in critical social theory, Foucault (1986 in Soja, 1989), pointed the way to understanding what he called the spatialization of power or in Sojas words, the organization and the meaning of space (as) a product of social translation, transformation and experience (p. 79). But it is Lefebvres elaboration of the concept of space as a social product that resonates most explicitly in the leisuring of the Barbadian rural landscape. Briey summarizing what Lefebvre himself recognised as a complex concept (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 32), the essence of his thesis is that space is more than just a physical entity, but rather that it serves as a tool of thought and of action; that in addition to being a means of production, it is also a means of control, and hence domination, of power (p. 26). From this general thesis Lefebvre postulates his by now familiar tripartite model of space: spatial practice how daily activities and practices are concretized over time in the built environment (Urry, 1995, p. 25); representation of space the conceptualized and designed space of planners, architects and developers, the space of capital (Merrield, 2006) and spaces of representation or representational space the directly lived and socially produced and reproduced experiences and meanings of space by its inhabitants. Lived, conceived and perceived space: a triad that Lefebvre saw as existing in a dialectical relationship in

which the balance of inuence between each will vary in time and space. He believed strongly that the understanding of his triad needed to be grounded in real life situations (Merrield, 2006). Under capitalism, the social spaces of lived experience the spaces of practice and representation would always tend to be vanquished by the abstract, conceived and repressive representations of space (Merrield, 2006). But he argued that abstract space has real social existence, nding expression through the production of its own spaces both in the tangible landscape and through modes of social activity across space. In the Holetown watershed, changes in spatial practices are revealed in the shifts in uses of land and patterns of spatial activities that I have described above, notably the shift from productive to consumptive land uses and from agricultural to leisure activities. This is reinforced by a decline in informal community space, including reduced access to and use of rabland (poorer quality plantation land customarily available for community use such as grazing livestock) resulting from the privatisation of spatial amenity. New representations of space are communicated through the conventions, codes and styles of the development process. These are reected in the increased activity of a real estate development industry which imposes architectural styles, residential forms, landscaping and golf course layouts conceived on the drawing boards and in the boardrooms of foreign enterprises in abstraction from the lived spaces and vernacular landscapes of local communities. This is supported by a land use planning system strongly inuenced by North American and European planning conventions and building codes. Representational space is the most dicult element of Lefebvres triad to identify in actual spaces because it deals with issues of perception, symbolism and experience. But the penetration of the Holetown watersheds by the conceived spaces of leisure involves new modes of production and reproduction of space that impose new spatialities that alter the shape of and therefore the ways of relating to community space. In the shift from productive to leisure land uses, and the introduction of new class fractions they also transform local relationships with land and supplant collective meanings of place and landscape. In the Holetown watersheds and, by extension, elsewhere in Barbados where rural land is being appropriated as residential and leisure amenity, the dominant and transformative power of representational space resonates in new spatial practices and therefore in actual landscapes. The externally conceived scales and forms of golf resorts and villa estates contrast with the small houses and lots, the vernacular architecture, the informal street layouts, and the compact and generally organic character of villages, as well as with the familiar landscape of cane elds and rabland. To this is added the air of privacy and exclusivity; the keep-out signs, security systems and guard dogs. The conversion of agricultural land results in the loss of open space landscapes and the alienation of what was generally publicly accessible land; the pathways which criss-crossed the

