Laura Centemeri

Sezin Topçu

Peter J Burgess

Recovery, resilience and repairing: for a non-reductionist approach to post-disaster situations

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Version avant publication

Recovery, resilience and repairing: for a non-reductionist approach to post-disaster situations Laura Centemeri, Sezin Topçu, J. Peter Burgess After every war someone has to clean up. Things won't straighten themselves up, after all Wislawa Szymborska, The end and the beginning i

In her acclaimed poem 'The end and the beginning', Polish poet and Nobel laureate Wislawa Szymborska provides a penetrating and sharp picture of the post-war social condition. As a young girl who grew up in Poland during World War II, she directly experienced the moral dilemmas of going back to normal life after the catastrophe. Her poem compellingly recalls how the mundane necessities 'to push the rubble/to the side of the road,/so the corpse-filled wagons/can pass', to 'prop up a wall', 'glaze a window', 'rehang a door', have 'the bridges back' slowly, yet inexorably undermined the quest for responsibilities and 'causes and effects'.

Through evoking how people got progressively caught in everyday occupations and concerns and lose interest in the 'dull' discourses about the past, Szymborska provides a good illustration of the moral tensions between forgetting and remembering scattered across the path that communities have to go in order to "remake a world" (Das et al. 2001) after the catastrophe.

On a different tone, author, film-maker and social activist Naomi Klein denounced in her bestselling book The Shock Doctrine (2007) the way in which the tenants of the free market ideologyin particular the Chicago School movement leaded by Milton Friedman -have been exploiting since the 1970s major catastrophes (from wars to 'natural' disasters like the 2004 tsunami in Sri Lanka or the 2005 hurricane Katrina) in order to have radical free market reforms approved and implemented. Her book supports the view of post-disaster situations as 'windows of opportunity' for socio-economic change, rife with interest struggles, even if there is a strong evidence of a 'bias among citizens and policy makers to return to the status quo' (Passerini 2000: 68).

Notwithstanding the diversity of registers, both authors touch upon fundamental sociological questions: how is a social order maintainedor challenged -in the face of disruptive events? How are issues of scale, power imbalances, social inequalities, epistemic struggles, cultural specificities and conflicting "normative expectations" [START_REF] Dodier | La force des dispositifs[END_REF] at play in the processes that are meant to clarify causes, effects and responsibilities of such disruptions? How do the contradictory necessities of mourning, justice and forgiveness interact in the experience of those having suffered more directly the consequences of catastrophic events? What place do economic and political interests, cultural differences and local specificities play in the processes meant to address pressing technical and practical questions of reconstructing, restoring, remediating and rehabilitating? Yet, in the field of disaster studies, of the four phases in which emergency management is classically organized, recovery is -together with mitigation -relatively under-researched and poorly understood, if compared with preparedness and response [START_REF] Berke | Recovery after disaster: achieving sustainable development, mitigation and equity[END_REF][START_REF] Passerini | Disasters as agents of social change in recovery and reconstruction[END_REF][START_REF] Weidner | Review of disaster recovery[END_REF][START_REF] Aijazi | Theorizing a Social Repair Orientation to Disaster Recovery: Developing Insights for Disaster Recovery Policy and Programming[END_REF]. Recovery is defined in this literature as the process accounting for things return to 'normalcy' or the 'period of time where deliberate actions are undertaken to routinize everyday activities of those individuals and groups whose daily routines have been disrupted. These activities may restore old patterns and/or institute new ones' (Quarantelli 1999: 3).

In introducing the virtual issue on recovery of the journal Disasters the editor John Twigg highlights the many gaps in the literature concerned with this specific aspect of disaster studies ii .

Mainly focused on appropriate reconstruction of shelter and housing, resettlement, relocation and displacement, psychological and psychosocial recovery, recovery studies have started only in the 1990s to address issues such as the roles of institutions, state and civil society actors in recovery policy-making and implementation. The focus is on coping strategies, adaptation mechanisms and more recently resilience building while research is rarely addressing issues of social change after disasters through long-term studies on recovery outcomes, including the role played by pre-existing socio-economic conditions in shaping post-disaster trajectories.

In fact, the focus on preparedness and response, and the relative neglection of mitigation and recovery can be explained as the result of the still largely dominant understanding of disasters as temporally delimitated phenomena.

Our book openly aims at challenging such an approach, in line with recent developments in the field of STS disaster research [START_REF] Fortun | Researching Disaster from an STS perspective[END_REF]) that call for expanding time frames in the study of disasters. Such an expansion is needed in order to fully appreciate how disasters have long lasting, pervasive and "slow" (see [START_REF] Nixon | Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor[END_REF] impacts on the life of societies and communities and how diverse forms of injustice structurally inscribed in the social fabric concur in increasing vulnerability to disastrous events. Beyond social injustice, research on disasters show that issues of environmental [START_REF] Schlosberg | Defining Environmental Justice: Theories, Movements, and Nature[END_REF], epistemic [START_REF] Allen | Strongly Participatory Science and Knowledge Justice in an Environmentally Contested Region[END_REF]) and narrative [START_REF] Barca | Telling Right Story: Environmental Violence and Liberation Narratives[END_REF] injustice are of crucial importance to understand the specific trajectories of recovery after disaster.

Consequently, the approach to recovery we develop in this book keeps a strong connection with current debates and recent developments in social theory, since we share the vision that the ways we think about disaster itself has 'profound operational and political consequences' [START_REF] Fortun | Researching Disaster from an STS perspective[END_REF](Fortun et al. : 1008; see also [START_REF] Kreps | Disasters Are Non-Routine Social Problems[END_REF].

It is consensually acknowledged in the literature on disaster studies that disasters are always social phenomena, no matter what the hazard agent. Phenotypic classifications that distinguish disasters according to the agentsseparating, for example, natural from technical disasters, public health disasters from ecological disasters -have been increasingly contested for their lack of analytical clarity. Following Perry (2018: 14), a quite consensual definition of disaster to which disaster scholars easily subscribe today is that of a 'fundamental disruption in the social system (of whatever size) that renders ineffective whatever patterns of social intercourse prevail'. Its 'causes rest in the social structure, social interactions and the environment as a whole' (Ibid 15; our emphasis).

Being disruptive of patterns, disasters can trigger a 'chain of occurrences' that potentially can durably transform previous structures and practices, a defining trait of what William H. [START_REF] Sewell | Historical Events as Transformations of Structure: Inventing Revolution at the Bastille[END_REF] calls 'historical events'. Historical events are temporally extended situations that reveal the interplay between action, culture and structures (including material infrastructures and the environment) in the production of social transformation.

In her review of 'of what we know, or think we know, about long-term disaster recovery' Passerini (2000: 67) argues that the transformative potential of disasters is more often than not defused by 'a myriad of structural and cultural forces that keep people from considering or embracing change' while, on the opposite side, sometimes disasters can overwhelm the capacity of communities to recover. Moreover, when change occurs, it happens at different scales, in a variety of forms and in a time span which is impossible to predetermine. In fact, the transformative potential of a disaster can be karstic, that is, it can stay latent until broader conditions for change are in place, showing that "disasters do not create the change" (Passerini 2000: 68).

The issue of scales is usually debated in the literature on recovery in terms of the social level, or unit, that is chosen in order to assess the 'success of recovery' [START_REF] Quarantelli | The Disaster Recovery Process: What We Know and Do Not Know From Research[END_REF]. It is in terms of 'success'and not of social changethat recovery is mainly analysed in disaster studies, with a relative lack of clarity on the normative underpinnings of what is considered as successful: successful for whom? This question is often neglected.

