12
UWI TODAY
– SUNDAY 7TH JUNE, 2015
Still fighting battles of the past
We desperately need a more sophisticated
understanding of development
B y D r . M a t t h e w B i s h o p
The Caribbean is living through
its most protracted
development crisis since independence.This is reflected in a
series of acute challenges relating to stalled growth, soaring
debt burdens, deteriorating governance, crime and violence,
regional disintegration, and climate change. Shortly before
his untimely passing, Norman Girvan suggested that these
problems collectively amounted to truly ‘existential threats.’
To have any chance of dealing with them successfully, a
concerted regional response is required.
However, these difficulties are emerging at the exact
moment when the regional integration process is itself
in marked decline. Since 2011, the CSME process has
been ‘paused’ and there is a very real sense of foreboding
regarding the future of CARICOM. In any case, regardless
of the extent of the malaise, even were these institutions
operating smoothly, they were designed for a very different
time: one that was considerably more benign than a
contemporary era characterised by this daunting list of
problems.
As the Caribbean tries to get to grips with these
challenges, the wider context has also changed dramatically
beyond the global crisis in quite contradictory and confusing
ways. On the one hand, the broader dominance of a liberal
international economy in whichmultinational corporations
and mega-trading blocs are relentlessly globalising trade
seems increasingly entrenched. Yet on the other, the hyper-
neoliberal capitalism of the past is actually also becoming
rather passé as powerful emerging countries such as the
so-called ‘BRICS’ – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South
Africa – engage in what are often quite unorthodox and
distinctive development strategies. These broad shifts, then,
are re-shaping the contours of a new structural order into
which the Caribbean must insert itself and find new ways
to approach its own development.
The problem, though, is that our intellectuals and
policymakers are often fighting the battles of the past. Two
broad narratives and separate communities have dominated
Caribbean development debate over the past few decades.
One group takes up a radical position, and is deeply
suspicious of global capitalism, seeing primarily threats and
new patterns of exploitation that mirror the neo-colonialism
of the past. The other, which is considerably more orthodox
and neoliberal, tends to be excessively optimistic regarding
the opportunities available to the Caribbean by becoming
‘competitive’ in a global market economy by making the
‘private sector’ the ‘engine of growth’ and letting the market
weave its supposed magic. Neither group listens to each
other, and both are to some extent stuck in the past: the
former are still rehearsing the arguments of the 1960s and
1970s; the latter continue to play the tired Washington
Consensus hits of the 1980s.
On the panel discussing Vulnerability in Small Island States, from left, Dr Sebastian Auguste,
Dr Matthew Bishop and Mrs. Indera Sagewan Alli.
Photo: ANEEL KARIM
Dr Matthew L. Bishop
is a Lecturer at the Institute of International Relations, The UWI, St. Augustine.
This is an abridged version of his presentation at the Forum on the Future of the Caribbean,
“Situating the Caribbean within the new Global Political Economy of Development.”
The full text of that presentation can be read online at
In 2015 theworld is changing rapidly, and the Caribbean
desperately requires a more sophisticated understanding of
development. A key aspect of this is a nuanced grasp of
the relationship between the public and private sector, and
the role that this plays in development processes. In short,
between the two positions briefly caricatured here, there is
space for a genuinely ‘developmentalist’ synthesis.
This is something that is characterised not by
unthinkingly ‘opening up’ or ‘closing off,’ but rather by a
genuinely strategic approach that seeks to shape economic
processes to serve developmental outcomes. We wonder
continually why the Caribbean private sector has failed
to stimulate high growth rates for the past thirty or forty
years: the radicals had the answer, which is that we have
a fundamentally rent-seeking, extractive capitalist class
which engages in import-buy-sell activity rather than
production. This cannot be overcome without purposeful
State intervention to change these logics of behaviour, but
too many are still wedded to the trite orthodoxies that have
been passed down fromWashington and Brussels over the
years that State intervention is always ‘bad’ and the market
is always ‘good.’
Yet this is clearly far from the case. Of course, a vibrant
private sector can certainly be a boon for growth and
development. But it can also be rapacious and parasitic,
misallocating capital and extracting wealth rather than
generating it. So, arguing about a bigger role for the private
sector rather misses the point: it is the nature of private
economic activity that matters, not the extent of it. The
same is true of the State: debates about a ‘bigger’ or ‘smaller’
State are insultingly glib: we need a developmental State that
intervenes selectively to shape the context in which private
actors engage, in order to stimulate private sector activity
that is developmentally-inclined.
Today, all of those countries that are enjoying rapid
growth and development are doing so with just these kinds
of penetrating institutions. Of course, countries as disparate
as China, Brazil and India, as well as smaller countries like
Malta, Singapore or Mauritius, are certainly globalising
themselves, and working hard to find their niches within
globalisation, as the Caribbean must too. But they are not
doing so in a passive way. Global change is not happening
to them: they are rather seeking to construct and sculpt
the context in which their entrepreneurs and businesses
are engaging with the world, and also challenging them to
produce real innovations and wealth, not to simply extract
rents behind privileged and protected market positions.
This is the primary lesson that Caribbean policymakers
need to take on board, and quickly. Development will never
occur if it is left to either chance encounters with often-
destructive global market processes, or a largely rent-seeking
local private sector. The Caribbean urgently needs to build
purposive public institutions, at the regional level, that
can shape, as effectively as possible, its engagement with
the new global context by simultaneously restructuring
internally and negotiating externally. This is what Mariana
Mazzucato, in one of the most influential books of the past
year or so, terms The Entrepreneurial State. It should be
required reading for everyone in the region.
“Firstly, we do far too much to let political actors – politicians, regional technocrats, civil society groups, the
business elite, academics and commentators, even ourselves as interested individuals – off the proverbial hook.
Things do not simply happen according to an unavoidable, impersonal, celestial logic, and the CSME did not
pause itself. Passive sentences that are written and spoken without subjects consciously elide agency, and they
serve only to obscure deeply political choices made by often-powerful actors.”
THE FUTURE OF THE CARIBBEAN
