The geographies of digital public monetary exclusion: examining the territorialising effects of central bank digital currencies in the Caribbean

This article contributes to emerging debates within economic and financial geography on Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) by examining how they may produce financial exclusion through a re-territorialisation of ‘public’ money. It does this by conducting a fieldwork based comparative study of two of the first CBDC schemes to have rolled out anywhere in the world: the Bahamas’ Sand Dollar and the Eastern Caribbean’s DCash. The article argues that financial exclusion is being produced in the two cases through a complex and contingent interaction between the specific private permissioned, intermediated, account-based CBDC ‘models’ that the respective central banks have opted for and the small island, postcolonial contexts into which CBDCs have been introduced, which are characterised by limited institutional capacity, infrastructural frailties, urban–rural and digital divides, and specific socio-cultural attitudes to money and payment. The article identifies four main channels through which public monetary exclusion is being generated via these interactions between technology and context: through the introduction of identity requirements as a condition of CBDC access; through unevenness in the spatial and temporal distribution of the infrastructural systems upon which CBDCs depend, including the merchant network; through both market and institutional mediation; and through ‘practice’ and ‘value’- based exclusion. While observations about unevenness in the mediating effects of digital forms of money have long been observed by geographers, the article argues that what makes the case of CBDCs unique is that it highlights the risks of redrawing the boundary between who is included and excluded in a form of public money – typically understood as a resource that should be universal and inclusive.