Protection as vulnerability: the conch paradox in complex adaptive systems
Why do protective adaptations in complex adaptive systems sometimes become sources of cascading vulnerability, and through what mechanisms does the paradox operate?
Research
The programme
Most work on small island economies treats them as a special category, too small for the standard models and too particular to generalise from. My interest runs the other way. The variables that matter in any economy are all present here, compressed into a range you can observe. A shock reaches employment, public finance, and household welfare within months. A protective institution shows its unintended consequences within a decade. The mechanisms are the ones operating everywhere. What an island gives you is a timescale short enough to study them.
The dissertation works from two literatures. Complex adaptive systems theory gives me the object of study: an economy that reorganises around a disturbance rather than settling back to a prior equilibrium, and whose protective adaptations can become the channel for the next cascade. Dynamic capabilities theory gives me something to measure, since it specifies what a government or a firm has to be able to do, sense, seize, and reconfigure, before any reorganisation happens. Much of the resilience literature leaves adaptive capacity as a residual, whatever is left over when the measured variables fail to explain recovery. I want it specified.
The empirical work runs on the six territories of the Dutch Caribbean, which make a good comparison set. Aruba, Curaçao, and Sint Maarten are autonomous countries within the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Bonaire, Sint Eustatius, and Saba are special municipalities of the Netherlands proper. They share a region, a colonial history, an exposure profile, and a currency architecture, and they differ sharply in constitutional status. Where their outcomes diverge, sovereignty is a plausible cause rather than a confound.
I am supervised by Prof. Kees Boersma (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), with Prof. Mark Sanders (Maastricht University) as co-promotor and Dr. Eric Mijts (University of Aruba) as daily supervisor.
Dissertation strands
The dissertation is article-based. All five studies are in progress and co-authored; none is yet published, and they are listed here as work in progress rather than as output.
Leadership tenure and institutional adaptive capacity in the Dutch Caribbean
How does the duration of leadership tenure affect institutional adaptive capacity in post-autonomy small island states, and what structural mechanisms explain the persistence of entrenchment?
Political sovereignty and governance-entrepreneurship co-shaping during COVID-19
How did autonomous and directly governed constitutional arrangements shape the interaction between government and entrepreneurs during the pandemic, and what does the difference reveal about the relationship between sovereignty and adaptive capacity?
Digital competence as adaptive capacity in Dutch Caribbean digital transformation
How do governance and entrepreneurship jointly shape the development of digital competence in resource-constrained economies navigating a sociotechnical transition?
When modernisation shifts vulnerability: food system resilience in the Dutch Caribbean
Which food system adaptations get prioritised in small island economies, and what happens to resilience when a modern solution displaces a vulnerability rather than removing it?
Books
The Conch Paradox: Rethinking Resilience
Searching for Binding Constraints on Economic Growth in Aruba
Articles and chapters
Being prepared for exogenous shocks: exploring strategies to transform the food systems of Curaçao, Aruba and Sint Maarten
Strengthening economic resilience in small island states: a situational analysis of food entrepreneurship, with a focus on the Cucumis anguria cucumber in Aruba
Forecasting tourism demand through search queries and machine learning
Relevant search-query features are identified through Google Correlate, and machine learning methods are applied to individual source-market series before aggregation, using monthly arrivals to Aruba from 1994 to 2016. Estimating the source markets separately and aggregating afterwards outperforms forecasting the total directly.
De economische consequenties van de verdwijning van Natalee Holloway
The disappearance cost Aruba between 0.5 and 2.1 per cent of GDP in 2005 and between 2.5 and 4.0 per cent in 2006.
Working papers
Papers in the Cornerstone Economics series are open access, deposited on Zenodo, and carry a DOI.
The truncated toolkit: disaster risk finance and the limits of autonomy in the Dutch Caribbean
The central banks of the Dutch Caribbean hold more foreign reserves than they need to defend their pegs, while their governments buy almost none of the instruments that finance disaster recovery more cheaply. Part of the gap is structural, since autonomous countries within the Kingdom cannot tap the emergency credit lines or issue the catastrophe bonds their independent neighbours use. Part of it is a choice. The paper reads the toolkit as a risk-layering stack and separates the layers that are foreclosed from the ones that are simply unused.
The diaspora multiplier: Curaçao at the 2026 World Cup and what the resident-population unit cannot see
Curaçao is the smallest country ever to qualify for the men’s World Cup, and the obvious inference is that the FIFA ranking has missed something. Across 202 nations it has not: rank moves systematically with resident population, and Curaçao is over-performing its population by around eighty places. What the resident-population unit cannot see is a multi-generation diaspora concentrated in European professional football and made eligible by the parent-and-grandparent rule. For small states with large diasporas, resident population may be the wrong denominator for competitive capacity.
Policy reports
Exploring amplified food security vulnerabilities in Curaçao, Aruba and Sint Maarten amidst the COVID-19 pandemic
Advancing disaster risk financing in Sint Maarten
Curaçao food security assessment: enhancing the resilience of vulnerable households while boosting sustainable economic growth
Building resilience in Aruba’s food security during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond
Diagnostics on the technology divide on Aruba
A baseline of the digital divide on Aruba using the OECD framework for digital inclusion, covering access, use, and skills at island level.
A second strand: electoral systems in small assemblies
Running alongside the dissertation is a smaller line of work on what happens to electoral formulas when the assembly is very small and the district is the whole country. Most of the literature on seat allocation is calibrated on assemblies of a few hundred seats. At twenty-one seats the choice of allocation rule can decide who governs, and the thresholds implicit in the formula behave in ways the standard results do not anticipate.
The high-magnitude paradox: threshold effects in single-district small assemblies