In the wake of Hurricane Melissa’s catastrophic October 2023 landfall, which caused $12.2 billion in damage and erased 56% of Jamaica’s gross domestic product, the Jamaican government established the National Reconstruction and Resilience Authority (NaRRA) to lead the country’s recovery and rebuilding effort. But a leading transparency and accountability advocate is sounding the alarm over gaps in the NaRRA legislation, warning that the same government overreach that was recently struck down by the country’s Constitutional Court could become legally enshrined if reforms are not made.
Jeanette Calder, executive director of the Jamaica Accountability Meter Portal (JAMP), laid out these concerns during a virtual address to the Kiwanis Club of Kingston on Tuesday, in a presentation titled *Trust, Power & Public Funds: Understanding the NaRRA Bill*. Calder anchored her warning in a landmark Constitutional Court ruling handed down in late April, which invalidated a 2020 environmental permit granted to Bengal Development Limited for a large-scale mining project in the ecologically fragile Dry Harbour Mountains of St Ann. The court found the permit unconstitutional after the Jamaican government overrode formal objections from the National Environment and Planning Agency (NEPA) and local communities, both of which warned the project would cause irreversible harm to the sensitive ecosystem.
Calder pushed back against common claims that the NaRRA Bill is crafted to let the government outright bypass independent regulatory agencies entirely. Instead, she clarified, the legislation lets NaRRA control those bodies through a controversial “stepping order” mechanism. Under the bill’s terms, when a regulatory body like NEPA is asked to approve a reconstruction or infrastructure project, NaRRA’s appointed chief executive officer can set a mandatory deadline for the agency to issue a decision. If the agency fails to meet that deadline, or if the CEO simply disagrees with the agency’s technical or planning assessment, the stepping order allows NaRRA to override the regulator’s ruling entirely and issue the approval itself. Critically, the legislation includes no requirement to publicly disclose when NaRRA has chosen to disregard independent technical advice from regulators.
Beyond the lack of transparency around overridden regulatory decisions, Calder identified two additional major accountability gaps in the bill: there is no explicit legal right for affected local communities to weigh in on projects that impact them, and the legislation does not codify a clear right to judicial review for contested NaRRA decisions. For Calder, this framework directly echoes the overreach the Constitutional Court condemned in the Dry Harbour Mountain case, risking embedding that same undemocratic practice into national law.
Calder also drew attention to Section 26 of the NaRRA Bill, which exempts the new authority from the 2019 Public Investment Management System (PIMS) — a regulatory framework designed to guarantee value for public money on large-scale infrastructure projects by requiring a full pre-funding appraisal before any public funds are committed. This exemption is particularly concerning, she argued, because NaRRA’s mandate extends beyond hurricane recovery projects to include a portfolio of broad “national strategic projects” unrelated to post-storm rebuilding. While Calder acknowledged that proponents argue PIMS can slow project delivery, she stressed that the exemption creates a critical accountability risk that could open the door to wasteful spending of public resources.
Perhaps the most pressing concern raised by Calder centers on governance oversight for NaRRA, which will manage a public budget totaling $6.7 billion USD, equal to roughly 1 trillion Jamaican dollars, at a time when public trust in government institutions is already low. Jamaica’s own 2012 Corporate Governance Framework requires independent governing boards for public entities to strengthen transparency, probity and decision-making effectiveness. Yet the NaRRA Bill does not include a formal governing board. Instead, the authority will be led by a single CEO appointed directly by the prime minister, supported by an advisory committee appointed by the relevant government minister.
Calder emphasized that the advisory committee holds no actual legal authority: it cannot block or reverse any decision made by the CEO, the legislation does not require the committee to hold formal meetings, and ignoring the committee’s advice carries no legal consequences. Calder acknowledged that rapid reconstruction is a critical national priority after Hurricane Melissa’s devastation, but she argued that speed should never come at the cost of accountability for public funds and democratic decision-making. She called on the government to integrate robust transparency and accountability mechanisms into the final NaRRA legislation to avoid repeating the mistakes that led to the Dry Harbour Mountain constitutional conflict.