Mia Mottley

Mia Mottley made Barbados a republic in 2021 and has become the loudest small-state voice in climate finance. She was called to the bar in England, entered the Barbadian parliament at twenty-nine, and in 2018 led her party to win every one of the thirty seats - and then did it again in 2022, which is without precedent in a Westminster system. She inherited a debt of about a hundred and sixty per cent of GDP and restructured it. The removal of the British monarch as head of state on 30 November 2021, the fifty-fifth anniversary of independence, made Barbados the first country to do so in nearly thirty years, with Sandra Mason installed as president and Rihanna declared a national hero at the ceremony. Her international standing rests on the Bridgetown Initiative, which argues that the terms on which small island states borrow make climate adaptation impossible: they pay high interest because they are exposed to hurricanes, and cannot adapt because the interest is high. It proposes disaster clauses that suspend repayment after a catastrophe, and lending on much longer terms. The World Bank and the IMF have adopted parts of it. Her speech at the 2021 climate conference asking what two degrees means for Barbados was the most quoted of the meeting. Barbados stayed in the Commonwealth. The republic came without a referendum, which drew criticism at home, and her thirty-nil majorities are the reason it was possible. She has co-chaired international panels on debt and has been named in every list of influential people that exists, which she has said is useful only insofar as it gets small states into rooms they are otherwise not in.

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