This same lack of clarity on normative assumptions can be found in the idea of recovery as 'Building Back Better'. This latter is a catchphrase coined by the US president Bill Clinton in the aftermath of the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami and developed into a list of ten propositions conceived as operational guideline for the humanitarian post-disaster intervention.

As shown by Mara Benadusi (2015: 93), however, 'the numerous organizations at work in Sri Lanka applied controversial and consistently value-laden significations to the "Building Back

Better" slogan'.

The analysis of the epistemic, cognitive and normative tensions that pervade the process of recovery are at the core of the contributions we have reunited in this book. Our focus is not on measuring disaster impact and recovery but in providing analytical tools to explore 'the cultural, social organizational, and political-economic conditions/options that affect how reconstruction occurs (for better or worse)' (Passerini 2000: 71).

These analytical tools are grounded in the assumption that any disaster situation is marked by the uncertainty of the 'whatness' [START_REF] Quéré | Did you say Pragmatic? Luc Boltanski's Sociology from a Pragmatist Perspective[END_REF] of the disaster, according to the diversity of actors experiencing its consequences, at different scales.

Disasters can be sociologically analysed as 'problematic situations' where, following pragmatist philosopher John Dewey, usual ways of making sense and doing things are no more effective. Actors deal with this practical and existential uncertainty through engaging in the contentious process of 'inquiry' to cognitively and normatively qualify the situation, in terms of attributing causes and responsibilities, identifying damages and victims (see [START_REF] Cefaï | Publics, problèmes publics, arènes publiques… Que nous apprend le pragmatisme ?[END_REF].

The contributors to this book share a similar approach in researching processes of recovery that consists in following how the disaster and its consequences are made the object of a variety of struggles of meaning-making, that is, struggles about the meaning of what happened and how it affected a given order of things (Centemeri 2010[START_REF] Centemeri | Investigating the "Discrete Memory" of the Seveso Disaster in Italy[END_REF]. These struggles are interlinked with interest-based struggles and power-based struggles that more often than not reproduce preexisting social hierarchy and forms of marginality, as feminist and postcolonial scholars in disaster studies have proven in the global South (see [START_REF] Fortun | Advocacy after Bhopal: Environmentalism, Disaster, New Global Orders[END_REF][START_REF] Choi | Anticipatory States: Tsunami, War and Insecurity in Sri Lanka[END_REF]. But evidence shows that also in the global North disasters usually intensify pre-existing conditions of inequality in the long term [START_REF] Passerini | Disasters as agents of social change in recovery and reconstruction[END_REF].

We consider that in order to explain the dynamics through which such inequalities are maintained and reinforced it is crucial to understand how a shared sense of the "whatness" of the disaster is stabilized, knowing that this stability is always potentially open to future revision, as disaster victims collective memory battles testify (see Gorostiza and Armiero in this book).

These struggles of meaning-making take place in a variety of "arenas" with their "material armors" (Cefaï 2002) in which concerned actors confront each other. An arena can be defined in general terms as a dispositif that brings together speakers and their audiences and that defines a mode of confrontation between speakers, or speakers and the audience [START_REF] Dodier | L'espace public de la recherche médicale[END_REF]. Arenas organize a form of collective reflexivityand 'reflexivity loops'. They can be more or less specialized according to the rules that define the conditions for access [START_REF] Dodier | La force des dispositifs[END_REF]. We can then distinguish between technical-expert arenas, doctrinal arenas, judiciary arenas, media arenas, parliamentary arenas, and other arenas of public or expert debates. In these arenas, actors express conflicting understandings of the disaster and conflicting normative expectations about what should be done to recover and what can be considered as 'good' recovery. Conflicts of interest and power struggles are then interweaved with processes that aim at the definition of a shared 'sense of things' across a variety of arenas, of scales and temporalities [START_REF] Chateauraynaud | Pragmatique des transformations et sociologie des controverses. Les logiques d'enquête face au temps long des processus[END_REF]. These processes of sense-making are of crucial importance in explaining the specific observable path to recovery after disaster.

But beyond structured arenas where to exercise collective reflexivity, disasters upset the space of everyday life through affecting people in their 'attachments' [START_REF] Hennion | Une sociologie des attachements. D'une sociologie de la culture à une pragmatique de l'amateur[END_REF]). Death, destruction, toxicity and displacements confront disasters victims with the need to find a way to meet their basic needs, rebuild familiarity with people and places, while dealing with the irreversibility of loss. As discussed by Revet and Langumier (2015: 5): 'The everyday life of "disaster victims" and those "displaced" by catastrophe cannot be summarized solely in terms of the management of a day-to-day existence that has been impacted by these events. Far from the cameras and in unspectacular fashion, life very quickly resumes its course on the ruins and traces of disaster. (…) The issue is therefore no longer to recognize and account for what disaster destroys but rather what it contributes to producing, the social recompositions it brings about'.

From a different perspective but with a similar focus, Aijazi (2015: 16) discusses the interest for disaster studiesand especially recovery studies -of Veena Das's work on -and withsurvivors of violence. What Das's approach reveals is that 'the process of re-occupying the same spaces of daily life where one once experienced disruption' is scattered with 'acts of selfcreation'. 'Generative spaces for social remaking' (Ibid.) can emerge that are cantered in ordinary activities which are necessary to keep life going on, like providing for food and shelter, taking care of children and elderly people.

Initiatives of 'grassroots recovery' can occasionally overlap with 'interstitial initiatives' that aim at reconquering a form of autonomy from dominant economic and political logics and structures [START_REF] Monticelli | Embodying Alternatives to Capitalism in the 21st Century[END_REF], as in the case of the post-earthquake ecovillage of Pescomaggiore (L'Aquila, Italy) studied by [START_REF] Tomassi | -2014[END_REF] iii . However, as shown by [START_REF] Benadusi | The Two-Faced Janus of Disaster Management: Still Vulnerable yet already Resilient[END_REF]Benadusi ( , 2015)), grassroots initiatives in contexts heavily exposed to international aid are systematically instrumentalized to support a rhetoric of resilience that reinforce local power dynamics deeply entrenched with the reproduction of conditions of inequality: 'the emphasis on resilience in disaster management interventions presents reconstruction and disaster riskreduction practices as if they were selfgoverning, not pre-set and chosen by the participants.

However, field research reveals the extent to which resilience-oriented projects adapt to politicized and elite-centred contexts' (Ibid. : 436).

Resilience has been gradually becoming, over about the last two decades, a key concept in guiding not only analysis but also public interventions in recovery after disaster, generating a vast literature (see [START_REF] Alexander | Resilience and disaster risk reduction: An etymological journey[END_REF]. Resilience has pushed researchers towards exploring what factors make a community more or less able to withstand and recover from disasteror to 'rebound' -and how to translate these factors into quantifiable indicators in order to help to design more effective mitigation strategies. Social capital and a variety of other 'capitals' (from community capital to economic capital) and capacities (from improvisation to infrastructural resources) are thus identified as 'elements of resilience' that can be operationalized [START_REF] Kendra | Resilience and disasters[END_REF].

However the concept of resilience and its use as a diagnostic and prognostic tool in recovery after disaster is also highly contested (see [START_REF] Aguirre | How not to learn: Resilience in the study of disaster[END_REF][START_REF] Tierney | Resilience and the neoliberal project: Discourses, critiques, practicesand Katrina[END_REF]. On the one hand, the efforts to operationalize resilience through a list of standardized indicators have to confront the fact that the responses to disaster are closely connected with socio-historical and cultural dimensions that are specific to each locality and that contribute to shape the sense of what counts as a 'good' recovery.

