Three reinforcing feedback loops help explain why crisis response across North America and the Caribbean often reproduces fragility and how changing the rules of rescue could unlock more durable resilience. Together, these loops shape whether public investment restores the status quo or rewrites the conditions that produced the crisis. 1. Moral hazard and the rescue-and-repeat cycle When decision-makers deploy public rescue as an unconditional safety net, risk-taking becomes rational. Losses are socialized while gains remain private. Incentives to invest in prevention, maintenance and equitable adaptation weaken. As vulnerabilities accumulate, crises become more frequent and costly. Political pressure then increases for rapid, no-strings disbursement, reinforcing the same risk logic and shifting long-term costs forward. 2. Disempowerment, policy failure and legitimacy loss When decision-makers manage crisis finance and recovery design through centralized, expert-driven processes, they often sideline the communities most affected. Local knowledge about lived risk, informal systems of care and place-based priorities are undervalued, leading to design interventions that underperform or create inequitable trade- offs. Trust declines when outcomes do not match needs. Participation costs rise, community authority weakens and future recovery efforts become even more top-down. Over time, this reduces the legitimacy needed to sustain long-horizon reforms. 3. Extractive recovery and enclave development When large-scale recovery and infrastructure investment primarily benefit external contractors, financial intermediaries, or foreign-owned assets, value flows outward while localities absorb long- term liabilities. This imbalance between who benefits and who bears the costs is evident in enclave patterns, in which infrastructure strains public systems, including grids, housing and land. At the same time, profits and decision-making rights reside elsewhere. As communities experience recovery as extraction rather than renewal, social cohesion erodes and resistance grows. Transaction costs increase and governments default to closed, expedited deals that deepen extraction and weaken public capacity. Together, these dynamics produce a rescue-and- repeat pattern. Each crisis triggers rapid funding that restores systems to pre-crisis vulnerability, weakens legitimacy and increases exposure to the next shock. This pattern is visible in rebuild-as-usual cycles across the region, including Puerto Rico’s grid rebuild,30 flood-rebuild-repeat dynamics in the United States,31 repeated high-intensity storm reconstruction across the Caribbean,32 and wildfire rebuilding cycles in Canada.33 The contexts differ, yet a shared governing logic persists: restore quickly, externalize long-term risk and defer structural change. ILLUSTRATIVE CASE Hurricane Melissa in Jamaica Hurricane Melissa’s devastation in Jamaica highlights both the promise and the gap this provocation addresses. Following Prime Minister Andrew Holness’s request for support, the Development Bank of Latin America and the Caribbean, the Caribbean Development Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank Group, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank Group assembled up to $6.7 billion over three years for recovery and reconstruction. This intervention was accompanied by rapid-disbursing liquidity of around $662 million enabled by Jamaica’s disaster- risk financing tools.34 At the same time, regional responders described a humanitarian emergency. Displacement, infrastructure damage, prolonged outages and urgent needs for shelter, food, water, medical supplies and trauma support required immediate action. Philanthropy mobilized to channel resources through trusted, community-rooted organizations across hard-hit areas and vulnerable groups.35This case shows that large-scale public and multilateral finance can move quickly and at scale. It also shows that those on the frontlines most clearly define equitable recovery priorities. Jamaica’s experience underscores the need to tie public rescue to binding, enforceable structural reforms co-created by decision-makers and affected communities. These reforms can include resilience standards for critical infrastructure, transparent targeting criteria, protections for displaced households and accountability mechanisms that track build-forward commitments over time. Across the United States, Canada and the Caribbean, there is a shared governance dilemma. Institutions and governments often optimize crisis finance for speed and political relief. Legitimacy, learning and long-term risk reduction remain weak by design. The question is whether decision- makers can redesign the rules of rescue so that each bailout reduces future vulnerability rather than reproducing it. Intergenerational Foresight: An Approach for Long-Term Responsibility in Governance 22

Intergenerational Foresight 2026