2025/08/05 by Byer, Amanda
paper · doi:10.25501/soas.00593925
Recent scholarship on the environment has involved an examination of the role of Empire in shaping our relations with the natural world. Parks and protected areas were some of the earliest conservation mechanisms deployed by colonial authorities to protect wilderness and they continue to fulfil this objective in modern environmental law. This paper complicates our understanding of parks as tools of spatial injustice and emblematic of exclusionary conservation in the law. It traces the origins and development of parks in the Commonwealth Caribbean (former British colonies in the Caribbean) using a legal geographical lens to assess their impacts on local communities and place attachment in the region. By paying attention to the way in which imperial imaginaries of wilderness were consolidated in the law at the expense of local communities, this paper highlights the need to democratise and diversify approaches to nature in the law. This is of particular importance to small island developing states, such as those in the Caribbean region, who rely on pristine nature as a core tourism asset but also face unique vulnerabilities in an age of environmental polycrisis.