Tourism is Jamaica’s “bread and butter” – producing approximately 50 per cent of the country’s foreign exchange inflow and generating more than 350,000 jobs annually (Silvera, 2020). In the current context, tourism has become the driving industry of Jamaica’s economic development plans. Yet, the profits and benefits of the industry are unevenly distributed across workers, communities and national borders (Lewis, 2014). Using the craft industry – with a central focus on the craft market – as an entry point, this paper offers an analysis of the production of multi-scalar uneven development within racial capitalism. Drawing on primary data from ethnographic fieldwork and semi-structured interviews with craft traders and producers as well as textual analysis of archival data, the paper argues that the everyday lives of handicraft workers make visible the socio-spatial relations of difference that produce and undergird (inter)national economic development processes and reproduce uneven development across multiple scales. In particular, the paper examines the role of the state in racial capital’s production of uneven development in Jamaica’s tourism industry. This intervention links micropolitics to macroprocesses, taking up theorizations across Caribbean studies, postcolonial theory, feminist political economy and Black geographies. Finally, by attending to the quotidian, the paper affirms the need to be attentive to the ways in which the project of economic development recruits and (re)makes “hierarchies of all kinds of difference” (Goffe and Luke, 2024) across scales.

Rural youth studies identify that rural youth aspirations and life-courses are dynamic and change over time. They are the outcome of the relationship between their context and individual as well as collective agency. However, few studies have explored how different social characteristics (e.g. age, sex) might influence the develop of aspirations, and how these characteristics and the relationship with context, where violence is a cross-cutting variable, could exacerbate power imbalances. In regions where licit and illicit economies coexist, the exercise of agency by rural youth becomes an act of rebellion. My study employs an “I will be” method, grounded in Possible Selves theory, agency, and intersectionality, to explore the aspirations and life trajectories of rural youth in La India, Colombia, from their own perspective.

Findings reveal a significant tension between the aspirations of young men and women and the perceived attainability of their goals considering their age, sex and living conditions. In these communities, youth participation is limited, with their voices marginalized by social norms shaped by violence and historical conflict. This is particularly pronounced for young women, those without social support networks, and young adults living independently. Understanding the factors influencing rural youth decision-making is essential for developing context-appropriate policies and programs that can support their aspirations and provide pathways to meaningful change.

The Caribbean and Latin America have entered the third generation of regionalism. It is markedly decolonial, and proffers counter-dependency as the raison d’être of south-south cooperation. This neo-Gramscian approach orients us to consider the whole context of ideas and institutions within which the production of material goods takes place. The strategy of scaling deep to reframe stories, spread big cultural ideas, and invest in transformative learning at the sociocultural levels of individuals, organisations, and communities is a vital part of this innovation.

The study utilises an innovation systems approach, which considers new modes of knowledge production that emphasise collaboration and contextual embeddedness. It identifies and discusses how on-going Jamaica-Colombia development cooperation in cultural policy and programming can be aided by public sector innovation (PSI) labs as a policy tool. The analysis addresses civil society’s roles as knowledge producers, managers, and intermediaries in the PSI lab “tentative governance” processes of experimentation, learning, and reflexivity.

The case for a transformative learning and scaling deep PSI lab approach to Jamaica-Colombia cooperation is developed through a literature review and thematic analysis of 24 semi-structured interviews with civil society workers from Kingston, Jamaica and Bogotá and San Andrés, Colombia. This multidisciplinary policy study adds to the evolving field of knowledge for development.