Walk through St. John’s on a Tuesday afternoon and the heat sits on the streets like a punishment. A vendor on Market Street arranges her produce under a tarpaulin that has survived three hurricane seasons and looks it. A civil servant edges his car through water pooling where the drains failed again, the same drains, the same places, year after year. A cruise ship towers over the harbour and a few hundred passengers step ashore into a town that cannot quite decide whether it exists for them or for the people who live there. On Redcliffe Street, a young woman home for Christmas looks at the shopfront where her grandmother once sold fabric and sees a locked door. She has a degree in environmental engineering from Toronto. She will fly back next week.
The government has announced the redevelopment of St. John’s. Whatever one’s political persuasion, this is the right decision at the right time. For too long the capital has been the subject of lament rather than action, and leadership means going first. On this, the government has gone first, however, a launch is a beginning, not a conclusion. The harder question is whether the rest of us, citizens, professionals, the private sector, residents, the diaspora, will own this project and shape it into what this moment demands and whether the government, having invited us in, will actually let us through the door.
In three previous essays I have argued that the international order that once protected small states is collapsing, that no external power is coming to rescue us, and that the ancient instruction the prophet Jeremiah gave to a displaced people, build houses, plant gardens, seek the welfare of the city where you find yourselves, is the Caribbean’s mandate now. That instruction was not sentimental; it was given to people who had lost everything and were tempted to wait for deliverance. Jeremiah told them to stop waiting, the government has given us the building site, the question is whether we will build on it like people who intend to stay.
Every Caribbean development document invokes climate resilience. The phrase has become an incantation, spoken at conferences, printed on summit banners, inserted into funding proposals. We are world champions at describing the crisis and world laggards at demonstrating the response. No Caribbean city has ever shown, in a completed, functioning, living place, what climate resilience actually looks like when you stop talking and pour the foundations.
St. John’s can be that demonstration. Consider one detail, drainage. The water pooling on the streets of the capital after every heavy shower is not an act of God, it is a design failure. Permeable paving, bioswales, retention gardens, and properly graded stormwater channels are not experimental technology, they are standard urban engineering in cities that take flooding seriously. A redesigned St. John’s could capture and reuse rainwater instead of letting it rot in the road. Scale that principle across every system, energy, transport, waste, building codes, and you have a city rebuilt for the storms that are coming, powered by the sun that is already here. Climate resilience not as branding, but as engineering. No one in the region has done it, Antigua and Barbuda can be first, and being first has a value that being third never will.
The young woman with the engineering degree is not a metaphor, she is a category. The expertise required to build a climate-resilient city, renewable energy, sustainable drainage, green architecture, smart water management, is precisely the expertise we keep exporting via the airport every August. This project can reverse that flow, but only if it creates genuine professional pathways, not junior roles for locals while foreign firms collect the fees. The default must be local, of course we partner with international expertise where necessary, but we structure it as knowledge transfer, as China did, not as permanent dependency. Every foreign specialist should have a local counterpart being trained to replace them, anything less is colonialism with a consulting fee.
However, reversing the brain drain is only half the challenge. The deeper question is one of ownership. Antigua and Barbuda sits on hundreds of millions of dollars in idle capital, bank deposits earn next to nothing, and pension fund returns barely keep pace with inflation. Private savings circulate in a narrow loop of consumption and real estate while productive investment starves, not because our people lack money, but because they have never been given a credible way to put that money to work building their own country.
This has to change, and the redevelopment of St. John’s is the place to change it. Imagine a St. John’s Development Bond, or a community equity vehicle, designed not for foreign institutional investors but for the Antiguan on the ground. A schoolteacher invests five thousand dollars, a taxi driver puts in two thousand, a retired civil servant commits a portion of her pension. They are not donating, they are buying a stake, a real, return-generating stake, in the transformation of their capital city. Transparently governed, independently audited and with small investors given priority over large ones.
Why does this matter beyond the economics? It matters because ownership changes behaviour. An employee watches; an owner asks questions. People who hold equity in their own national development do not sit on the sidelines while contracts go to friends and costs balloon without explanation. They demand standards because their money is on the line. For too long, the Caribbean development model has offered ordinary citizens only two roles, worker or spectator, this project can create a third, owner! That is not a financial innovation, it is a democratic one.
The government has launched the project, now citizens must own and shape it if allowed to. Here we must be honest, because we know the old model, we have lived it. In one Caribbean country after another, the pattern repeats, a contract quietly steered to a connected firm, procurement technically open but practically predetermined, a community consulted after the concrete has already been poured. I remember a regional infrastructure project, I will not name it, where the “public consultation” was held forty-eight hours before the contract was signed. The room was full of people who understood, with perfect clarity, that they had been invited to ratify a decision, not to shape one.
None of that is inevitable, citizens can choose differently by demanding differently. Open procurement with published criteria. Independent oversight with civil society teeth, public reporting on expenditures and contracts, a citizen advisory structure with real authority, not decorative consultation. These are not radical proposals, they are standard practice in countries that take their own development seriously. If Antigua and Barbuda gets this right, not just the buildings, but the process, this project can do for the Caribbean what Viv Richards did with his bat and Andy Roberts did with the ball, prove to the world, and more importantly to ourselves, what we are capable of when we refuse to settle for less.
The young woman on Redcliffe Street is watching. She has heard the speeches before, she has seen plans that came to nothing, she knows the difference between a country that talks about transformation and one that practices it, because she left the first kind and is deciding whether to come back.
She will know if we didn’t.