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cane elds, the rabland used for grazing livestock, even the views across open countryside (Gmelch and Gmelch, 1997). Exchange and monetary values reign supreme in Lefebvres concept of abstract space (Merrield, 2006), achieving, as Harvey puts it, a command over space and a control over the creation of space that also confers power over the processes of social reproduction (Harvey, 1985, p. 186). This is the space in which the dominant relations of production are in Sojas words, reproduced. . .in a concretized and created spatiality that has been progressively occupied by an advancing capitalism. . .organized into locations of control and extended to (and from) the global scale (Soja, 1989, p. 92). But the command over space is also a command over nature, or as Harvey argues, of the production of a second nature of built environments. . .an urbanised human nature, endowed with a specic sense of time, space and money as sources of social power (Harvey, 1985, p. 187). So the new spatialities produced by the leisuring of the Holetown watersheds in turn have produced new socio-ecological relations that require an extrapolation from the consideration of production of and power over space to an understanding of the political economy of environmental change, in other words the political ecology of the new leisure spaces. The brand of political ecology that relates most directly to my discussion is that summed up by Michael Watts as an understanding of the complex relations between nature and society through a careful examination of what one might call the forms of access to and control over resources and their implications for environmental health and sustainable livelihoods (Watts, 2000, p. 257). The emphasis on resource access and control is entangled with Harveys notions of command over space and nature and the suppression of ecology (Harvey, 1985). But it is the critical, post-structuralist discourses, the intensely critical disposition (Keil, 2003) of urban political ecology which relate most directly to Lefebvres and Harveys spatialities. The geographical space that is the subject of this paper would seem to be far removed from a consideration of urban processes and ecosytems. However, the ideas that are circulating in the emerging discourses of urban political ecology not only help to amplify my use of Lefebvrian ideas of space, but also speak to the fact that the leisuring of this apparently rural landscape and the plantation system that shaped this landscape, economically and politically over the preceding 300 years, has been an essentially urban and global process, an argument that Harvey, and before him, Williams (1973) have convincingly made. That Marxist urban political ecology sets out to tie together social process, material metabolism, and spatial form in this context makes it a valuable set of concepts for considering the ecological implications of the leisuring of rural space. Of particular relevance is the critique of socio-environmental changes under capitalism; the multiple socioecological processes of domination/subordination and exploitation/repression that feed the capitalist urbanisation process (Swyngedouw and Heynen, 2003, p. 900).

I nd it gratifying that these authors refer to Williams and the powerful and profound thoughts of the last chapter of The Country and the City (1973). But reading Williams beyond their brief allusion, we come to the kernel of the implications of the spatial and ecological power of global capital in Barbados. What the oil companies do, what the mining companies do, is what the landlords did, what the plantation owners did and do. . .seeing the land and its properties as available for protable exploitation; so clear a prot that the dierent needs of local settlement and community are overridden, often ruthlessly (Williams, 1973, p. 293). Seen in this light the current transformation of plantation lands into leisure amenity landscapes is a neo-colonial continuation of three centuries of alienation of the majority of Barbadians from access to land. Control of the rural landscape then has merely shifted from one estate to another (Bunce, 2004) or, as Dann and Potter have put it substituted new plantations for old (Dann and Potter, 2001). To the old plantation owners then we can add the new leisure capitalists, the developers and owners of the golf courses, polo elds and villa estates, and the international nanciers and bankers who bankroll their projects. It is, as Williams argues, the country exploited and dominated by the city. But more signicantly it is exploitation by capital by global capital which produces new spatial practices that transform, but more importantly direct, socio-environmental processes (Swyngedouw and Heynen, 2003). Escobar argues that this capitalization of nature, in other words the progressive capitalization of production conditions, lies at the heart of the history of modernity and capitalism (Escobar, 1996, p. 55). But what I have described in Barbados is, in Escobars terminology, the post-modern form of ecological capital nature and local people seen as the source and creators of value (Escobar, 1996, p. 57), of value drawn out of the transformation of land, nature and community into leisure real estate, processes that others have associated with a neo-liberalist agenda which further entrenches power over land resources in the hands of private and generally global capital (McCarthy and Prudham, 2004). In his elaboration of this, Lefebvre gave the example of the current transformation of the perimeter of the Mediterranean into a leisure-oriented space for industrialized Europe. . . Economically and socially, architecturally and urbanistically, it has been subjected to a sort of neo-colonization. Viewed uncritically, Lefebvre argued, we would get a mental picture of a space given over to unproductive expense, to a vast wastefulness, to an intense and gigantic potlatch of surplus objects, symbols and energies, all of it enshrining an illusion of naturalness. However, the truth is that all this seemingly non-productive expense is planned. . .to serve the interests of the tour operators, bankers and entrepreneurs of London and Hamburg . . . in the spatial practice of neo-capitalism (complete with air transportation), representations of space facilitate the manipulation of representational spaces (sun, sea, festival,