Beyond the denunciation of the implicit normative assumptions of resilience metrics that have been developed with the ambition to define a universally valid model of resilience building, resilience has been often 'co-opted' as a justification for neoliberal projects of withdrawing government support to universalistic measures of welfare and, more in general, investments in public infrastructures. Communities are then forced to compete for public, and increasingly private funding to support resilience building so that: 'Resilience, paradoxically, is not for everyone, but for those who are best equipped to compete in the demanding milieu of government and philanthropic funding mechanisms' (Kendra et al., 2018: 101). On a similar note, Benadusi (2013: 434) stresses that in post disaster situations actors facing 'dispositifs' of international aid 'had to appear "just resilient enough" (…), but not so resilient as to tarnish the image of vulnerability still required to intercept aid'.

In both cases, the authors show how the framework of 'social resilience' (see [START_REF] Hall | Social resilience in the Neoliberal Era[END_REF] promotes a specific normativity that is sustained by neoliberal policies and narratives, and based on individual and collective capacities to cope and 'creatively' adapt to unavoidable catastrophes. In this perspective, resilience has been defined as the new 'social morphology' of our societies, that are 'insecure by design' [START_REF] Evans | Resilient life. The art of living dangerously[END_REF].

However it is important to distinguish between, on the one hand, resilience as a justificatory argument that can be mobilized by a variety of actors in concrete situations and, on the other hand, resilience as an analytical frame to approach the way in which societies respond to disruptions. In this latter use, resilience had the merit to bringing attention to the need for an interdisciplinary approach to the study of recovery after disasters, one that pays attention to the systemic dimension of the intermingling of ecological, technical, socio-cultural and political factors, at different scales.

In fact, the framework of resilience invites to develop an approach to disasters in which social dynamics are analysed in their interdependences with materiality and the life world, in specific places of disaster occurrence. From the perspective of resilience, disasters can be considered as 'interactive phenomena of social and technical systems distributed over geographic space' (Kendra et al., 2018: 104).

The reference implicit in the framework of resilience to the mutually constitutive dynamics of systems and places invites us to include the dimension of the milieu in order to understand how 'nested systems' can produce 'injurious outcomes that cannot be straightforwardly confined in time or space, nor adequately addressed with standard operating procedures and established modes of thought' [START_REF] Fortun | Researching Disaster from an STS perspective[END_REF](Fortun et al. : 1004)).

However, we consider that the technocratic reduction of resilience into a tool of a larger form of neoliberal 'governing through standards' (Ponte et al. 2011), the community-based focus that this framework implicitly supports and the social morphology it encourages deeply hinder the potential of such notion as a tool to explore the dynamics of post-disaster initiatives and the diversity of patterns towards social change.

In this book we deploy an alternative perspective on researching recovery after disasters, one that is based on the notion of repairing environments. It consists in analyzing how a variety of issues of sociotechnical, socioecological and sociocultural repairing are defined and dealt with in arenas, through 'dispositifs' and practices that together shape the paths of recovery after disaster.

But what do we mean by repairing? And why repairing environments? Let's start with environments. Disasters, in their different forms, remind us of human interdependences with the material world and societies dependence on material infrastructures and 'infrastructuring practices' [START_REF] Star | The ethnography of infrastructure[END_REF][START_REF] Bowker | Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences[END_REF][START_REF] Edwards | Infrastructure and modernity: force, time and social organization in the history of sociotechnical systems[END_REF]. Moreover, major chemical and nuclear disasters have contributed at least since the 1960's to the emergence of a form of environmental reflexivity on the global dimension of the ecological crisis epitomized by the sociological category of 'risk society' [START_REF] Lagadec | La Civilisation du risque[END_REF][START_REF] Beck | Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity[END_REF]) and, more recently, the notion of 'Anthropocene'. This implies that it is increasingly hard to draw a clear line between what can be considered as a 'natural environment' and a socially and culturally shaped environment, while it is even harder to address issue of social change as isolated from larger processes of ecological and technical transformations.

However, against the general propensity to speak in terms of an undifferentiated global environment, disaster situations force us to pay attention to 'the activities, materialities, and concepts through which an environment is performed in always situated and contested ways', bringing into view 'an array of environments, themselves heterogeneous and differently organized' [START_REF] Blok | Infrastructuring Environments[END_REF]. In fact, disasters disrupt a variety of ecologies that shape environments thus triggering a multiplicity of processes of repairing that account for the emergence, or not, of new patterns of socio-ecological organization.

Subsequently, the reference to environments point to the need to address the analysis of disaster recovery by means of paying attention to the variety of material ecologies that become visible through their misfunctioning and the efforts to repair them. Through the notion of 'environments' we want to stress the importance to pay attention in the analysis of disaster recovery, on the one hand, to social phenomena as embedded in socio-ecosystems, and, on the other hand, to their place-based nature, as phenomena that are geographically located and shaped in a material web of life that is culturally invested with meaning and value [START_REF] Gieryn | A Space for Place in Sociology[END_REF].

Through connecting disasters and environments our objective is to emphasize that disasters potentially reconfigure not only societies but also ontologies, by ways of the variety of processes of repairing that actors engage in in order to 'go back to normalcy'. Recent developments in the field of environmental law, like the creation of legal rights for rivers (O'Donnel and Talbot-Jones 2018), points to evolutions in this direction (see Quefelec in this volume).

But why repairing? Through the notion of repairingand the related notions of arenas in which repairing is debated, devices aiming at repairing and repairing practices -our aim is to provide an analytical framework that can help to reveal the complexity of recovery processes in terms of actors' normative expectations of the 'good' way to repair. The analysis of the diversity of these expectations can help to shed light on the conflicting nature of recovery processes, and on the way in which power dynamics and interests are at work in these situations.

In fact, the observation of actual processes of recovery after disaster shows the coexistence of a 'multiplicity' [START_REF] Law | Complexities: Social Studies of Knowledge Practices[END_REF] of possible understandings of repairing that guide actors conducts as part of recovery after disasters.

First of all, repairing, as asking for reparation, can point to the righting a wrong, typically by ways of making amends to those who have been wronged. In this 'accusatory' [START_REF] Dodier | Les hommes et les machines. La conscience collective dans les sociétés technicisées[END_REF] understanding of repairing as 'reparation', to repair entails to identify and denounce damages unjustly suffered, and to determine corresponding faults, crimes, victims and perpetrators. The disaster is framed as a 'moral crisis' requiring reparation, by providing payment or other assistance to those who have been wronged. This implies to resort to law and to a specific dispositif (Barbot and Dodier 2016): the trial. However, trials do not necessarily achieve the objective to solve the moral crisis. Feelings of injustice can persist, when victims or their representatives consider the definitions of the damage or the forms of its compensation as inadequate or improper. The valuation and evaluation of damages to body, life [START_REF] Petryna | How Did They Survive?[END_REF] and environment [START_REF] Fourcade | Cents and sensibility: Economic valuation and the nature of "Nature[END_REF]) imply a series of complex and contentious processes that can bring to important transformations in legal systems. Beyond monetary compensations, victims or their representatives can ask for symbolic forms of reparation, as in the case of the request of apologies especially from state actors [START_REF] Mihai | When the State Says "Sorry": State Apologies as Exemplary Political Judgments[END_REF]; see Jobin in this volume), whose importance can vary sensibly according to cultural contexts.

Depending on the nature of disasters and their destructive potential, these contentious processes can reveal also the power of industrial actors and practices of "ignorance production" (REFERENCE) in the frame of the evaluation of damages. A variety of factors influence these processes of reparation and their potential to trigger social change, including the existence of national insurance, juridical and environmental protection systems, as well as the lobbying capacity of collective mobilizations.

