Regulatory Delay and Liability Decay: The Chlordecone Disaster in the French West Indies

Persistent pollutants pose a legal-institutional problem because injury, causation, and fault often become observable only after the evidence required for liability has deteriorated. This paper analyzes the chlordecone disaster in Guadeloupe and Martinique as a case of regulatory delay and liability decay. Combining case evidence with a formal political-economy model, it examines how regulatory authorization, proof burdens, public enforcement, and compensation rules shape ex ante incentives under scientific uncertainty. The analysis uses the Hopewell, Virginia Kepone episode as an early warning signal and models authorization as continuing when organized producer rents and transition-cost claims exceed politically weighted harm and expected legal sanction. The framework yields five propositions linking delay to concentrated benefits, environmental persistence, territorial peripherality, endogenous information, and evidentiary decay. The French West Indies case is consistent with these mechanisms: chlordecone use continued until 1993; contamination and exposure remain widespread; administrative fault has been recognized; a 2026 statute acknowledges the state's share of responsibility; and criminal accountability remains limited. This paper shows how long-latency environmental harm makes evidentiary institutions part of the original incentive structure. It identifies policy implications for persistent pollutants, including sunset clauses, independent territorial review, exposure registries, archive-preservation duties, rebuttable compensation presumptions, and transition financing.