The Jamaica Beach Birthright Environmental Movement (JaBBEM) is issuing an urgent national warning that the newly proposed National Reconstruction and Resilience Authority Act, 2026 (NaRRA), poses a serious and immediate threat to Jamaicans’ legal rights to access and use their beaches by constructively incapacitating prescriptive rights (Common Law/Customary Rights) afforded by the Prescription Act of 1882. 

The Prescription Act of 1882 remains one of the last remaining legal pathways for ordinary Jamaicans and communities to secure and defend customary beach access by way of the right to coastal land.

The reconstruction bill grants the Government of Jamaica (GoJ) power to fast-track coastal development while stripping communities of the regulatory protections and customary rights they depend on for their livelihoods and survival. JaBBEM is urgently warning that the NaRRA legislation presented to the public as a hurricane recovery framework contains sweeping powers that will accelerate the displacement and dispossession of Jamaican fishing communities, coastal villages, and the general public from the island’s beaches permanently.

The Prescription Act, 1882 (Sections 4 and 9) protects rights acquired through long, uninterrupted, and open use of land or access routes. These include customary access to beaches and rivers, fishing and bathing rights and the use of coastal pathways both on land and in the sea. 

To date, JaBBEM is collaborating with vulnerable and impacted communities on five legal cases in the court against GoJ agencies (Commissioner of Lands, Jamaica National Heritage Trust, Airport Authority, Urban Development Corporation, and Portland Municipal Corporation) along with other private land owners as defendants for rights to beaches. The foundation of these cases is the Prescription Act of 1882 which codified the right to land associated with customary long-standing use.

The functional interference of the Prescription Act of 1882 by NaRRA is realized in how it undermines the operation of the act in several ways, rendering it ineffective and disenfranchising Jamaicans of their customary rights. NaRRA achieves its intentional objective as a disaster capitalism tool that creates structural conditions under which prescriptive rights become practically unenforceable in the reconstruction context as follows:

• Interruption of the continuous use of beaches that is required to sustain prescriptive rights
  • Accelerated development will block access routes, enclose beaches and restrict traditional entry points
• Executive override of Rights-Based claims (Step-in orders-Section 23) that subordinates customary rights to executive discretion that allow the project to proceed without resolving claims of long-standing public use,
  • where the authority can issue directives under Section 22 to all approving entities, including the Natural Resources Conservation Authority (which administers the Beach Control Act) to fast-track approvals, waive zoning requirements, and override procedural delays. Any resistance triggers the Step-in orders that activate the supreme power of the Minister under Section 24, which can grant an approval that has the same legal force as if the approving entity had granted it themselves
• Restrictions on Access to Information under the secrecy clause of section 14 by imposing confidentiality over official documents that effectively impairs communities’ access to evidence, establishes historical use and defends prescriptive rights claims
• Omission of mandatory consideration which results in the systematic disregard of existing rights as NaRRA does not require assessment of prescriptive rights in project approvals and does not mandate consultation with affected users
  • Once physical development is approved and underway, the practical burden of asserting a prescriptive right shifts entirely to the community affected. They must mount costly court proceedings against a government-backed development enjoying statutory expedition. The asymmetry of raw government power is significant and violently extractive.

These structural conditions dismantle the community’s ability to realise their prescriptive rights to land, fundamentally shift Jamaica’s legal framework and allow NaRRA to build a pipeline of efficient displacement and dispossession from the coastline.

JaBBEM is demanding on behalf of the Jamaican people a judicial review and that the dispossessive components of NaRRA be abolished and the following amendments be included in a new bill to protect the nation rights to beaches and beach lands

• Explicit protection of public and customary rights of beach access
• An immediate amendment to the NaRRA to require a mandatory prescriptive and customary rights audit before any coastal project is approved or designated as a strategic investment project.
• Prohibit approval of projects that restrict or extinguish rights to beaches
  • Consistent with the government announcement that all new coastal development will be required to provide beach access
• Limitations of Step-in powers:
  • Exclude environmental and coastal access matters
  • Require judicial oversight before exercising
• Statutory exclusion of all designated fishing beaches from the directive and step-in order regime.
• Inclusion of a coastal rights safeguard clause :
  • Affirm that the foreshore remains a public commons
  • Guarantee uninterrupted access for traditional and customary uses
• A binding community consultation requirement including affected fisherfolk, coastal residents, and indigenous land users before any coastal designation is confirmed by Cabinet.
  • Public disclosure of all project-related documents
• Explicit preservation of all planning conditions that protect public access to the foreshore, including Development Order policies, which must not be subject to Ministerial waiver under Section 22 of the Act.
• An independent coastal rights commission with power to receive community complaints and intervene in Authority proceedings before approvals are granted.

JaBBEM notes that this bill follows a pattern already visible in pre-Melissa Jamaica. In 2022, fisherfolk at Mammee Bay in St Ann were denied access to their beach during hotel construction. Initiated in 2023, communities in Portland fought to maintain access to the Blue Lagoon. In 2025 and to date, residents of Flankers and surrounding communities are in court against the Airport Authority as land owners of a property that is slated for Sandals Resort International’s proposed development of over-water bungalows and villas for access to Providence Beach, a community beach they had used continuously for more than 60 years. In each case, the barrier was commercial development enabled by a legal framework that prioritises investment over customary rights.

The NRAA Act does not solve the harm of dispossession. It institutionalises and accelerates it behind the shield of national reconstruction by reconfiguring ownership, access and control of Jamaica’s coastline. NaRRA represents one of the most dangerous legislative threats to Jamaicans’ beach rights in modern history as it will systematically dismantle the legal foundation that protects public access to beaches and, most critically, the Prescription Act of 1882.

If NaRRA proceeds in its current form, Jamaicans risk losing not just access to beaches but the very legal foundation that protects that access. Once prescriptive rights are broken, they cannot be easily restored.

Dr. Devon Taylor can be contacted at : (President of JaBBEM, JaBBEM.org; instagram & Facebook @Jabbemjabbem;Tiktok & Bluesky @Jabbem; X @bbem_ja)