The Shock and the Strategy

The Caribbean Development Bank held its 56th Annual Meeting of the Board of Governors in Nassau from 1 to 5 June 2026. The theme was Forging the Caribbean’s Future, Strategic Solutions for Uncertain Times. Two documents arrived in the same week and the pairing is the story. The Bank’s new ten-year Strategic Plan 2026 to 2035 sets the institutional direction. The Caribbean Economic Review and Outlook reports that regional growth in 2025 was 0.6 per cent if you exclude Guyana, down from 1.4 per cent in 2024. The plan and the print belong on the same page.

Including Guyana, the region grew by 4.7 per cent in 2025, down from 8.3 per cent in 2024. Excluding Guyana, the figure falls to 0.6 per cent. That gap is now a structural feature of how the region reads. One small open economy on a multi-decade oil cycle pulls every regional aggregate upward and tells very little about the rest. The CDB’s outlook for 2026 makes the same point. Regional growth is projected at 1.1 per cent excluding Guyana, 6.2 per cent including it. Subdued. The Bank’s framing of the underlying conditions, set out in advance materials for an Annual Meeting session titled Shockwaves, How Global Crises Are Hitting the Caribbean, names the drivers without softening them: multilateral fragmentation, shifting trade and tariff dynamics, intensifying climate impacts, persistent fiscal vulnerabilities, and rising input costs across fuel, food, and shipping. The 2025 print for the rest of the region was small because the conditions were hostile.

The institutional answer is the new Strategic Plan. Its three pillars are Social Resilience, Economic Resilience, and Environmental Resilience, with cross-cutting attention to youth, institutions, and climate. Its decade-long horizon is the right frame for a region that cannot adjust on a quarterly timetable. Each pillar maps onto work already under way in member states. Barbados, midway through BERT 2026 and now backed by a precautionary IMF arrangement agreed at staff level on 14 May, sits inside the economic-resilience pillar. Antigua and Barbuda’s recent Article IV, which paired a 2025 primary surplus near 5 per cent of GDP with significant arrears, sits inside the same pillar with different work to do. Saint Kitts and Nevis’s new Sovereign Wealth and Resilience Fund Act sits inside the social and economic pillars at once. Jamaica’s reconstruction from Hurricane Melissa is environmental resilience in its most literal form. The 26th William G. Demas Memorial Lecture, delivered on 2 June by Justice Denys Barrow of the Caribbean Court of Justice, turned the same question onto the courts: how the strength of institutions decides whether any of this work holds.

A ten-year plan is a useful instrument only if the institutions that operate it can withstand the shocks the plan acknowledges. The 0.6 per cent reading is the cost of one weak year. The plan is the answer over ten. The hard part is staying with both at once.