In recovery process, however, actors have to deal not only with a 'moral crisis' but also with the re-establishment and, then, the improvement of the functionalities of the various infrastructures (including ecological, economic, technical infrastructures) that disasters unsettle. The focus of this functional repair is not on the past and the identification of crimes, but on the future and the discovery and anticipation of dysfunctions [START_REF] Dodier | Les hommes et les machines. La conscience collective dans les sociétés technicisées[END_REF]. To repair means, in this case, to fix a systemic breakdown so as to avoid its repetition. In this case too, law and regulations play an important role since they should guarantee, at least formally, the conditions for safety and the prevention of future accidents. This implies to recur to specific devices such as technical protocols, 'stress tests', procedures of maintenance, ecological restoration programs (including revegetation, habitat enhancement, remediation) but also insurance or liability systems. Furthermore, such devices increasingly are conceived and organized at an international level, especially in very high-risk sectors such as the nuclear sector, where the cross-border character of radioactive fallout has been a major concern since the Chernobyl accident .

These devices are meant to deal with technical issues but they have a huge impact on the trajectories of recovery. They can be contested not only on the technical ground (controversies) but also for the social consequences of their design in terms of exclusion and injustice (conflicts). As we recalled mentioning Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine, the repairing of infrastructures can be not only an economic opportunity for interest groups but also a political opportunities to advance a certain vision of how society should work.

The repairing of infrastructures inevitably crosses path with the practices that actors engage in individually and collectively in order to maintain and repair their own environments, intended as the result of everyday relationships of taking care of people, objects, places and non-human beings. The reference here is to repair as discussed by feminist scholars and activists in relation with the concept of care, which is defined by Berenice Fisher and Joan Tronto as 'a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our 'world' so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, our selves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web' (Fisher and Tronto 1990: 40). As Steve Jackson (2014: 232) argues in discussing his perspective of 'broken world thinking': 'Care (…) reconnects the necessary work of maintenance with the forms of attachment that so often (but invisibly, at least to analysts) sustain it. We care because we care'.

Repairing thus intended is focused on individual and collective practices of reflexively maintaining one's own world, in material, experiential and emotional terms. As expression of care, to repair after disasters involves engaging in maintaining as far as possible ordinary activities and experiences (such as providing for food, taking care of children, sleeping, sharing time with close ones, etc.) necessary to support the texture of everyday life: disasters reveal the importance of such ordinary practices for the preservation of the 'human life form' [START_REF] Lovell | Face aux désastres. Une conversation à quatre voix sur la folie, le care et les grandes détresses collectives[END_REF]. This meaning of repairing therefore refers to the embodied and 'emplaced' (see [START_REF] Pink | From embodiment to emplacement: re-thinking competing bodies, senses and spatialities[END_REF] experience of the catastrophe and it points to forms of self-organization that emerge as part of the response to disaster and the recovery process. These practices respond to the need to recreate, at the level of everyday life, meaning and attachments, these latter intended as close relationships between human beings and between human beings, other living beings, and places. These practices of repair rely on the exercise of a form of 'negative capability': the ability to maintain the continuity of everyday life in the face of the absence or loss of meaning [START_REF] Lanzara | Capacità negativa : competenza progettuale e modelli di intervento nelle organizzazioni[END_REF]. The scope of such practices of repair, and their contribution to recovery, can be understood only through taking into account the importance of the 'familiar environment' as a space in which individual capacities are rooted [START_REF] Breviglieri | L'espace habité que réclame l'assurance intime de pouvoir: Un essai d'approfondissement sociologique de l'anthropologie capacitaire de Paul Ricoeur[END_REF]. In order to grasp repairing at the level of everyday life, ethnography is therefore a fundamental complement to other methodologies of inquiry.

These practices of repair are analysed by Aijazi (2015: 15) as part of a wider process of 'social repair', intended as both 'resumption of everyday life and re-humanization/re-constituting the self'. More in details, he discusses 'memory', 'hope' and 'resistance' as 'strategic tools to achieve social repair', through reconstructing 'places/spaces/meaningful objects' and reembedding in them 'memories (old and new) in a process of re-anchoring' that is essential for the recovery of an individual and collective agency by those who have been more affected (Aijazi 2015: 18).

With this third understanding of repair our aim is to bring into disaster studies recent developments that have emerged in the field of 'repair studies' (see [START_REF] Graziano | Repair Matters[END_REF].

Repair studies point to the activities of 'maintaining the world' as a potential 'site of altering', that is, of 'contingent political change without relying upon the myth of ex-nihilo creation' (Graziano and Trogal 2019: 214). Far from the idea of re-establishing the status quo, repairing as caring points to the work of maintaining interdependences as a potentially transformative process. Repairing practices can then be articulated with the construction of a collective revendication and they can sustain struggles for reparation.

However, the analysis of the processes of recovery after major nuclear accidents (like Chernobyl and Fukushima) reveals the instrumentalization of this kind of ordinary repairing through the resilience narrative, in order to mask conditions of irreparability and to prove nuclear risk as socially acceptable, thus contributing to the maintaining of the status quo.

As discussed by Ribault (2019: 4) in the case of resilience narratives after the Fukushima catastrophe: 'As individuals are called upon to act upon themselves hygienically to measure and mitigate radiation exposure after catastrophic levels of contamination, the proposed responses consist in shifting the target for resilience from biology to individual psychology and to society. Resilience is thus operating as a governing technology-more specifically as a technology of consent-that displaces some problems-here the irreversible biological effects induced by radiation exposure-by offering substitute problems such as empowering individual and rebuilding communities'.

On a similar note, [START_REF] Topçu | Chernobyl Empowerment ? Exporting Participatory Governance to Contaminated Territories[END_REF] discusses how in Chernobyl and Fukushima 'nuclearists' have been promoting a 'radiological culture' (e.g. the use of Geiger counter on a daily basis to organize everyday activities in such a way as to reduce the exposure to radiations) aimed at turning radioactivity into an 'ordinary' feature of the everyday life experience, de facto producing a form of collective ignorance.

In this case, the human capacity to 'maintaining one's own world' is instrumentalized in order to sustain a vision of repairing which is exclusively focused on recovery systemic functionalities. This vision of functional repairing imposes a technocratic, non-negotiable reconfiguration of ordinary human-environment interdependences, oriented towards future technoscientific achievements: as Ribault (2019: 6) shows in the case of Fukushima, these achievements can include 'robotic, agronomic (…), biological, and medical experiments', but also 'architectural and urban planning experiments including land deregulation, smart cities, and other smart communities projects'. The 'incantatory' [START_REF] Ribault | Resilience in Fukushima: Contribution to a Political Economy of Consent[END_REF]) mechanism sustained by resilience narratives contributes, in the case of Fukushima, to reduce to silence present experiences of irreparable lossesincluding the invisibility that strikes remediation workersand to hamper collective efforts to transform these harms into damages in need of reparation.

The approach to recovery we outline in this book pays attention to the interaction between these different logics of repair in 'dispositifs', practices and arenas where the interplay of normative expectations on recovery and the struggles over meaning-making in the problematic situation can be analysed as part of larger interest-based struggles inside power-laden framework. Even if we are not outlining a 'theory of recovery' we are providing a theoretically-informed approach to the study of socio-ecological change that pays attention to the interaction between socio-technical, environmental and cultural dimensions in accounting for social change.

