Aubrey Stewart | NaRRA will be judged by what it delivers 

The parliamentary debate over the National Reconstruction and Resilience Authority (NaRRA) Act has now ended; the legislation has passed. And yet the argument continues, as the questions raised about governance persist. These are relevant questions that the passage of the legislation does not, by itself, answer, and we should still be grappling with them.  

The concerns centered on executive authority, procurement exemptions, and the concentration of decision-making power are legitimate. These concerns were raised in good faith by individuals who contribute meaningfully and consistently to Jamaica’s democratic discourse. Though those positions did not ultimately hold sway, does not invalidate those concerns.  

The burden of proof now shifts to those responsible for implementing NaRRA: the institution, its capacity, and the people in charge of it must demonstrate, through performance, that the powers granted to them are justified by the outcomes they produce. 

EXECUTIVE AUTHORITY 

This is not a new dilemma: governments across the world face the same choices when crises overwhelm the normal machinery of the state. After the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, Indonesia created the Badan Rehabilitasi dan Rekonstruksi (BRR) to centralise reconstruction in Aceh. New Zealand created Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority (CERA) following Christchurch (2011). The Philippines layered additional executive coordination mechanisms onto an existing disaster framework after Typhoon Haiyan (2010). 

In every case, the pattern was the same: normal institutional arrangements proved too slow, too fragmented, or too constrained for the scale of the disruption, and governments responded by temporarily concentrating authority in a dedicated body. The lesson from those cases is that centralisation works well under specific conditions. The Indonesian BRR succeeded because it was time-bound, led by a director whose reputation for competence and integrity gave the institution public credibility, and supported by stakeholder oversight structures, including advisory and supervisory boards that kept reconstruction aligned with community needs and sound governance.

In other situations, where those conditions were absent, similar authorities have become instruments of patronage or inefficiency, as seen in aspects of the post-Hurricane Katrina reconstruction process in Louisiana, where recovery programmes faced sustained criticism over high-level bureaucratic delays, uneven implementation, and administrative dysfunction. The mechanism is not what is at issue: the governance arrangements surrounding the mechanism are. This is the test NaRRA faces. 

ENABLING SPEED 

Hurricane Melissa triggered the legislation, but the underlying problem existed long before. There has been long and frustrating history of passing ambitious legislation and creating new institutions, only for implementation to stall because the broader system of government has not been reformed alongside the new body. NaRRA was created because Jamaica has repeatedly struggled to convert vision into delivery. The approvals that take years when they should take days, the inter-agency coordination that fragments what should be coherent, the procurement processes that outlast the political will that drove the original project; these are the conditions NaRRA is meant to disrupt. 

The risk, however, is that NaRRA disrupts them only within its own perimeter, leaving the surrounding system unchanged. If the Authority moves relatively quickly while everything around it remains slow, we will face the same implementation crisis after the next major shock, because the systemic weaknesses will still be there. The real measure of NaRRA’s success is whether the lessons it generates about procurement, approvals, inter-agency coordination, and project management are fed back into broader public sector reform. 

NaRRA should be a learning institution from its first day of operation and should not preclude the government and the parliament from updating existing legislations and policies, generating greater efficiency as a minimum standard. 

The government’s Streamlining Processes for Efficiency and Economic Development (SPEED) initiative exists to carry out broader reform and eliminate inefficiency, and it must find its nexus with NaRRA. If and when implementation succeeds under NaRRA, policy shifts can begin to be immediately integrated into standard government processes. If they operate as separate exercises, both will be diminished.

ACCOUNTABILITY FRAMEWORK  

The oversight mechanisms written into the legislation, parliamentary reporting requirements, the work of the Public Accounts and Public Administration and Appropriations Committees, and the Auditor General’s real-time audit, are necessary but not all-encompassing. They are necessary because NaRRA operates with significant discretionary power, and discretionary power without credible accountability structures degrades over time, regardless of the intentions of those exercising it. 

However, reporting alone is insufficient if it only explains decisions after they have already been made. For transparency to function, it must be active, visible, and consequential.  

Given that the proposed Jamaica Reconstruction and Resilience Oversight Committee (JAMRROC) was not fully ventilated in the law, the government still has an opportunity through regulations to demonstrate the critical role that JAMRROC will play in ensuring that NaRRA realises its mandate while strengthening transparency through meaningful real-time oversight of project approvals, funding allocations, and implementation timelines. 

None of this is a reason to oppose NaRRA, but it is a reason to take the institution seriously, and to keep taking the governance concerns seriously. The proponents of the legislation were correct – there needs to be a mechanism capable of accelerating reconstruction and building long-term state capacity. Both the need for alacrity and concerns about direct governance can be true simultaneously, and both can be addressed by ensuring that NaRRA performs effectively and that the oversight apparatus around it functions credibly through strong regulations. 

The public will vaguely remember the parliamentary debate, but it will remember whether the roads were fixed, whether the schools were rebuilt, whether the drainage projects that were planned for years before the storm finally got done. They will notice if Jamaica became more resilient, or if it did not. That is the test NaRRA must pass. Everything else is a preamble.

Dr Aubrey Stewart is a public policy researcher and consultant evaluating the effectiveness of government policies and programmes. Email: aubreymstewartiv@gmail.com and astew055@fiu.edu