David Southgate

A fundamental paradigm of our political economy is that government has an ethical and moral obligation to intervene when markets fail. The paradigm is central to the Market Failure Doctrine. The doctrine recognizes that rational self-interest produces undesirable externalities. It advances welfare economics on the… Read More »Challenging Market Failure in a Climate-Vulnerable Community: How La Playa Produces Its Own Public Goods

Two months after Russia invaded Ukraine, one of the world’s largest superyachts quietly moored at the Port of Ponce, Puerto Rico. EU economic sanctions froze the Russian owner’s assets, cutting off funds that could support Russia’s war effort and halting payments to Le Grand Bleu’s… Read More »What’s That Russian Oligarch’s Yacht Doing in the Port of Ponce? Hydrocolonial Currents, LNG, and the New Global Order

In a previous blog (The Port that Transformed Barrio Playa’s Shoreline),I examined the physical transformation of Barrio Playa, Ponce, through a hydrocolonial lens. The discussion attempts to illuminate how U.S. colonial expansion and port development reengineered the coastline and displaced vulnerable communities in the name… Read More »Erasing Communities: How Progress Displaced the Playeros of Ponce

The shipping cranes and cargo terminal at Puerto Rico’s Port of Ponce are linked to a powerful, official discourse that can be traced across a century. Less visible is the dispossession required to create port infrastructure, dispossession that is largely absent from academic and planning… Read More »The Port that Transformed Barrio Playa’s Shoreline

Let me begin by plainly stating what I do, something I hinted at in my first blog, “The Ethical Disclosure that Begins this Story.” In the past year I deepened relations in my geographically focused area of investigation, Barrio Playa in the Municipality of Ponce,… Read More »What I Do and How: Embedded Research for Hazard Adaptation

Community resilience hubs have emerged as powerful means to address social and environmental inequities in the face of climate change. Yet despite their virtues and popularity, I’ve begun to question if resilience hubs effectively respond to neighbors’ climate traumas in ways that foster emotional resilience.… Read More »Beyond Bricks and Mortar: Fostering Emotional Resilience Through Community Hubs in Puerto Rico’s Coastal Neighborhoods