The standpoint of repair is less normative-laden and politically connoted than resilience and more alerted to the contentious nature of recovery processes. Our hope is that the repair approach that we present in this book can contribute to the development of research on recovery after disasters 'methodologically and theoretically inventive, empirically rich, and expressed in ways attentive to the acute problems of representations that beset disaster (and disaster studies)' [START_REF] Fortun | Researching Disaster from an STS perspective[END_REF](Fortun et al. : 1018)).


Desmond Thomas

Max Berre

Debt Sustainability in the Caribbean BY

This paper examines debt sustainability in the Caribbean region in general giving the emerging market status, and small size of Caribbean economies. Particular emphasis is given to six countries within the region with respect to debt sustainability techniques and policies. The size, scope and effects of sovereign indebtedness is also discussed. Policy options and recommendations for ensuring debt sustainability and reducing indebtedness are examined herein.

I: Introduction

This paper examines the macroeconomic performance of several Caribbean countries, with respect to debt sustainability, and debt reduction and management measures. Six countries are examined within the purview of this paper, as is the region as a whole.

While living standards and fiscal performance as a whole vary widely across the region, some fiscal as well as human development trends are prevalent.

Most countries in the Caribbean region enjoy high levels of human development and democratization. Most countries in the Caribbean region rank highly on the Human Development Index in comparison with averages for Latin America and the Caribbean.

Moreover, life expectancy and literacy are also high in comparison with both the averages for developing and emerging market economies, and with Latin American and the Caribbean, while enjoying lower inequality statistics. Notwithstanding, emigration rates are among the highest in the world. From 1970From -2000, emigration from the ECCU countries included 40-70 % of the skilled labor force (IMF ECCU Article IV, 2005) Additionally economic growth rates have been sluggish for several countries in the region. Growth rates, are only marginally higher than that of Latin America and the Caribbean's average, and less than that of the developing and emerging market economies average. [START_REF] Sahay | Stabilization, Debt and Fiscal Policy in the Caribbean[END_REF] The late 1990s saw a stark increase of sovereign debt across the nations in the Caribbean region, which largely tapered-off in the early 2000s. Accordingly, public sector debt to revenue has seen a drop since 2000. The presence of a debt problem arose through accumulated deficits resulting largely from a series of unforeseen external shocks including disaster relief, and a slowdown in the tourism sector in the aftermath of September 11 th . In the face of such rising expenditures, revenues have remained stable in most cases, and saw only a slight revenue growth on average.

While sovereign debt has tapered-off in terms of magnitude, sovereign debt has also come to be managed more efficiently and responsibly in several countries across the region for which data is available. Steps have been taken by all countries to attempt to manage their debt. These steps include renegotiation, the development and improvement of primary surpluses, redistribution between foreign currency denominated and domestic currency denominated debt, and the reduction or elimination of relatively risky short-term debt as well as bullet payments. In most cases several of these policies were used together as a package.

Beyond the region at large and the nature of the challenge facing the countries in the region, six countries are investigated in terms of fiscal and debt management performance. These are Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago. Each of these nations has taken some steps to reduce or manage its sovereign debt, with varying degrees of success.

The paper proceeds as follows. Section II explains the fiscal and macroeconomic performance of the region. Section III analyses the risks and pitfalls associated with risk in emerging markets, and provides a look at how it affects the Caribbean region. Section IV provides a look into the six countries, Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago. This section also examines what has been done outside of the region in order to manage and reduce sovereign debt. Section V provides some conclusions and policy recommendations. While some progress has been made in these respects, more needs to be done in order to improve prospects of debt sustainability. Ultimately, debt sustainability means not only the sustainability of the possibility to finance government deficits, but also survivability and insulation in the face of exogenous shocks which may occur.

III: The Perils of Emerging Market Debt in the Caribbean:

In many ways, sovereign debt sustainability in the Caribbean is vulnerable to exogenous shocks. In emerging markets in as a whole, debt is riskier than in large OECD economies. [START_REF] Alvarado | Fiscal Sustainability in Emerging Market Countries with an Application to Ecuador[END_REF] This is especially true in small economies, where exogenous factors can have a much larger effect. [START_REF] Alvarado | Fiscal Sustainability in Emerging Market Countries with an Application to Ecuador[END_REF] In this sense, the debt profiles and economies of many countries in the Caribbean region are no exception.

In terms of GDP size, Trinidad and Tobago's GDP for 2005 was approximately $12.5 Billion, while that of the Bahamas was $5.2 Billion. These two countries represent some of the largest GDPs in the Caribbean region. By comparison, the 2005 GDP of Chile was $94 Billion, Mexico's GDP was $676.5 Billion, and Brazil's was $ 604.8 Billion.

Moreover, there exists a certain vulnerability to exogenous shocks within the region. The average size foreign currency denominated debt, GDP in the six countries examined in detail in this paper was 41.250% in 2005. In comparison, larger emerging markets in the region, the size of the foreign currency denominated debt in Mexico for 2005 was 13.5%, while that Chile was 5.4%. In many larger economies it is more readily possible to have more of the debt denominated in domestic currency, this is more difficult for small emerging market economies. While size of the Bahamas foreign debt relative to GDP, as well as that of Trinidad and Tobago resemble that of Mexico, most other nations in the region have much larger foreign debts. Hence, the threat of foreign currency shocks is appreciably larger.

Additionally, dependency on tourism in many of the region's economies means that income and growth in the Caribbean region can be affected severely by events a world away. The bulk of Caribbean countries depends on tourism for over 25% of their GDP. In the aftermath of September 11 th 2001, there was a sharp decline in tourism arrivals for the 2001-2002 winter season. (WSJ) Beyond the possibility of foreign currency shock, and trade shock, lies the possibility of natural disaster. In 2006, Belize underwent a major debt restructuring. According to the Government of Belize, this was a necessary measure due to a precarious fiscal stance brought on by the hurricane relief expenditures.

Debt accumulation can have potentially disastrous implications. In some scenarios, high debt accumulation may adversely affect levels of economic growth chiefly through increases in the cost of finance, which can in turn be caused by increases in risk premia, relating to the level of indebtedness. The ultimate effect would be a decrease in investment. Growth may also be curtailed in the case of a high sovereign debt through the development of a sizeable interest rate spread between the deposit rates and the lending rate in the countries, thereby making the savings in a country increasingly inaccessible to the markets for investment. Indeed, a regression analysis reveals that the Debt-to-GDP ratio is responsible for a sizable portion of the interest rate spread. and its rate spread. This logically follows since in many ways, interest rate spreads are a measure of fear of volatility and instability on the part of the investors with respect to the lending situation. Ergo, one can expect investors to become increasing nervous about suffering a loss as indebted rises. In the case of rising indebtedness, the risk spread can ultimately increase because of the increased willingness on the part of the investor to be suitably compensated for the risk taken.

A more severe possibility is the threat of currency or interest rate instability, which in the case of a large external debt, can leave a country extremely vulnerable to exogenous shocks, who's onset may ultimately have little to do with the domestic fiscal or financial situation. (ECLAC, 2006) [START_REF] Alvarado | Fiscal Sustainability in Emerging Market Countries with an Application to Ecuador[END_REF] stress the fact that given the climate of risk involved with sovereign debt in emerging markets, there is an elevated level of investor volatility, and hence thresholds of maximum debt tolerance are subject to volatile changes and shocks. In fact, a country under tranquil and sustainable conditions may have an acceptable and sustainable level of sovereign debt, which suddenly become unacceptable because fear of defaults my lead to investors asking for higher premia, hence making debt sustainability much more difficult. This may even occur despite the absence of any changes in a country's policies or fiscal stance. [START_REF] Alvarado | Fiscal Sustainability in Emerging Market Countries with an Application to Ecuador[END_REF] Such may become the case during a contagion outbreak, or market reaction to far away events such as a major market crash half a world away.

