Environmental determinism was not universally accepted at the end of the 19th century, but it was a useful philosophy for the men of the British Colonial Office who controlled the Crown's Caribbean colonies
Through a genealogy of Jamaican disaster management, shows how participatory and mitigation techniques were deterritorialized from marginalized experiences of disaster and reterritorialized into mitigation policies through the confluence of local disaster events and the global emergence of sustainable development and resilience theory.
Case studies demonstrate how countries in the same region can develop health care policies that represent different biomedical and sociocultural outcomes. For example, Cuba's policies result in the lowest HIV/AIDS prevalence rates in the Caribbean, whereas Belize experiences the second highest rates.
