Abstract
This article analyses the relevance of the SDGs to the needs of the Small Islands Developing States of the Caribbean Community. The article situates the SDGs within a critical interrogation of the social change logic of the universalizing global economic system. Thus, I argue that the SDGs, while recognizing some key economic and environmental concerns of the Caribbean Community, are hamstrung by their commitment to the unequal power structure of the neoliberal capitalist development model. Finally, this article calls upon regional and global social movements, and increased economic regionalism as ways of empowering Caribbean social change.
Keywords
Introduction and background
The new millennium ushered in an era of the global development intervention, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), that were arguably more deliberate, more far reaching and supposedly more encompassing than any other previous development initiative at any time in the post-war era. The MDGs came to an end in 2015, and a new set of goals, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), have been adopted to replace them. However, while there have been extensive practical and critical engagements with the form, content and implementation of these goals, particularly the MDGs, in various countries and regions, very little work has been done in the context of the Caribbean. This is a region with an extended history of colonialism, populated by Small Island Developing States (SIDSs) that have significant socio-economic and environmental vulnerabilities. Therefore, given the environmental and economic circumstances that characterize the region, any intellectual and practical engagement with the global development goals is incomplete without a discussion about their relevance—intellectual and practical—to the Caribbean. Yet, there has been little discussion in this regard. This article aims to contribute to this conversation by addressing the question, how relevant are the SDGs to the particular development problems of Caribbean countries?
This examination of the SDGs’ relevance for charting the Caribbean’s development trajectories is guided by locating them within the dominant conceptualization of social change and ideas about human progress, and how it should be pursued. These ideas of progress are found to engender a universalist Western vision that privileges Western power, and which shapes global economic and institutional arrangements that favour powerful Western stakeholders. While recognizing that societies from the Global South do re-interpret, resist and even attempt to tread alternative paths to social change, the article situates the current dominance of Western capitalist framework as a coercive mechanism of social change. These ideas about the nature of change are further juxtaposed with the scholarship that suggests that many of the problems of the Global South are due to inequities of the current neoliberal global capitalist system in which poor countries are structurally excluded from the decision-making process, and therefore the spoils of the economic system. A key question that arises then is how do the SDGs address this credible and sustained criticism, particularly in their relevance to the Caribbean region, which in addition to economic problems, face exacerbating environmental vulnerabilities?
There is a clear understanding that these goals, particularly the SDGs, are meant to be global and should be applied by each country as they see fit (United Nations, 2015a). Even though this might be the case, I posit that the SDGs do present a template for what development issues ought to be addressed and how countries should address them. That is, the SDGs have embedded within their framework the guiding structures for how countries should use and apply them. This framework outlines what areas of development are included, what is excluded, the mechanisms for implementation and how we are expected to measure progress. This is why, for example, there are defined goals, targets and indicators. In other words, these goals (and their related targets) are not just abstract aspirations; they have clear parameters and frameworks guiding them. Thus, in significant ways, the SDGs represent (or are part of) a contemporary development discourse. Therefore, how countries will apply them may vary less in kind than in degree. As a result, there is merit to looking at the framework of the SDGs as representing a particular development discourse, and therefore worthy of analysis. Still, because countries and regions supposedly have some autonomy—even within the limits of the discourse that the goals represent—to apply them based on their needs, it is important that their analysis takes place within context.
I start this article by briefly historicizing and contextualizing Caribbean development, showing how the region has come to be where it is economically and environmentally. I then look at dominant conceptualizations of social change and the ways in which particular Western ideas shape the current global economic system, and the implications for developing regions such as the Caribbean. After analysing how dominant concepts of social change are reflected in the SDGs, I end by suggesting modes of challenging the current neoliberal capitalist development model in order to open up credible means of realizing the positive aspirations of the goals. Thus, the article ends by calling upon regional and global social movements and increased economic regionalism as ways of empowering Caribbean social change.
