10
UWI TODAY
– SUNDAY 7TH JUNE, 2015
Ideas
Aplenty,
Inaction
the Curse
B y R e b e c c a R o b i n s o n
There is no doubt that the content
of this conference is
absolutely essential to the future of the Caribbean region.
The challenge is therefore not in the conception of ideas,
but in the more up-stream department of executing ideas.
Pro Vice-Chancellor and St. Augustine Campus Principal,
Professor Clement Sankat, in his opening remarks
underscored this point by saying that as a region, country
and community, “execution has bedeviled us.”
Shortly thereafter, the Deputy Executive Secretary of
ECLAC (Economic Commission for Latin America and
the Caribbean), Antonio Prado, brought what could have
been easily summative and future-positioning remarks in
his welcome. Prado said that the models and strategies used
to improve the lives of the peoples in the past are no longer
working, that small adjustments have not been enough in
a hyper-competitive world and there needs to be a tectonic
shift, a paradigm change.
Luke Williams’ Disrupt was the provocateur concept
for this conference and Prado’s address exemplified and
advanced a real-time meaning of being disruptive in the
Caribbean with razor accuracy. He said that disruptiveness
in the region is needed to challenge the persistent problems
associated with development and some revolutionary ways
of bringing this would be for:
(1) Institutions to strengthen a culture of openness with
the public at large as they are the groups who make
the products, provide the services and craft the
experiences. A robust collaborative relationship with
the private sector would challenge academics to find
practical solutions from their theoretical positions so
that the intersection of that relationship is the genesis
of disruptiveness.
A review of the proceedings from the Forum on the Future of the Caribbean, 5-7 May, 2015 held at The UWI and the Hyatt Regency Hotel, Trinidad & Tobago.
(2) Academics need to revise what and how they theorize
and conceptualize and leave behindmacro-thinking for
a deeper level, a micro-level of understanding that can
drive innovation and profitability in business, which
can be supplied to business to help them leap-frog over
past and known challenges to development.
(3) Business and industrymust share in the risks associated
with research and development which will benefit all.
Only networks of public and private partnerships can
find ways to raise productivity levels, cut the lengths
between growth and inequality and spread the access
to capacity building tools. Overall, the region has
to use these “ideas as recipes to rearrange things to
create new value and wealth” – the core tenet of Luke
Williams’ Disrupt as based on economist Paul Romer’s
new growth theory.
This frame was adequately clad with some specifics,
statistics and samples over the course of the three days but
it was on the last day, at almost the last session that arguably,
one of the most important drivers of disruptiveness was
presented: CARICOM has to reinvent itself. This call came
fromAndy Knight, Director of the Institute of International
Relations at The UWI.
“CARICOM is an important institution for Caribbean
unity but there is a perception that it has stalled or lost its
way. It is not enough to tinker with that institution it requires
a complete overhaul.
“Caribbean states are small, vulnerable and
dysfunctional. Pursuing individualistic foreign policy will
be a failure. We need to act as one, to pool our sovereignty,
to get rid of the egotistical political leadership and forge a
new convergence in terms of collective decision-making
and positions within multilateral bodies.”
Caribbean people, by their sheer enduring presence
are creative, adaptable overcomers, but there is a time in
the personal and collective histories of all people when
the survival strategy of ‘brute force’ must be examined and
tweaked, if not totally revamped to survival predicated on
‘brain power.’ And that is what this conference was about
– acknowledging that the future of the Caribbean lies in
using the accumulated intelligence along with the better
than ever access to technology, to find a way to make the
data meaningful in everyday life.
That is a big request and indeed a major disruption to
the current order as every speaker no matter the subject, in
some form acknowledged that the ideas and perspectives
they were offering in some way challenge the current order
andmodus operandi. Speakers therefore adequately aligned
to the conference themes: laying out futuristic goals for
the region; reviewing how the Caribbean collective can
converge; calling for the region’s debt burden to be lessened;
addressing poverty and other social imbalances; locating
innovative financing and finding allies for this drive in the
global village.
Andy Knight summarized some of the key issues on
the last day:
“It is time to streamline the plethora of regional
organizations that have multiplied in the region since
independence. Rationalization of their goals and functions
and elimination of unnecessary overlap would be part
of that streamlining. We need political leadership, but a
different type of political leadership than we have currently.
Corruption, white-colour crime, unaccountabilitymust give
way to clean and accountable governance.”
THE FUTURE OF THE CARIBBEAN
Professor Sir Hilary Beckles, UWI Vice-Chancellor.
Economist and Head of the Caribbean Centre for Competitiveness, Indera Sagewan-Alli with moderator Josanne Leonard.
Photos: ANEEL KARIM