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waste, expense) (Lefebvre, 1991, pp. 5859). For Mediterranean read Barbados. 5. New spatialities and SDSIDS The central focus of the policy discourse on the Sustainable Development of Small Island Developing States is, as I indicated earlier, their special vulnerability to development pressures (United Nations, 2003), especially tourism (United Nations and the World Tourism Organization, 1998). The Barbados government has incorporated into its land use planning and environmental management strategies many of the principles enshrined in the SDSIDS action plan (United Nations, 2003). The latest Physical Development Plan (PDP), for example, is replete with references to sustainable development, which is dened as supporting the rights of all persons to have access to a secure and fullling life in harmony with the natural environment and available resources (Barbados, 2003, pp. 1 1). However, Pugh and Potter (2000) have argued that there is a potential conict between dierent policies in the plan which suggest that sustainable development is not as intrinsic to the 286 page draft. . .as the introduction suggests (p. 190). This is not unusual in the conventional approach to land use that the PDP follows, but it does result in sectorally-based policies which are incapable of addressing the bigger picture. Moreover, land use planning and environmental management take place within and often second place to the more aggressive policies of economic development. Tourism is central to this in Barbados and luxury resorts and villas as well as niche markets like golf courses are a key component of the rejuvenation of the tourist industry (Potter and Phillips, 2004). Concessions such as the exemptions from duties and taxes on all building materials, equipment and land transfers and permission to drill wells to pump 300,000 gallons of water a day that were granted to Royal Westmoreland (The Advocate, 1993) reveal the governments determination to attract high-end resort development. Projects like Apes Hill, despite the fact that they appear to violate most of the PDPs conditions for golf course approval, get the green light as well as the freedom to cloak their developments in a supercial green mantle. Sustainable development is relegated to specic strategies of resource management, and ecosystem remediation. Notably lacking in the Barbadian policy framework is a commitment to the SDSIDS armation that to achieve sustainable development and a higher quality of life for all people. . .all States should reduce and eliminate unsustainable patterns (my emphasis) of production and consumption (United Nations, 2003). One would be hard pressed to show that the patterns of consumption associated with the leisuring of the Holetown watersheds matched this high rhetoric. The sustainable development discourse from its Brundtland Commission origins onwards has been about the environmental management of growth, or as Escobar (1996) puts it, the recon-

ciliation of the two old enemies, growth and development. . .intended to create the impression that only minor corrections to the market system are needed to launch an era of environmentally sound development (p. 49) ecology at the service of capital. So, not surprisingly, Barbadian public policy and the environmental management practices of the golf course and villa developers themselves are designed to facilitate rather than restrict land development. This is consistent with the assimilation and dilution of environmental sustainability discourses into the projects of neo-liberalism through which governments and private developers can collude to provide environmental justication for market driven land development (McCarthy and Prudham, 2004). It is not just that the new spatial practices involve land uses that have a huge ecological footprint, but rather that this footprint is embedded in the new spatialities and the political-economic forces that have produced them. New layers have been added to the landscapes of power that have shaped the island from the outset of British settlement. In place of the plantation owners have come new forces of spatial appropriation and control dominated by oshore capital and lifestyle. But the dierences between the old and the new landscapes of power in rural Barbados lie not just in the changes in spatial practices and representations, but in the more fundamental shift to the production and reproduction of space by global capital. These new spatialities impose great contradictions on the landscape, for they shape spaces which reect Foucaults notions of heterotopias; heterogeneous spaces composed of incompatible sites in a single real space (Harvey, 2000). At the heart of these incompatibilities are landscapes that are being shaped in the context of the general social and economic restructuring associated with globalisation in which the spaces of leisure represent, frame and legitimize the penetration of external controls of landscape and place. This is a process in which landscapes are privatized through various mechanisms of appropriation and exclusion, private ownership and local legislation (Duncan and Duncan, 2001, p. 390); appropriation of local spaces and exclusion of local populations from access to and control over those spaces. It is a process, to quote Duncan and Duncan again, in which the words exclusion and exclusionary are replaced by the positively charged (in capitalist terms) term exclusive (p. 390). The Apes Hill Club may trumpet its protection of two-thirds of its site as open space, but this is in the service of ensuring that each residence will have large expansive use whilst being surrounded by nature and providing nature trails and pleasant tropical scenes (Apes Hill, 2007) nature as private and exclusive amenity. But is also exclusive from the local community as the recent confrontation between the residents of Williams own tenantries over access to their homes near Apes Hill illustrates, an issue that even prompted criticism of Sir Charles from a usually supportive source, the Prime Minister, who was reported as saying,