Key Caribbean development issues
The modern Caribbean has been shaped through much of the economic and political history of the 20th century, and therefore represents a suitable context to examine the application of the Sustainable Development Goals. Caribbean countries—more specifically, those constituting the regional body, the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) 1 —share a history of being former enslaved and colonized societies. This is a region with a complex history of external imposition but also vibrant internal resistance. As part of the ‘New World’, the Caribbean experienced the savagery of the colonial enterprise through slavery and colonization, but also resistance through slave rebellions, and anti-colonial and independence movements. These processes radically changed Caribbean societies, resulting in the extinction of peoples and the destruction of cultures, and the making of new hybrid cultures built from various peoples from around the world. The result is that the Caribbean is ‘the world’s most racially and culturally diverse region’ (Valerio-Holguín, 2010: 707) ‘and perhaps the most globalized of world regions’ (Klak, 1998: 6). Hall (2001: 27) engages this remarkable ethnic and cultural diversity, noting that ‘not a single island looks like any other’ and that ‘everybody in the Caribbean comes from somewhere else’. In many ways, one can view this diversity as a metaphor for the various Caribbean responses to dominant political economic discourses of development.
The post-war era began a period of national independence for these countries (except Haiti who gained independence in 1804). The capitalist industrial modernization enterprise of the post-Second World War period saw the Caribbean attempt to develop its societies along the lines of their former Western ‘masters’ and, in some cases, to integrate into the global economy as newly independent states. However, Caribbean political, economic and cultural history is far from linear, singular or consistently dominated uncontested by global discourses of development, as I explore more extensively later. Inspired by more radical Marxist socialist models, the early post-independence era saw significant regional efforts at alternative political economic governance to the then dominant capitalist modernization approaches that many newly independent developing countries found inequitable. As the region entered the 1980s, the Western Keynesian capitalist modernization model gave way to neoliberal market approaches that challenged state-led development and largely ended Caribbean alternative socialist experiments. Yet, as Klak (1998) correctly notes, there is a particular affinity between earlier modernization conceptualizations of development and today’s neoliberal economic ideas. And even while there have been various incarnations, creolized versions, and even radical responses to these dominant international development models in the Caribbean, development pursuit in the region has had mixed results. There clearly have been some notable successes, such as comparatively high literacy rates and other educational measures of progress; health achievements, such as lowered infant mortality rates; and effective management of certain vaccinable diseases. However, there are also some significant unfulfilled political economic promises. As is well documented elsewhere (for example, Manley, 1982, 1987, 1990; Meeks, 2001; Williams, 1993), Caribbean dalliances with modernist development have led to high levels of indebtedness and the exposure of the structural limitations of the region. For example, Caribbean indebtedness was so high at the turn of the 21st century that the World Bank estimated that in 2003, the average debt for Caribbean countries was 96 per cent of their respective GDP (Kathuria et al., 2005), with several countries 2 closer to 200 per cent of their GDP (for example, Guyana, 179%; Jamaica, 142%; St. Kitts and Nevis, 171%). This was well above the 60 per cent threshold used by the IMF to define ‘high level public debt vulnerability’. This is part of a vicious cycle of indebtedness in which CARICOM countries borrow to repay debt. The neoliberal turn of the 1980s onwards brought devastating social and economic disruptions through crippling effects of structural adjustment programmes. For instance, in Jamaica there were declines in government expenditure going to social and community services; reduction in expenditure on education, training and cultural activities; a decline in the nutritional status of children; increase inflation, among other effects (Chen-Young and Associates, 1986). Jamaica’s former prime minister, Michael Manley, recalls the ‘widespread economic dislocation’ and other problems the country encountered (Manley, 1987: 175). In Trinidad, Melville (1996) found that many workers suffered a decline in real incomes and many fell below the poverty line; that there was a rise in poverty levels, and decline in spending on the social sector. By the mid-1990s with the advent of the WTO, and the free trade movement in full swing, the Caribbean had become ‘very open to international trade’ according to the IMF (Acevedo, Cebotari and Turner-Jones, 2013: 1), with mostly stagnating economies over the past two decades, further exposing the region’s economic vulnerabilities.