Insulation against the possibility of such an event is difficult for small economies, no matter what their fiscal shape. In the Caribbean region, vulnerabilities exist in this sense due to the large existing debt portfolios of many of the region's countries, as well as the size of the proportion of both foreign currency denominated, and relatively risky forms of debt, such as short-term debt, variable interest rate debt, and debt whose terms of maturity are in bullet remuneration.

IV: Performance of Six Selected Countries in the Caribbean region:

Six countries in the Caribbean region, Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago, are studied in more detail in this paper because they represent some of the larger economies in the region. Each of them has also taken steps towards improving debt sustainability worth examining in closer detail.

In these six countries, indebtedness has both declined slightly and converged slightly While most of the six countries examined have less than 52% of their total sovereign debt denominated in a foreign currency in any given year during the 2001-2005 period, the foreign currency denominated share of their debt was above 90%. Each of these countries has taken active steps in attempts reduce its debt burden. These are a combination of active debt management policies, and the development of primary surpluses. Consequently, some countries have succeeded in making their debt burdens much more sustainable.

Trinidad and Tobago:

Trinidad and Tobago's experience with managing its debt has been characterized by the rapid and effective reduction of its sovereign debt during 2000-2005. This has been achieved largely through debt buybacks, rollover into low-yield 10 year bonds, and reduction of its borrowing requirements. These reductions were made possible largely by seizing on high oil prices, and a robustly performing financial sector during the period, fueled by broad acquisition of assets both domestically and across the region as well as high economic growth rates. The reduction of Trinidad and Tobago's indebtedness, has served to improve its credibility and further fuel its financial market. In many ways

Trinidad and Tobago has adequately taken advantage of a favorable Balance of Payments position, (that is, both a favorable Capital Accounts and Current Accounts position) in order to buy back its debt, especially its multilateral debt, as well as roll-over remaining debt on more favorable terms.

Trinidad and Tobago is the only country among the six where short-term debt increased.

However, it is also the country with the lowest level of indebtedness and highest growth rates. Additionally, Trinidad and Tobago's share of foreign currency denominated debt is well below average in terms of both the region and the six countries examined herein. In terms of Trinidad and Tobago's primary surplus, it has remained both stable and positive.

Moreover, an examination of the trends in Trinidad and Tobago's debt sustainability indicators indicates an eventual elimination of sovereign debt, should the trends continue as they are.

While Trinidad and Tobago is considered a stable country in terms of debt sustainability, debt sustainability in the country is most vulnerable the to threats of both contingent liability shock, and Growth shock, according to the IMF's debt sustainability bound tests.

Jamaica:

Jamaica is characterized by both a very a high level of indebtedness and a high primary surplus. The country's debt-to-GDP ratio is consistently between 130-140%, while the primary surpluses around 10%. Additionally, interest rate payments for Jamaica's sovereign debt amounted to over 40% of Jamaica's revenues during the 2001-2005 period. Additionally, Jamaica's sovereign debt represents a high concentration of short term debt, which stood at 82% of total sovereign debt at the end of 2005. (ECLAC, 2006) Jamaica has attempted to reduce its debt burden thorough primary surpluses. Also, the country has attempted to lower the risk profile of its sovereign debt by more evenly distributing its sovereign debt. Jamaica's efforts to reduce its indebtedness have unfortunately not been successful. This is chiefly because debt service costs have consistently been around 15% of the GDP, while primary surpluses have hovered around 10%. Jamaica's distributionary efforts however have fared better. While in the early 1990s, Jamaica's sovereign debt was almost exclusively external, foreign currency denominated debt, the proportion of external debt as a share of total debt shrank progressively, reaching parity in 1999, since which time the proportion of domestic debt has been slightly higher that external debt. In 2005, the proportion of foreign currency denominated debt with relation to its total sovereign debt stood at 43%. Overall, Jamaica's debt sustainability situation has remained stable. Accordingly, Jamaica's rate spread has remained has remained stable since late 2003, while debt-to-GDP ratios have declined slightly over the same period.

According to the IMF's public debt sustainability bounds tests, Jamaica is under much less threat from exogenous shocks than the other countries examined in the Caribbean region. In the event of most types of shock, the tests indicate that indebtedness would merely drop less immediately.

Antigua and Barbuda:

Antigua and Barbuda, while being one of the two most highly indebted countries of the six examined within this paper, it has managed to reduce both its debt level and its level of indebtedness the most. The Antiguan government managed to renegotiate the terms of its high interest domestic debt, which accounted for a third of its total debt stock.

Additionally, the country secured a significant debt write-off of bilateral debt from the Italian government. In terms of active debt management, Antigua and Barbuda retired more expensive obligations, replacing them with the issuance lower-yielding, but short term of regional treasury bonds

Antigua and Barbuda was one of the few countries in the Caribbean region not to adopt an expansionary fiscal stance in the late 1990s. (ECLAC, 2006) Additionally, for Antigua and Barbuda, unpaid contributions and vouchers represent a sizable share of the sovereign debt stock.

According to the IMF's debt sustainability bounds tests, the largest long-term threat to debt sustainability in Antigua and Barbuda is a non-interest current account shock. It is also noteworthy that the effects of a real depreciation shock reverse would themselves in the medium term.

Bahamas:

Bahamas is a country with a high sovereign credibility rating, and a low level of According to the IMF's debt sustainability bounds tests, debt sustainability in the country is most vulnerable in the event of sustained low GDP growth. In this case however, Bahamas' indebtedness levels would still leave sovereign debt below 70% of GDP, a level comparable to many European countries.

Belize:

In 1998-2002, Belize incurred large deficits which were translated into large debt increases. These were incurred unexpectedly for the purposes of disaster relief, and were exacerbated by refinancing operations which led to a consistent rise in borrowing costs.

Ultimately, the situation grew problematic, over 90% of Belize's sovereign debt was owed to foreign creditors, and interest payments exceeded 27% of government revenues.

(Houlihan Lokey, 2007) Moreover, Belize's sovereign debt was a high risk debt because of the presence of bullet maturities, which created a significant rollover risk.

In December 2006, Belize restructured its external commercial debt. The Government of Belize made extensive use of Collective Action Clauses (CACs), which ease negotiation with creditors by imposing the terms agreed to by the majority of credit holders on all credit notes. CACs prevent a minority of credit holders holding out for better terms, requiring the debtor to negotiate separate with each individual crediting party, or suing in response to debt restructuring agreements with which they are unsatisfied. Although long written into financial instruments of sovereign debt in the region, CACs had theretofore gone unused.

As a result of Belize's debt restructuring, both short-term debt and bullet maturities were replaced completely, thus making the country's sovereign debt less risky. Indeed, after the restructuring was complete, Belize's S&P rating rose to it highest level since August 2004. Instead Belize issued US dollar denominated bonds to be repaid in semi-annual installments from 2019-2029.

The final result of the debt negotiation was a successful reduction in the cost of servicing Belize's sovereign debt purely through active debt management policies. While the debtto-GDP ratio has been maintained, interest payments-to-revenue ratios were cut in half, from between 30-35% to 15-20%, as far forward as 2015. Additionally, Belize's sovereign debt became less risky -and thereby cheaper-due to the elimination of both short-term payments, and bullet maturities. Successful debt restructuring notwithstanding, Belize retains quite a high level of risk in that the vast majority of its sovereign debt is foreign currency denominated debt. This fact may come to undermine debt sustainability in the future, particularly in the event of foreign currency shock. While currently Belize's currency is pegged to the dollar, this may change as the Balance of Payments and the level of Belize's reserves changes in the future. Moreover, the IMF identifies various types of possible shocks as sizeable threats for Belize's debt sustainability. Among these threats are low growth, drop in primary balance, contingent liability shock, and any combination of the aforementioned threats acting in unison.