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when we gave permission for the project it wasnt with the understanding that there would be no people around it (Sealy, 2007, p. 1). So there is conict between space and place between the spaces produced by the global leisure economy and the places which have purpose and meaning for local people or, as Williams put it, a contrast between forms of settlement and forms of exploitation (Williams, 1973, p. 293). A signicant stream of current thinking on sustainable development emphasises local, community-based solutions (Begg, 2000; Prugh et al., 2000). The prospects for this in Barbados seem more rather than less remote under the current trends. This is not to say that rural communities have ever had a much of a say in running their own aairs, but, its exploitations and inequities notwithstanding, the plantation system did produce communities that lived within the frameworks of spaces which they helped to produce and which, over time, were representative of local meanings of and identities with place. Of course the sense of community has been weakened by new mobilities and lifestyles, but as Gmelch and Gmelch found in their study of the parish of St. Lucy in the north of the island, there is still evidence of community identity which is closely tied to familiarity with place (Gmelch and Gmelch, 1997). In contrast the landscapes of the new spatialities are global products, exotic and placeless, unrooted in cultural engagement with local spaces or ecologies. They not only threaten the ecological sustainability of the whole island but, worse still, undermine the possibilities of sustainable solutions based on local interests and self-determination. This situation is exacerbated, indeed entrenched by government policy. As Pugh and Potter (2000) have shown, there is limited provision for public participation in both the physical planning and the environmental impact assessment process and an apparent informal consensus within many Government departments in Barbados to exclude the public and NGOs when making decisions (p. 192). Even the shift to community planning in the latest Physical Development Plan remains largely top-down (Pugh and Potter, 2000). This is compounded by the propensity of the government to hire large oshore consulting rms rather than local consultants who, although still serving government agendas, would be more familiar with local conditions and interests. Sustainable development in Barbados therefore is neither community-based nor participatory. On the contrary, government policy for tourism not only encourages the very kind of development that has occurred in the Holetown watersheds but also ensures an approval process which routinely excludes local interests. 6. Conclusion Just at the point in the post-colonial history of the island when local communities might have been able to take some control over their local spaces, it is snatched away from them in a neo-colonial imposition of external production and control of space. We are left with the disturbing ques-

tion of whether the communities which are being surrounded by leisure spaces have a future other than as places to live for those serving the labour needs of the luxury villas and golf resorts. Pushed even further to the spatial margins of their surroundings, these communities are living with the imposition of landscape changes over which they have had little or no say and a new form of alienation from control of their environment. The changes that have occurred in the Holetown watersheds over the past 10 years reect the direction in which much of Barbados and other Caribbean islands are moving. My central argument in this paper has been that the sustainability of small island states is not just a matter of managing development in ways which conserve specic resources and protect pieces of natural environment. The real threat to Barbados and to other islands experiencing similar land development trends comes from a failure to recognise the consequences of changing spatialities. The leisuring of rural land not only imposes new landscapes but also new fractions of power over the production and reproduction of space. It involves social constructions of space and socio-environmental transformations by a largely oshore elite which emphasise consumptive instead of productive uses of land and lifestyle over functionality at the expense of persistently marginalized populations. It also exemplies the dissonance between global and local scales of activity and a prevalent insensitivity to the smallness of small islands and the principles of local sustainability. As Terkenli (2005) has argued in another regional context, it is essential to recognise the importance of scale and of working with local landscapes, where the transformative processes of global origin play out on the ground and shape local geographies. Small island states around the world are actively working to attract investment in developments of the kind that I have described in Barbados. This may bring some measure of employment and economic growth. The immediate and local benets of the 500 jobs promised at Apes Hill for example, cannot be ignored (Apes Hill, 2007). However, in order to follow a path approximating truly sustainable development, close attention must be paid to what this means for the production and control of space and therefore the use and management of resources and ecosytems. The penetration of small island landscapes by the global leisure industry results in new spatialities that impose serious constraints on the implementation of the SDSIDS agenda. Further research into the nature of these spatialities and how they are perceived and experienced by local populations is an essential pre-requisite of sustainable development policy. The challenge will be to nd ways of empowering communities so that they can re-connect with their spaces and places and achieve some measure of inuence over the management their local environments. Acknowledgements Research for this paper was partially funded by grants from the SSHRC Institutional Grant fund in the