At this stage, the IMF notes that the Caribbean’s outlook is an increasingly difficult one that, in many ways, is typical of small states (Acevedo, Cebotari and Turner-Jones, 2013). The Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) notes that since 1970, the average growth of the region has fallen well below 3 per cent, and that the Caribbean has lagged behind other developing countries in terms of absolute and relative growth (Smith, 2015). CARICOM, (the region’s organization of 15 nations and dependencies), in its 2015–19 strategic plan for the region cites the ‘low growth rates and crippling external debt’ among the disabling factors that must be addressed (CARICOM Secretariat, 2014: 4). This report also intimates that two of the major problems driving the economic issues of the Caribbean lie in its place in the global economy, which is related to the structural imbalance of power within the global economy that is dominated by industrialized countries and major financial institutions. And while there have been global efforts at debt relief for poor countries, the Caribbean, except for Guyana, has not benefited from these opportunities because most countries in the region are classified as middle-income countries and so are not candidates for debt relief. Another problematic factor that CARICOM identifies, similarly resulting from middle-income status, is that trade rules have changed, particularly due to the advent of the WTO, and as a result, trade preferences with former colonial powers that Caribbean countries once enjoyed have been eroded (CARICOM Secretariat, 2014; Melville, 2002).
By world standards, CARICOM countries are considered small states, a United Nations (UN)-defined category that is especially characterized by vulnerability in various forms (Commonwealth Secretariat, 1997). The issue of environmental vulnerability is especially important to the Caribbean, a concern that plays out almost annually, particularly with hurricanes, flooding and other forms of environmental adversities. A joint study by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the CARICOM Secretariat and the University of the West Indies (UWI) shows that compared to other regions—in the Caribbean—natural disasters—which appear to be on the increase in the region—have a greater effect on GDP (cumulative damage as a share of GDP is 43%) than in any other region (United Nations Environment Programme [UNEP], 2010: 42).
There is a rich body of research that shows Caribbean policymakers, across all political-economic governance models and eras, are themselves complicit in the region’s environmental vulnerability through insufficient attention to environmental planning. Similarly, even in the era of supposed state marginalization in governance, and the emergence of non-state and Western forces of environmental planning and management, policy elites’ in the Caribbean have subverted these forces to reassert their capacity to govern, sometimes with negative consequences for the environment (Conway and Timms, 2003; Pugh and Momsen, 2006; Pugh and Potter, 2000; Pugh and Richardson, 2005). Still, some of this lack of environmentally focused policy planning is further complicated by other phenomena, such as urbanization driven by increasingly Westernized patterns of consumption, lifestyle and livelihood preferences, as well as the inherently limited production and economic possibilities of small islands of the Caribbean. These limited economic possibilities have also contributed to a dependence on environmental-intensive sectors, such as tourism, for national revenues (Potter, 1993).
Given the region’s economic problems, which are exacerbated by environmental challenges, UNECLAC maintains that ‘the SDGs are potential game changers of regional development prospects’ (Smith, 2015: 44) and that ‘the Caribbean has a strong case to be treated as a priority region for assistance’ (p. 62). Early signs show that regional strategic planning for development will seek to integrate the SDGs’ aspirations. But are the new SDGs promising to the Caribbean as a priority region? Are they any different from the past development promises that have proven insufficient to address regional needs? To properly understand the place of the new global development goals in the context of the Caribbean, it is important to, even briefly, examine the SDGs in relation to past change discourses that have impacted the region.
Conceptualizing and historicizing change initiatives
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were established by the UN General Assembly’s Resolution Adopted by the General Assembly on 25 September 2015. Declaration number 2 prefacing the goals states that: ‘On behalf of the peoples we serve, we have adopted a historic decision on a comprehensive, far reaching and people-centered set of universal and transformative Goals and targets’ (italics added for emphasis; United Nations, 2015a: 3/35).
