From courtroom to Crop Over: Linking climate justice to cultural expression

Last week, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) delivered what sounds like a simple matter of common sense: that a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment is a human right — and that states who fail to protect it, including by regulating corporate polluters, may be held accountable under international law, including through claims for reparations.

 

The ruling makes clear: climate change is not just a scientific or economic issue — it is a matter of justice. For small island states like Barbados, who continue to bear the brunt of emissions we did not produce, the implications are far-reaching.

 

And the timing is no less significant. This decision lands in the heart of our cultural season — Crop Over, Emancipation Day, and CARIFESTA XV. More than coincidence, this convergence is an opening not just to reflect, but to act—to reimagine freedom as the power to confront climate injustice, resist global inequality, and build the cultural and civic tools needed to shape the future on our own terms.

The ICJ’s opinion is not binding, but it affirms a growing international consensus. States that fail to prevent climate harm — including from corporations within their borders — may be responsible under international law. For vulnerable nations, it sets the foundation for future litigation and gives moral weight to longstanding demands for climate reparations.

Barbados has led in climate diplomacy. But law alone doesn’t shift culture. And without cultural pressure, political will wanes. That’s where emancipation — and mas — come in.

Unlike in many countries, Emancipation Day in Barbados lands in the crescendo of Crop Over — just three days before Grand Kadooment. This timing collapses the usual distance between remembrance and revelry. It also raises a bigger question: What if carnival didn’t only mark the end of Crop Over, but the beginning of a new civic imagination?

Emancipation in 1838 ended chattel slavery. But today’s emancipation must confront new entrapments: economic precarity, environmental collapse, and cultural silencing. If we want more than symbolic freedom, we need to link legal gains with expressive power.

Grand Kadooment allows us to speak without permission, to perform what matters, to claim space. This year, at Lucian Carnival, individual masqueraders used costumes to speak on issues ranging from popular music to pyramid schemes. Their messages weren’t part of band themes. They were citizen interventions — declarations in feathers and cardboard.

Artists across the region — from Nadia Huggins’ photographic reflections on climate and the sea, to Leanne Russell’s digitally reimagined archives, to La Vaughn Belle’s multimedia practice spanning ceramics, film, and memory — are already showing what cultural clarity can look like.

We inherited a legacy of using mas to question authority. Tuk bands, donkey carts, and masked revellers once roamed neighbourhoods during Crop Over, mocking elites and telling inconvenient truths. But shifts in legislation — like the Highway Code Act banning masks on the road — helped erode that practice. Still, the road remains a stage. What would it mean for more revellers to treat Kadooment not only as  spectacle, but as statement? Not as protest, but as provocation — using the space to express hope, grief, defiance, and imagination?

Barbados can’t let the ICJ ruling sit as legal theory. Cultural expression — especially through Kadooment — is a vital, underused arena to make that right visible, public, and actionable. Joy isn’t a distraction from justice; it’s one of its most recognisable signals. The freedom to wuk up, to dress as we choose, to take over the road are rehearsals of the kind of agency the ICJ’s ruling affirms: the right to shape the world we live in.