Barbados:

Barbados is highly rated, investment grade debt and has consistently managed to maintain around two-thirds of its total sovereign debt as domestic debt since 1998. The IMF reports however, that Barbados faces risks due to its already high level of indebtedness, as well as the high prices for oil, which Barbados imports, and on which Barbados' economy largely depends. (IMF, 2006) This in turn, puts Barbados at risk of several types of external shock, which may increase the country's indebtedness level, and from which recovery may become difficult.

Outside of the Caribbean region:

Beyond the Caribbean region, one of the emerging market which was able to successfully reduce its debt was South Africa. Despite some apparent characteristic economic differences between South Africa and most countries in the Caribbean, as well as its larger size as an economy, some of the steps South Africa has taken may hold valuable lessons for reducing sovereign debt.

South Africa's situation in many ways parallels that of Trinidad and Tobago.

Fundamentally, South Africa seized an opportunity to act with respect to its debt burden. The South African government reduced its indebtedness through a mix of fiscal measures and active debt management. In terms of fiscal measures, South Africa Managed to lower its borrowing requirements by rendering its state-run firms more efficient, while in terms of active debt management, South Africa lowered its contingent liabilities as a percentage of GDP. Furthermore, the South African central bank has accumulated unusually large reserves, having the effect of improving credibility, and flexibility given its flexible exchange rate regime. (IMF, 2007) Ecuador on the other hand has made progress in reducing its indebtedness levels by improving its fiscal stance. The country managed to reduce its debt to GDP ratio from In an effort to reduce risk, the Ecuadorian government has created a plan to create an escrow account specifically for debt management. These funds will be used to retire outstanding short-term high-interest bonds. (IMF, 2005) The lessons on debt sustainability both inside and outside of the region are more or less clear. To summarize, debt sustainability is most solidly secured in those countries which have relied more heavily on active debt management. While both fiscal policies and active debt management policies vital to securing debt sustainability and reducing indebtedness, reliance on fiscal policies primarily leads to debt which is risky and on unfavorable terms. This increased riskiness will have the further effect of making future debt more expensive due to its credibility rating and inflated rate spread (see figures 1 and 2), which has the potential to become a vicious risky debt cycle if left unchecked.

Conclusions and Policy Recommendations:

Fundamentally, the road to sovereign debt reduction or sustainability has two important avenues which must both be used to one extent or another. First, in order to render debt sustainable, certain fiscal steps should be taken. These are the reduction of borrowing needs and the development or increase of a primary surplus. The country's fiscal stance must be made more conducive to debt sustainability. Fiscal approaches to debt sustainability however, have their inherent limits. Typically, these limits set by a constraining need to maintain fairly constant fiscal expenditures.

As far as the fiscal path is concerned, many successful examples of debt reduction or debt sustainability have managed to improve their fiscal stances by lowering their country's borrowing requirements. Market performance and export fortunes aside, it must be noted that advantageous moments in terms of fiscal, trade or capital balances must be capitalized on in terms of debt management. Advantageous good moments in the market do not by themselves reduce the debt burden, nor ensure sustainability.

With respect to fiscal spending, it must be said that there is a need to maintain fairly constant expenditure, ceteris paribus. Fiscal consolidation through spending cuts has two constraints limit the downward flexibility of spending cuts. First, there exists a second political constraint in the sensitivity of the electorate to spending cuts over time, that is, how quickly or how gradually expenditures are cut. Second, there is an absolute maximum acceptable level of expenditure cuts, irrespective of time, beyond which a government may find itself in peril in terms of political sustainability. Moreover, fiscal consolidation measures may have pro-cyclical effects and may ultimately increase volatility risk, particularly in small emerging market economies, where volatility risks are already present, and may ultimately be magnified. To provide a healthy partial alternative, it must be noted that successful examples of improving the county's fiscal stance have relied on measures such as increasing and diversifying exports, as well as improving transparency and efficiency in state-run enterprises both in terms of operation and financing. Overall, improvement of the fiscal stance must be multifaceted and proceed cautiously.

In order to reduce the magnitude of fiscal measures necessary to have an effect on the debt sustainability picture, active debt management must also be undertaken. The most straightforward and successful debt management technique documented within the purview of this paper is debt buyback. This strategy has been successful in Trinidad and Tobago, as well outside of the region in South Africa. Debt buyback is a technique that can be employed in order to take advantage of good moments in time in terms of fiscal, trade, or capital surpluses, as was demonstrated these two cases.

Beyond this, active debt management strategies include principally debt rollover strategies. In order for debt sustainability to be improved, it is important that debt be rolled-over on as beneficial terms as possible, and that as a minimum the terms of debt rollover at least as good as the previous terms. The improvement of rollover terms lowers various types of risk, which in turn improves credibility, which in turn will lead to cheaper future debt, making future rollover operations easier and less expensive.

Successful policies have rolled over debt from bullet maturities to stepped maturities, thereby reducing the rollover risk. Other successful policies lead to the issue of maturities with lower yield or longer maturity periods, reducing the default risk. The risk of foreign currency shock can be lowered by replacing foreign currency denominated risk with domestic currency denominated risk. Additionally, foreign currency denominated debt can be spread out in debt issuances denominated in several currencies, rather than to keeping external debt concentrated in a single currency. This may also mitigate the risk foreign currency shock, as the external foreign currency denominated debt does not depend entirely on the relationship between the country's currency, and a single foreign country's currency. The major shortcoming of active debt management is that a certain trade-off exists between one debt management policy and another. That is, in many cases a country will have the opportunity to roll-over debt either into a more advantageous (domestic) currency denomination, or with a more advantageous terms. Achieving both at once will be difficult. With this said, the relative benefits of one active debt policy will have to be weighed against the relative benefits of another.

It must be noted that while debt buybacks can be undertaken primarily by countries that have experienced a balance of payments windfall, other types of active debt management do not require a good moment in the market to seize. Rollover operations can be done in many circumstances. While a windfall may help a country improve the debt rollover terms, there have been examples of active debt management where even the opposite was the case, such as that of Belize.

Overall, it is active debt management which matters most in the effort to secure debt sustainability. While debt reduction and sustainability require both fiscal measures and active debt management in order to be successful, it is the debt management strategies which ensure the greatest flexibility of action, secure future debt, and minimize future risk.