With the central idea behind the SDGs being the ‘transformation’ of societies by ‘universal’ goals as expressed in the UN General Assembly Resolution, the concepts of change and universalism invite examination. These two notions both have an extensive and contentious history as they speak to fundamental ideas about change, and the underpinning principles guiding how it happens. Thus, the UN’s description of the SDGs being a ‘far reaching and people-centered set of universal and transformative Goals and targets’ (italics added for emphasis) (3/35), echoes fundamental similarities to past Western conceptions of change, for which there are significant implications for the Caribbean. As such, it would be a significant and costly ‘own goal’ were we to view these SDGs in isolation or as new; we would miss their profoundly critical linkages with past initiatives that made similar claims and the impact they have had on Caribbean nations.
In exploring the history of the idea of progress, or change, of over two and half thousand years, Nisbet (1979), in his essay, Idea of Progress: A Bibliographical Essay, states that ‘the idea of progress is hydraheaded’ (p. 22), or multifaceted and complex. However, even with its historical and internal conceptual complexity, the idea of progress, or social change, that Nisbet unearths in his historical analysis is a uniquely Western one. That is, dominant conceptualizations of progress in which ‘mankind has advanced in the past, is now advancing, and may be expected to continue advancing in the future’ (Nesbit, 1979: 2) are largely constructed from European knowledge, cultural and religious traditions. Nisbet (1980) describes this concept of progress as ‘the vision of all humanity in necessary advancement, stage-by-stage, from a remote and primitive past to a distant and glorious future’ (p. 352). These thoughts can be traced to thinkers such as Hegel who posited that even within the complexities and contradictions in dialectics, progress or development changes, follows a rationally determined path and largely driven by collective intellectual development (Robertson, 1996; Simon, 2006). These ideas influenced thinkers such as Engels and Marx, the latter of whom applied this idea of rational human progress to material conditions and proposed that the actions of humans are primarily materially determined. Marx also suggested a stages model of the development of these material conditions, ranging from primitive consumption through capitalism, ultimately achieving communism in which the underclass gains consciousness and equality. As rightly acknowledged by Nisbet, while other civilizations historically have their own ideas about change and improvement, what is unique about the West’s treatment of the idea of progress is the assumption that the aforementioned principles apply to all human civilizations, and thus are ‘universal’, or that all societies share this singular view of change and progress.
Applied to modern development thinking, this Western universalist notion of progress and change has been evident in some of the world’s most consequential socio-economic development phenomena. For example, as a host of postcolonial writers such as Walter Rodney, C. L. R. James, Stuart Hall, Franz Fanon, Homi Bhabha, Ann McClintock, Anthony Memmi, Edward Said among numerous others have observed, even while colonization was in large part an economic enterprise, it was fundamentally moralized and driven by a civilization mission to speed up the transformation of the natives who were seen as barbaric, pagan and backwards in their ways of thinking, and the societies they constructed. A major goal of the colonization mission, therefore, was to convert (spiritually, politically and culturally) the natives and bring progress to these distant lands. This colonization mission was partly operationalized through European cultural imposition and economic expansion. For the Caribbean, the results have been the radical restructuring and reshaping of the racial, cultural and political make-up of the people of the region. Gone, through extinction, for example, are the Arawak Taino people from Jamaica and some parts of the Caribbean, replaced by a black majority whose ancestors came there primarily as slaves, and the mixture of other races who came as either slaves or indentured labourers. Additionally, communal social and political structures have been replaced by nation states.
The dominance of this ‘universal’ notion of progress is also apparent in the post-Second World War development era in such ideas as Walt Rostow’s ‘stages of economic growth’ in which all societies are expected to pass through five stages of economic growth, starting at ‘traditional society’ through to the final stage of ‘mass consumption’. This theory was built on supposedly empirical analysis of select Western nations’ development trajectory. In these approaches to social transformation or ‘development’, the problems of underdevelopment were located within the societies targeted for transformation, and therefore much of the positive change was deemed to be exogenously emergent. Rostow’s (1959) theory, has fundamentally informed development practice through its influence on capitalist modernization development discourses that were geared towards transforming the Caribbean to mirror images of Western progress. Thus, as explored, Western universalist modernity has had a profound impact on Caribbean development historically.
