Socio-Institutional Adaptation in the Integration of Generative AI Across Caribbean Higher Education
Abstract
The article analyses the integration of generative artificial intelligence (AI) in Caribbean higher education as a process of socio-institutional adaptation, rather than a linear trajectory of technological adoption. Drawing on comparative evidence from Anglophone, Francophone, and Hispanophone Caribbean contexts, it demonstrates how universities actively reinterpret global AI paradigms in response to structural constraints, including climate vulnerability, infrastructural asymmetries, funding limitations, linguistic diversity, and persistent social inequalities. Higher education institutions emerge as pivotal mediating actors, embedding generative AI within learner-centred and hybrid pedagogical models that foreground critical thinking, ethical reasoning, and sustained human oversight. Beyond the education sector, AI is mobilised as a cross-cutting strategic lever supporting disaster risk reduction, precision agriculture, public health, workforce transformation, and public governance, thereby reinforcing its contribution to the Sustainable Development Goals. Haiti is strategically used to illustrate how, even in contexts of extreme fragility, contextualized training in generative AI and prompt engineering can foster innovation, social impact, and transnational academic cooperation. The analysis advances a normative argument that successful AI integration requires minimum institutional capacity, robust data governance, clear regulatory and ethical frameworks, and strengthened regional coordination. It concludes that Caribbean universities are not passive recipients of technological change but active architects of locally grounded digital futures, leveraging generative AI to enhance societal resilience, reduce structural inequalities, and inform context-sensitive public policy design.
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