II:

  Fiscal and Macroeconomic Performance of the Caribbean: Sharp contrasts exist across the Caribbean region in terms of income, living standards, and macroeconomic performance. Similarly, sharp contrasts exist in terms vulnerability to exogenous shocks of various types, given range and distribution of sovereign debt in the region. Economic growth in the region was quite varied in the region during the 2001-2005 period. The average growth for the ECCU for 1990-2003 was less than three percent, while Jamaican GDP growth from 2001-2005 was less than two percent. Aruba experience negative GDP growth during 2001 and 2002, only to recover to a GDP growth of less than 2% in 2003. Conversely, Growth rates in Suriname and Belize were above 4.5% while those in Trinidad and Tobago were above 8%. While debt in the region has grown to be large and burdensome for many countries in the Caribbean region, where debt exceeds 100% of GDP and features high rates of debt growth, in several countries in the region, debt growth has tapered while debt sustainability indicators show improved signs of sustainability. In Trinidad and Tobago, as well as in the Bahamas, foreign currency denominated debt accounts for less than 30% of all sovereign debt. Moreover, it has decreased as a share of total debt since 2001 in the case of Trinidad and Tobago. In Jamaica and Belize meanwhile, short-term debt has undergone vast reductions since 1998, and now represents less than 10% of external debt in each country. Suriname meanwhile reduced both its sovereign debt and foreign currency denominated debt as a share of total debt. Since 2001, fiscal performance has improved across the region. On average, fiscal revenues have improved, while Public Sector Debt-to-GDP ratios have decreased. The sharp increases in debt that characterized the 1990s and early 2000s ended in 2001-2002. Suriname moved gradually from generating primary deficits to primary surpluses during the 2001-2005 period.

  since 2001, as shown in figure2. Additionally, the average debt-to-GDP ratio for these countries has decreased continuously since 2003. There has also been an upward trend in the size and existence of primary surpluses since 2002 in these six countries as demonstrated in figure3, signaling an overall better fiscal health. Taken together, it can be seen that debt sustainability outlooks have improved since 2003. risk factors of debt, are the proportions of short-term debt, and the proportions of external debt. As shown in figure4, short-term debt has remained stable in three of the four countries for which data was available, as well as on average for the countries. Of the six countries, the proportion of short term debt increased only in Trinidad and Tobago. Additionally, both Barbados and Belize managed to reduce their short-term debt proportions to zero. In the case of Barbados, the elimination of its short-term debt was achieved in 1998, and so is not visible in figure4. In as far as the proportion of foreign currency denominated debt as a proportion of total, the average of the six countries has remained stable for the 2001-2005 period. Typically, countries in the Caribbean region have between one and two thirds of their sovereign debt denominated in a foreign currency. This foreign currency denominated debt, ultimately consists of a portfolio of foreign currency obligations, distributed amongst multiple convertible foreign currencies.

  indebtedness. The debt to GDP ratio however, rose steadily throughout the 2001-2005 period. Nonetheless, the sovereign debt of the Bahamas is around 50% of the GDP, as it was at the end of the 2005 period. This is a lower level of indebtedness than the less specified in the convergence criteria in the treaty of Maastricht. The IMF however, considers the reduction of indebtedness a main policy challenge in order to secure macroeconomic stability. A budget proposal was introduced to Parliament in May 2005 to reduce the debt to GDP ratio to 30% within five years.(IMF, 2006) The domestic sovereign debt is larger than what the data would indicate on the surface because the foreign currency denominated portion of Bahamas' debt during the 2001-2005 period was in fact financed by domestic banks. In terms of active debt management, the Bahamian government seeks to avoid government guarantees of third parties specifically with respect to airports and public utilities.

(

  ECLAC, 2006) Moreover, Barbados' domestic debt is largely held in relatively safe long-term instruments.(ECLAC, 2006) It is largely these factor which may be contributing to the country's sovereign debt credibility rating. Barbados has also managed to reduce its interest payments, maintain a high primary and avoid short-term sovereign debt obligations. The debt sustainability picture in Barbados is one of the best in the region, given the country's relatively low level of indebtedness relative to its revenue. While Barbados' sovereign debt relative to GDP, was consistently between 80 and 90% from 2001-2005, it took a downward trend starting in 2002 and continuing into the present day (Central Bank ofBarbados, 2007). Since 2003, Barbados' borrowing needs have shrunk, and the public sector debt to GDP ratio has also decreased. Moreover, the country has generated a surplus since 2004.(IMF, 2006)

  over70% in 2001 to 43% in 2005. According to the IMF, the Ecuadorian government has set a final debt to GDP target at 40% as a maximum level of indebtedness. Additionally, Ecuador has maintained a consistent fiscal surplus of over 4% since 2001, and has reduced its borrowing needs by more than half since 2001.(IMF, 2005) Ecuador's debt sustainability improvement however, has to do largely with increased oil revenues. The country's non-oil deficit increased from2003[START_REF] Sahay | Stabilization, Debt and Fiscal Policy in the Caribbean[END_REF] . (IMF, 2005) ) This, along with increased level of expenditure has lead to an increased shock susceptibility, putting at risk much of the gains made from oil price increases. According to the IMF's 2005 assessment, even slightly lower (but still high) international oil prices may put Ecuador's debt sustainability in peril.

Foreign Currency Debt as a Proportion of Total Debt

  In the short-run, perhaps the most important indicator of sustainability of the existing sovereign debt is the cost of paying the interest on the debt so to maintain it as it is. With this in mind, trends show a shrinking convergence given the limited availability of data in with this indicator. Figure six demonstrates the convergence in interest payments towards approximately 10% of national revenues. Also important to gauging the short and immediate term of debt sustainability in the sovereign debt's size relative to revenues. Clearly, a country with high and stable fiscal revenues can sustain and repay lagers debts, size of the country or economy notwithstanding. A low debt/revenue ratio also signals upward flexibility, not only in terms of debt repayments ability, but also the ability to maintain interest payments, given difficulties with data availability with respect to interest payments. Figure seven demonstrates overall stability of debt with respect to revenue. While the average for the six countries dropped slightly during the 2001-2005 period, this drop can be attributed chiefly to drops in debt levels specifically in two countries; Antigua and Barbuda and Trinidad and Tobago. Beyond this, it can be said that most of the six countries witnessed at least a slight drop in the debt/revenue ratio after 2003.

		Debt/Revenue Ratio
	800.000%
	700.000%		Trinidad and Tobago
	600.000%		Antigua and Barbuda
	500.000%		Belize
	400.000%		Jamaica
	300.000%		Bahamas
	200.000% 100.000%	Barbados Short-Term Debt / Total Debt Average
	60.000% 0.000%
	50.000%	2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005
	40.000% Sources: World Bank WDI
	30.000%		Trinidad and Tobago
	20.000%		Belize Jamaica
	10.000%		Barbados
			Average
	0.000%
		2000 2001 2002 Interest Payments/Revenue 2003 2004 2005
	Source: World Bank WDI 60.000%
	50.000%		Antigua and Barbuda
	40.000%		Bahamas, The
	120.000% 30.000%		Trinidad and Tobago Barbados Belize
	100.000% 20.000%		Antigua and Barbuda Trinidad and Tobago
	80.000% 10.000%		Belize Jamaica
	60.000%		Jamaica
	0.000%		Bahamas
	40.000%
		2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006	Barbados
	20.000%
			Average
	0.000% Sources: World Bank WDI, Government of Belize
		2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006
	Sources: IMF, IADB

  This opportunity presented itself in the form of increased value of its currency internationally. As a result, domestic currency denominated bonds are traded overseas, as is South African currency. Stronger currency increased South Africa's hand in attempts

	to undertake active debt management. South Africa lowered its contingent liabilities from
	26.1% of GDP in 1994/95 to 9.8% of GDP in 2005/06. South Africa also improved the
	quality of domestic currency debt instruments by introducing inflation-linked bonds,
	while increasing liquidity in its bond markets. (SAG, 2006) Foreign currency
	denominated debt has declined from 19% of total sovereign debt in 2001/02, to 14.3% in
	2007. (Government of South Africa, National Treasury, 2007)
	Additionally, South Africa managed to reduce it borrowing requirement from 5.1% of
	GDP in 1994/95, to a projected 0.3% in 2009/10. According to Government documents,
	this due to the cheaper cost of financing the operations of state-run enterprises, as well as
	higher sovereign debt credibility ratings. (Government of South Africa, National
	Treasury, 2007) Finally, the government improved the efficiency, transparency, and
	accountability of its state-owned enterprises. (Government of South Africa, National
	Treasury, 2007)