However, the Caribbean’s political, economic and cultural history is far from linear, singular or unequivocally governed by dominant global discourses of development. With reference to the post-Second World War era, while modernization can arguably be seen as a consistent goal, there has always been some regional creolized response to the dominant ideas about how to achieve it (Klak, 1998). As other scholars have articulated extensively, there were early post-war and independence movements’ adaptations of neoclassical models, for example, by W. Arthur Lewis ‘that applied more directly to the traits of the developing colonies of the Caribbean’ often referred to as ‘Industrialization by Invitation’ (Conway and Timms, 2003: 96). This school of thought was followed by the socialist experiments of the 1970s, inspired by Marxist-socialist post-war models as represented in the various political economic systems in Jamaica, Guyana and Grenada, and a ‘middle way’ and ‘centrist’ models that entailed in Trinidad and Tobago, and Barbados (Potter et al., 2004). However, while some of these more socialist and nationalist development models showed some promise, a combination of economic (oil shocks and debts crises of the 1970s) and political (the emergence of centre right neoliberal regimes in the UK and US) made these Caribbean versions mere failed experiments (Conway, 1998; Meeks, 2001; Potter et al., 2004).
The 1980s onwards brought the ascendancy of neoliberalism and the related structural adjustment and ‘Washington consensus’ programmes with their associated conditionalities of the World Bank and IMF aimed at restructuring Caribbean economies for a new global market economy. Additionally, there was the rise of ‘free’ trade through the auspices of the WTO allied with the reduction of special markets for exports from the Caribbean region (Meeks, 2001). These experiences typify Caribbean existences in the post-war development era—the dominance of capitalist Western modes of development, complex Caribbean responses that suggest submission and resistance, but also local interpretations of such discourses.
However, these experiences ultimately betray a glaring exposure of the historical structural limitations and inherent environmental vulnerability of the region within the global capitalist market economy, which has been extensively described as limiting and coercive. David Harvey (2003) refers to the global economic system as ‘arrangements through which the asymmetries of exchange relations can so work as to benefit the hegemonic power’ (p. 181). Richard Peet (2003) also engages with this global economic architecture in which institutions of global governance promulgate neoliberal ideologies through various mechanisms. These institutions, which he refers to as ‘prodigious institutions operating under principles that are decided upon undemocratically…drastically affect the lives and livelihoods of a world of peoples’ (p. 3). And Gillian Hart (2002) refers to this global governance framework as ‘historically determined limits and structures’ (p. 15). This is the framework that constrains the countries of the Caribbean in significant ways. Therefore, the questions arise: how do the Sustainable Development Goals address this global structure that limits the Caribbean? And do these goals challenge or merely continue to reflect the dominant Western conceptions of progress and change?
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): Origins, context and Assumptions
The general framework of the SDGs is not new or surprising, given that they were meant to ‘build on the foundation laid by the MDGs’ (United Nations, 2013: 1). The MDGs (Table 1) were a set of eight development benchmarks devised by a small group of international development stakeholders and became the change objectives that would define global development practice from the year 2000 to 2015 (Anstee, 2012; Bradford, 2006; Hume, 2009; Hulme and Fukuda-Parr, 2009). The MDGs were focused on alleviating the most extreme forms of poverty in the world, and therefore not targeted to specifically address the CARICOM countries’ problems. This is largely why the MDGs have been less relevant to most of the Caribbean that has long achieved the targets outlined in areas such as education and health. By most measures set by the MDGs, there have been some limited successes, though many have questioned the extent to which some of the seemingly positive changes in extreme poverty, primary education enrolment, infectious diseases, infant mortality, among others can be attributed to the MDGs’ initiative (Celemns et al., 2007; Go and Quijada, 2012; The Economist, 2015). Yet advocates of the MDGs are under no doubt; for example, Ban Ki-Moon, the UN Secretary General, maintains that: ‘The MDGs helped to lift more than one billion people out of extreme poverty, to make inroads against hunger, to enable more girls to attend school than ever before and to protect our planet’ (United Nations, 2015b: 3). He does admit that ‘inequalities persist and that progress has been uneven. The world’s poor remain overwhelmingly concentrated in some parts of the world’ (p. 3). A UNICEF report, for example, found in 2011 that ‘the richest population quintile gets 83% of global income with just a single percentage point for those in the poorest quintile’ (p. vii).
Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)
Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)
The SDGs, a total of 17 goals and 169 targets, have emerged in a somewhat different policy context from the MDGs’ benchmarks—a context with a greater concern with global and local inequalities, environmental problems and the consequences of the indiscriminate consumption of finite resources. Importantly, there is a tacit acknowledgement of the link between unchecked industrial capitalist expansion and environmental degradation. This is clearly reflected in the current framework of the SDGs that, even by their very title, reflect anxiety about the natural environment and unequal share of resources. In fact, the SDGs are built on the scaffolding of sustainability, drawing from the commitment made by governments at Rio+20 in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil in 2012. The resulting document of Rio+20, the ‘Future We Want’, asserts that ‘[e]radicating poverty is the greatest global challenge facing the world today and an indispensable requirement for sustainable development’ (p. 1). Here we find two discourses merging—the poverty and inequality discourse, and the sustainability discourse. It is out of this context of the Rio+ 20 conference and the principles set forth in the ‘Future We Want’ document that the SDGs are evolving. The UNDP advances in its Human Development Report (2007/2008) that ‘…development progress is increasingly going to be hindered by climate change. So, we must see the fight against poverty and the fight against the effects of climate change as interrelated efforts’ (p. 4). As we examine each of the goals (Table 2) carefully, all the major thematic development areas of the SDGs are, in theory, applicable to the Caribbean, more so than the MDGs; in fact, the CARICOM Caribbean, since its independence, has worked diligently to improve health, education and other areas of social development, and has made progress, even within the questionable context of the Western development model. The SDGs can be seen as having greater potential relevance due to their increased focus on issues of the environment, further reduction of poverty and a recognition of inequalities at the global level. Though the SDGs are new, and it will take some time for countries, including those of CARICOM, to integrate them in their development planning, early indications from CARICOM Secretariat have established that the SDGs will be an important mechanism of reference. For example, in the region’s Strategic Plan for The Caribbean Community 2015–2019: Repositioning CARICOM, it is noted that ‘steps will be taken to bring alignment between the Strategic Plan and the SDGs’, and further notes that the region will attempt to advocate for ‘its special needs’ as the goals are established (CARICOM Secretariat, 2014: 25). The main question therefore is: Do the SDGs provide a means for addressing the persistent development problems of the Caribbean by tackling the limiting global structural framework in which the region operates?
Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
The last goal, number 17, is the goal that mostly hints at addressing the structural challenges. It proposes to ‘[s]trengthen the means of implementation and revitalize the global partnership for sustainable development’ in a number of areas including: finance; technology; capacity building; trade; and systemic issues (including policy and institutional coherence; multi-stakeholder partnership; and data, monitoring and accountability). This last goal includes, but also expands on, those larger structural and systemic areas listed in MDG 8. The inclusion and expansion of SDG 17 points to an implicit recognition of the fundamental macro issues at the global level that must be addressed. However, the SDGs place them not as the primary global structural framework to be tackled and the basis on which the rest of the goals will be addressed but as merely one of the many matters to be dealt with to achieve poverty reduction and sustainable development. The great disappointment from an equity point of view is the lack of explicit discussion in the SDGs, and the major UN Resolution adopting them, about the structural imbalances that plague the neoliberal global economy, and which exacerbate Caribbean vulnerabilities.