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M. Bunce / Geoforum 39 (2008) 969979 Harvey, D., 2000. Spaces of Hope. University of California Press, Berkeley. Hudson, J.C., 1987. Neglect of the land, feature address at the annual general meeting of the Barbados National Trust (unpublished). Ionnides, D., Holcomb, B., 2003. Misguided policy initiatives in smallisland destinations: why do up-market tourism policies fail? Tourism Geographies 5, 3948. Keil, R., 2003. Urban political ecology. Urban Geography 24, 723738. Lefebvre, H., 1991. The Production of Space. Blackwell, Oxford. Lewis, A., 1991. Agriculture: golf course and tourism development. Paper presented at the Lecture Series, Agriculture 25 Years after Independence, Christchurch, Barbados, November 2529. Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Fisheries, Graeme Hall. McCarthy, J., Prudham, S., 2004. Neoliberal nature and the nature of neoliberalism. Geoforum 35, 275283. Merrield, A., 2006. Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction. Routledge, London. Miller Publishing Company, 2005. The Ins and Outs of Barbados. Miller Publishing Company, Edge Hill, Barbados. Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, 2006. Agricultural Statistics, Planning and Development Department. Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, Barbados. Morris, R., 2006. Trinis snapping up upscale lots. Daily Nation, Barbados. Nurse, L., 1979. Residential Subdivisions of Barbados, 19651977. Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of the West Indies, Barbados. Potter, R., Phillips, J., 2004. The rejuvenation of tourism in Barbados, 19932003. Geography 89, 240247. Prugh, T., Costanza, R., Daly, H., 2000. The Local Politics of Global Sustainability. Island Press, Washington, DC. Pugh, J., Potter, R., 2000. Rolling back the state and physical development planning: the case of Barbados. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 21, 175191. Sandy Lane, 2007. Website: <http://www.sandylane.com/golf/ courses.html>. Sealy, D., 2007. Blocked! MP claims tenantry folk being denied access. Daily Nation, Barbados. Slocombe, S., 1993. Implementing ecosystem-based management: development of theory, practice and research for planning and managing a region. Bioscience 43, 612622. Soja, E., 1989. Post-Modern Geographies. Verso, London. Swyngedouw, E., Heynen, N., 2003. Urban political ecology, justice and the politics of scale. Antipode 35, 898918. Terkenli, T., 2005. New landscape spatialities: the changing scales of function and symbolism. Landscape and Urban Planning 70, 165 176. The Advocate, 1993. Articles on Royal Westmoreland, August 24 and 25, Bridgetown, Barbados. United Nations, 2003. Declaration of Barbados, United Nations Environment Programme. UNEP Islands website: <http://www.unep.ch/ islands/dbarded.htm>. United Nations, 2005. Draft Mauritius strategy for the further implementation of the programme of action for the sustainable development of small island developing states. United Nations Environment Programme website: <http://www.un.org/smallislands2005>. United Nations and the World Tourism Organization, 1998. Final Report of the International Conference on Sustainable Tourism in Small Island Developing States (SIDS) and Other Islands. United Nations, Lanzarotte. Urry, J., 1995. Consuming Places. Routledge, London. Venable, S., 2001. Tender is the knight. Signature Barbados. Sassman Publishing Co. Ltd., Barbados, pp. 1617. Watts, M., 2000. Political ecology. In: Sheppard, E., Barnes, T. (Eds.), Companion to Economic Geography. Blackwell, Malden, MA, pp. 257274. Wilms, Shier, 1997. Major Development Trends, Environmental Management and Land Use Planning for Sustainable Development.

Department of Social Sciences, University of Toronto at Scarborough. This paper is dedicated to the memory of my good and much-missed Barbadian friend, the late Dr. Colin Hudson, for the use of his archives, his insights into the islands environmental problems and his example of how to live lightly on this earth. I would also like to acknowledge the assistance on planning and related matters given in Barbados by Lionel Nurse, Luther Bourne, Rudy Headley and John King. Finally I wish recognize Dr. Christine Barrow of the University of West Indies, Cave Hill, Barbados who rst introduced me to research possibilities in Barbados. References
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