How Easy Is It For A Country To Change Its Time Zone?

Given people’s disdain towards changing the clocks back and forth with the shifting of the seasons, you’d think countries would be put off from doing something like changing their time zone entirely. Still, several places have done so over the years – so how easy is it?

Turns out, it’s simpler than you might think – just ask Kiribati. Back in 1995, the government didn’t just make a time zone change, but shifted the entire international dateline so that all of its islands were on one side of it, beginning on New Year’s Day. 

It did so with little notice to the rest of the world, and it was a declaration rather than an attempt at seeking international permission. After all, while there are standardized time zones, there’s no global authority that’s going to come after you for deviating from them.

“We just did it and told the world,” Michael Walsh, the Kiribati Honorary Consul to the UK, told BBC News in 2011.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s no planning or hurdles involved, at least not within the country seeking to make a change. In southern Chile, people in the Magallanes region weren’t happy when it was announced that the country reversed its decision on cancelling daylight saving time, arguing that daylight hours in the region were too short as a result of this change. It took a change in the law to keep the region in the same time zone all year round, separate from the rest of the country.

In Kiribati’s case, there wasn’t much chance of people within the country kicking up a fuss. The nation is made up of 33 islands, only nine of which, containing 20 percent of the population, were in another time zone. Some were uninhabited.

That’s not to say it wasn’t worth it. The key here is remembering that Kiribati was straddling the international date line, and that meant some neighboring islands had a time difference of 23 hours between them. If that’s not an administrative nightmare, I don’t know what is. Time zones deviating from the standard might be a pain in the butt for mapmakers and anyone else outside of the country, but for the people of Kiribati, that’s probably worth it compared to the alternative.

But it’s not always about solving logistical problems – the ease with which a country can declare its own time zone means that doing so can be a convenient way to flex your political power on the international stage. 

One of the best examples of that was perhaps seen in 2007 Venezuela, when then-president Hugo Chávez created a new time zone, shifting the country’s clocks back by 30 minutes to UTC -4:30. Chávez had said that the change was made to give schoolchildren more daylight, but many saw it as a power move.

“It's just one more example of when Chavez gets an idea into his head and gets to put it into place,” Shannon O'Neil, a Latin America expert at the US-based Council on Foreign Relations, told BBC News in 2007. “There is an aspect of Venezuela striking out on its own, asserting that 'We don't need to follow international dictates'.”

Venezuela would eventually return to its previous time zone, UTC -4:00, in 2016.

Changing time zones can also strengthen international relations. "Countries might choose a different time zone to be with their trading partners or political allies," said David Rooney, at the time the curator of timekeeping (top-tier job title) at the National Maritime Museum in London.

“[Time] is to do with people, politics and shifting alliances and relationships,” Rooney added. “It is by no means straightforward.”