JAMAICA | UNESCO Taps Dr Hickling Gordon, Jamaican Cultural Policy Architect, for Paris Meeting
Dr. Deborah Hickling Gordon, Lecturer in Cultural Studies and the Cultural and Creative Economy at The University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona.
MONTEGO BAY, Jamaica, November 13, 2026 — When the world's cultural policymakers gather at UNESCO headquarters in Paris today to work out how to turn the promise of "cultural rights" into something ordinary citizens can actually feel, a Jamaican will be at the table.
Dr Deborah Hickling Gordon, Lecturer in Cultural Studies and the Cultural and Creative Economy at the Institute of Caribbean Studies, UWI Mona, has been invited by Nayef Al-Fayez, Assistant Director-General of UNESCO's Culture Sector, to present as an expert at the UNESCO Expert Meeting on the Implementation of Cultural Rights on November 13.
It is a signal honour. It is also an indictment.
The meeting builds on MONDIACULT 2025 in Barcelona, where more than 160 ministerial delegations declared culture a human right and pressed for its inclusion as a standalone goal in the United Nations' post-2030 development agenda.
The world's cultural experts will identify practical approaches that can be adapted to different cultural and institutional settings, and their input will shape a new UNESCO policy guidance note to help Member States design policies that promote equitable access to, participation in, and contribution to cultural life.
In plain language: UNESCO wants to know how to move governments from declaration to delivery. And it has asked a woman whose own government has spent the better part of two decades not quite delivering.
A policy twenty-three years in the making
Consider the record. Jamaica's last fully adopted national cultural policy, Towards Jamaica the Cultural Superstate, dates to 2003. Hickling Gordon convened the National Cultural and Creative Industries Commission from 2014 to 2016 and authored the cultural economy framework for the revised policy between 2013 and 2019 — work that passed through a 2017 draft and a 2019 redraft and then sat.
Only on October 7, 2025, did Culture Minister Olivia Grange table the Green Paper on the National Policy for Culture, Entertainment and the Creative Economy in the House of Representatives. A Green Paper is a consultation document, not a policy. Thirteen months on, Jamaica still has no White Paper.
Belize, meanwhile, is not waiting. Through UNESCO, Hickling Gordon is currently facilitating the development of Belize's National Strategy and Roadmap for its cultural sector. She has led capacity-building in cultural-policy reporting in St Lucia and Trinidad and Tobago. The region — and now the world — is buying what Kingston has been slow to implement.
She named the problem herself at a Caribbean Development Bank forum in 2024, identifying the two gravest threats to Caribbean cultural economies as a scarcity of data and a scarcity of political will, in a sector too many leaders still dismiss as "just singing and dancing."
The Government's case
To be fair to the Government, there is a case to answer with. The Green Paper is a ten-year roadmap to 2035, not a press release. Hurricane Melissa struck within weeks of its tabling and upended every ministry's calendar. In April 2026, Jamaica ratified the 1970 UNESCO Convention against illicit trafficking in cultural property and aligned it with amendments to the Jamaica National Heritage Trust Act.
And Grange has put a number on the stakes: the 2025 Bluedot CCI Survey estimates the cultural and creative industries contribute J$107 billion a year, some 5.1 per cent of GDP.
Those are real achievements. But a roadmap is not a journey, and a survey is not a statute.
A roadmap is not a journey, and a survey is not a statute.
A scarce national asset
UNESCO did not pick a name from a hat. Hickling Gordon served on the UNESCO Expert Facility on the Diversity of Cultural Expressions from 2019 to 2022, holds a PhD in cultural economy, and has spent three decades moving between the television studio, the policy table and the lecture hall. She is an associate of the P.J. Patterson Institute for Africa-Caribbean Advocacy and sits on the Pan African Enterprise Economic Research Council in Trinidad and Tobago.
That makes her one of a critically small number of Jamaicans who can do what Paris is asking: translate the language of cultural rights into budgets, institutions and law. Jamaica produces world-class artists in industrial quantities. It produces cultural-policy architects by the handful — and it has a habit of consulting them abroad more readily than at home.
What UNESCO is asking in Paris is the question Jamaica has dodged since 2003: not what cultural rights are, but how a small state with a J$107-billion creative sector and the most recognisable cultural brand on earth actually guarantees them to a sound-system operator in Grange Hill or a Kumina drummer in St Thomas.
If the guidance note Hickling Gordon helps write eventually lands on a desk at the Ministry in Kingston, the irony will be complete: Jamaica importing from Paris the advice it declined to take from Mona.
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