Built on Purpose

In the spring of 2012, I spent a week at the Harvard Kennedy School in a seminar on innovation for economic development. I still have the diploma, and I have carried it from office to office ever since, more useful to me than most things that hang on a wall for decoration.

What I actually took from that week was a framework, not a document. Places like Silicon Valley were not accidents of geography or culture. They were built, deliberately, on the alignment of three forces: a strong research university system generating ideas, private capital willing to fund their translation into products, and a government whose job was not to build the ecosystem itself, but to create the conditions under which the other two could function. Remove any one leg and the stool does not stand.

I have used that framework more times than I can count since. I have also never stopped noticing how rarely Latin America manages to build even one leg of it, let alone all three.

I spent part of my childhood in La Ceiba, on Honduras's northern coast, where my father worked as a regional bank manager. It was a beautiful, faded city even then — a former banana enclave that had once been one of the region's great shipping ports, its best years already behind it but still visible in the old railway and the wide, unhurried streets. We left after Hurricane Fifi tore through in 1974, taking most of what my parents owned. I was too young to grasp the scale of it. I only remember the sea, the trains, and how much I loved the place before we had to go.

Decades later, as a member of the committee responsible for approving governance frameworks within Honduras's special jurisdictions, I found myself pitching that same city's future to a board of trustees. The Technical University of Munich had agreed to open a campus in La Ceiba, anchoring a planned industrial zone. We had written the ZEDE framework specifically to allow zones to incorporate universities without separate government authorisation — because a functioning innovation ecosystem needs a serious research institution as one of its three legs, and Honduras's existing universities were unlikely to supply one within any useful timeframe.

For a moment, it looked as though Hondurans might study at one of Europe's finest engineering universities without leaving the country.

The opposition arrived quickly. NGOs and opposition politicians launched a campaign claiming the framework would displace Garífuna communities from ancestral land, and it went international within weeks — never mind that displacement was explicitly forbidden, with a proper legal defence mechanism, not a vague declaration. TUM withdrew, citing human rights concerns the framework had already foreclosed on paper.

What finally killed the broader possibility was a constitutional challenge brought by the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Honduras, arguing the clause violated its constitutional monopoly over higher education. UNAH is both the regulator of Honduran higher education and one of its principal operators — a conflict of interest that gave it every reason to resist competition. A claim aimed at a single article was later used by the Supreme Court to strike down the entire ZEDE framework, reversing five of its own prior rulings and a decade of precedent.

I have written elsewhere about regulatory incumbency — institutions that, once granted a monopoly, defend it regardless of what it costs the people it was meant to serve. I did not expect to find quite so literal an example in my own professional history.

No Latin American university, except the University of Buenos Aires, currently ranks among the world's top hundred. Australia has nine. Canada has four. Singapore, a city-state of under six million people, has two in the global top twelve. The UAE never tried building its way into that company from scratch — it imported world-class institutions directly, inviting NYU, the Sorbonne, and INSEAD to open genuine branch campuses with their own faculty and standards intact. That is exactly what we attempted with TUM in La Ceiba. The UAE was allowed to succeed. We were not.

I taught negotiation and dispute resolution for a time at UNITEC, and the reviews were good. But there is no tenure in Honduras, and the pay never justified the hours it took from my children when they still needed me home. I do not regret the choice. But I have never stopped being curious, and now that my children are grown, I would not mind returning to a classroom.

Two weeks ago, an organisation called Infinita City announced Startup Week on Roatán, inside Próspera — the same framework the Court declared unconstitutional — with a pitch event backed by five hundred investors. Nobody authorised this. Nobody needed to. Part of what the framework was built to make possible has survived anyway.

I think about La Ceiba often — the sea, the railway, the university that never opened. Honduras is not missing talent, or curiosity, or people willing to teach for the reviews rather than the pay. It is missing the third leg of the stool: a government able to get out of its own way long enough to let the other two do their work. Próspera suggests it is still possible. La Ceiba is the reminder of how easily it can be taken away.