No solo rebuild

The United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS) is warning that Jamaica’s recovery from the destruction of Hurricane Melissa will rise or fall on a single factor: Government, private interests, citizens and international partners all pull their weight in a united, national push.

Utilities have largely returned in western parishes devastated by the monster storm last October, but more than 90,000 households remain displaced or are living in gutted structures.

William Squier Gonzalez, UNOPS portfolio development adviser for Latin America and the Caribbean, believes recovery efforts done in a vacuum will lead to a fractured and failed response, and a disjointed system.

UNOPS is the operational arm of the United Nations, dedicated to implementing projects, managing infrastructure, and handling procurement for the UN system, international financial institutions, and governments.

“I would say a joint effort [is required] from all parts of the country, of the nation. It cannot be a government-alone effort, or just a civil society, or just a private sector. It needs to be a shared burden towards a common goal, and the common goal seems to be a striving Jamaica,” said Squier Gonzalez, whose team is working with state agencies on executing a recovery plan.

He told The Sunday Gleaner that Jamaica’s recovery should have three main ingredients – a vision or strategy of where the country wants to go, the ability to mobilise funds, and the ability to implement plans.

He noted that the vision is usually backed by institutional capacities and policy frameworks, and assessed that Jamaica is “quite advanced” at this stage.

Squier Gonzalez, during an interview at the newspaper’s North Street offices last Thursday, said Jamaica has proven, even amid the response, that its disaster risk management institutions, processes and knowledge, are solid.

He said the Government has also shown that it is strong in mobilising financing through mechanisms put in place and through creating strong alliances with the international community.

“Now, the question is, how do you get these ingredients and turn them into concrete action? Public action needs to be concrete, it needs to be efficient, it needs to be rooted in reality,” he said.

Squier Gonzalez noted that ultimate productivity and efficiency in the recovery process can only be realised when central mandates are dismantled and rebuilt as local empowerment, ensuring that the parishes and communities tasked with the work are the ones driving the change.

Further, he said, establishing agile institutional frameworks that bridge the gap between central control and granular implementation, and ensuring local governments and affected communities are integrated into transparent, streamlined communication channels, will positively impact recovery efforts.

“It’s a multi-layered approach. It’s setting the plans; it’s mobilising the finance. It’s setting clear strategies. It’s having, of course, the right machinery,” he said.

“ … Any decision that is taken at the highest level will eventually need to land somewhere. And the somewhere always ends up inevitably becoming a community, a city, a parish, piece of territory. So these conversations need to happen, and I believe that it’s not an either-or [situation], but it’s rather trying at this stage and facing the importance of what is at stake, being able to bridge this sort of dialectic of central versus decentralised, but rather saying, well, it’s a nationwide effort, and it’s being tackled at all levels simultaneously,” he said.

Squier Gonzalez called the Government’s reconstruction plan bold and ambitious amid the four-year timeline for recovery.

“And it can only happen if all of the pieces required for this – the pieces that I mentioned earlier – are properly aligned, adequately coordinated, and properly integrated,” he said.

He stressed that, in a resource-strapped small island developing state like Jamaica, the greatest threat to recovery is the silo effect, where disjointed projects compete for the same limited talent and duplicate efforts.

Without a holistic ‘big-picture’ strategy, where a newly built hospital is seamlessly integrated with road networks, individual successes will remain isolated, and the national effort will stall under the weight of its own inefficiency.

Squier Gonzalez said that, to break this cycle, recovery must shift from managing separate initiatives to mastering the complex interdependencies between them.

He said implementation requires a high level of professional command and control that leverages every project’s synergy, ensuring that one success fuels the next.

kimone.francis@gleanerjm.com