CANARI pays tribute to long-standing colleague and friend, Professor Dennis Pantin

CANARI would like to extend its condolences to the family of Professor Dennis Pantin and colleagues at the Sustainable Economic Development Unit (SEDU) for the untimely loss of such a warm human being and exceptional academic and visionary. Many of us worked closely with Dennis on CANARI projects and he became both an inspiration and a friend in the process. His legacy to CANARI has been a number of papers and case studies, most recently those that made the case for, and demonstrated suitable approaches to, economic valuation of environmental goods and services in Caribbean small island states. In the process, he helped us and many of his other readers, to understand aspects of economics that had previously been obscure. But we will remember him best for his oral contributions at meetings, and particularly the various CANARI Action Learning Groups in which he participated. He had an extraordinary ability to analyse and explain complex issues in ways that all his audience (and they were often very diverse) could understand, whilst nevertheless making it clear that the complexity existed and would require multi-faceted solutions. By reframing a problem in a completely new way, his interventions often dissolved rising tensions between people with apparently polarised views. Most importantly, he was not content just to theorise about approaches and solutions but dedicated a great deal of time and energy to testing and applying them, whether in his work at SEDU, his partnerships with other research institutes like CANARI, or in the organisations such as the Constitution Reform Forum and Civil Society Coalition of Trinidad and Tobago, which he helped to found. He will be much missed by all of us.

Back to News Items >>