Repositioning the Caribbean within globalisation

Under the backdrop of the Commonwealth Caribbean moving toward a new technocratic model of development to reposition itself within the global economy, this paper examines three key policy agendas that have emerged to drive, guide and inform this process: competitiveness, diplomacy and governance. It focuses on highlighting progress made and problems encountered.

The authors argue that the Commonwealth Caribbean's current crisis of development is perhaps the gravest it has faced in the post-independence era. It has been generated by the region's failure to establish for itself a viable role within the wider context of the globalisation of the world economy. Real progress can be made only if the Commonwealth Caribbean adopts the 'functional equivalent' at the regional level of the kind of 'development state' that was so successful in East Asia. This will involve restructuring Caribbean Community (CARICOM) to become more innovative, proactive and directive than has been the case to date.

Key concluding points include:

• what emerges from the preceding analysis is an overriding need to create a Commonwealth Caribbean 'functional equivalent' at the regional level for the kind of 'developmental states' that were so crucial in the 1980s and 1990s in East Asia in breaking out of the impasse of underdevelopment in that part of the world
  
• with only a small number of exceptions, theorists concerned with Commonwealth Caribbean development have ignored the 'developmental state' model, most presuming that it somehow did not apply to a region that had as great a commitment to democracy as to development
  
• all Commonwealth Caribbean countries need to focus hard on the issue of competitiveness, improve their development diplomacy and take their interest in the reform of governance further than they have done thus far. But in the discussion of all three agendas that these goals will be extraordinarily difficult to deliver at national level alone
  
• the establishment of a CARICOM Commission is a necessity, but that it cannot be enough on its own - a new tier of three or four ex-regional politicians appointed as Commissioners will not be transformative of itself
  
• the Commonwealth Caribbean may at long last be on the verge of setting up a Commission, but it must beware of once again doing too little too late.