Caye Caulker: Economic Success In A Belizean Fishing Village

First published in 1986. In the last decade, the island of Caye Caulker was transformed from a subsistence fishing village into an affluent enclave within a poor Caribbean country. This ethnographic study of the island recounts the economic success story of Caye Caulker, attributing the island’s relative prosperity to several key features: the reorganization of the lobster fishing industry into producer cooperatives, the limiting and controlling of tourism, and the maintenance of sociocultural institutions that historically have created strong family networks and encouraged autonomy and self-sufficiency. Dr. Sutherland’s unusual case study of positive development without external assistance makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of Third World development in general and local development in particular.