A look at the UN Resolution’s structure and content highlights these criticisms. For example, the resolution commences by providing a vision, principles and commitments of a world that is desirable—one characterized by equality of social and economic opportunity, where people’s identities are respected and protected, and a planet that is cared for and sustainably used. It then moves on to paint a picture of the world we live in today—one defined by ‘immense challenges to sustainable development’ (5/35). These challenges include rising inequalities within and among countries; enormous disparities of opportunity, wealth and power; gender inequality; unemployment; global health concerns; rising incidents of natural disasters; conflict, violence and terrorism, among other global problems. The resolution then introduces the SDGs and provides a brief discussion of their overall themes before listing all the SDGs’ goals and targets. At no time, however, is there an attempted identification and sustained discussion of what the UN believes are the core circumstances that have caused these global problems to emerge in the first place. For example, there is no analysis of the global governance framework and the institutions involved, nor is there an examination of the economic system under which the described social and economic challenges have arisen. That is, there is no analysis of the development problem to identify what might have created the conditions that now characterize the admittedly flawed world that we are now trying to change. Instead, there is a tacit suggestion that all that is needed for the goals to be effectively implemented is merely a reinvigoration of the current global development arrangements. For example, in the final section of the resolution, ‘Means of Implementation and Global Partnership’, the UN states that ‘this Agenda, including the Sustainable Development Goals, can be met within the framework of a revitalized Global Partnership for Sustainable Development supported by Addis Ababa Action Agenda’ (italics added for emphasis; p. 28/35). What is noticeable here is that there is no inclination or suggestion for a radical rethink of the current dominant economic and development model under which the SDGs will be implemented. This is possibly why, for example, the SDGs’ framework does not include specific recommendations to restructure and reform pre-eminently dominant global institutions, such as the World Bank, IMF and WTO, that have been at the centre of global economic and development policies, thereby exacerbating the vulnerabilities of developing countries like those of the Caribbean. Even the very mention of the ‘Addis Ababa Action Agenda’ suggests that the UN and Western industrialized countries have deaf ears for some of the concerns of developing countries and social activists, particularly that too much of the development agenda is being handed to the private sector and other market mechanisms (Cordaid, 2015). This is coupled with the fact that under this ‘Global Partnership’ mentioned by the UN, the majority of industrialized countries have been quite apathetic or uncooperative; for example, only five (Demark, Luxemburg, Norway, Sweden, the UK) of them have kept their commitment to provide 0.70 per cent of their GNI to official development assistance (ODA) (OECD, 2013). What becomes clear here is that the current development framework needs more than just being reinvigorated or ‘revitalized’ in order to provide a credible means of realizing the goals.
Thus, SDGs’ framework, like the MDGs, does not explicitly link poverty and underdevelopment fundamentally to unequal power relations, and an international framework that favours the more powerful nations and institutions, which as we have explored, have played significant roles in the Caribbean’s development problems. Rather, like the MDGs, they are built on achieving specific targets in certain catchphrase areas of health, education and the environment. Consequently, it is still not clear what actions will lead to what results; that is, the SDGs lack a credible means of implementing their desirable aspirations. Further, an analysis of these SDGs suggests a failure to contest the Western assumptions of the vision of social change in which power is unevenly vested in Western ideas, institutions and structures; in this case, the neoliberal capitalist economic system and the structures that support it, or what Klak refers to as the ‘globally homogenizing pressures’ of neoliberalism (1998: 21).
A few points become clear in this analysis of the SDGs. We find reflections of the notion of progress that Nisbet (1980) identifies in his analysis of the historical concept of change: there is still a deeply Westernized version of social change that is embedded in the SDGs, in which change takes place on the terms of the power of Western ideas and practices. An important principle follows naturally from this—the SDGs represent a commitment to a neoliberal capitalist form of development, including its reliance on the market system for the realization of a ‘glorious future’. This may be why, even though there is clear reference to aspirations for global partnership, there is a tacit endorsement of the global power structure in which places like the Caribbean remain in positions that are acutely subject to a supremely unequal global market system that is dominated by Western ideas of progress. Consequently, it is not unreasonable to question the extent to which the deeper aspirations for reductions of inequality, poverty alleviation and environmental sustainability are amenable to the logic of neoliberal capitalism. And this is where the means of realizing the goals seem to lack credibility most generally, and specifically to the Caribbean. Neoliberal capitalism by its very nature is based on the exploitation of positions of advantage. However, the very strategies for reducing inequality seem to necessarily require intentionally placing limits on liberal capitalist freedom, and the decoupling of the idea of progress from crass capitalist expansion as ‘the only’ means of achieving the vision of a system that facilitates the reduction of poverty and inequality, as well as the sustainable use of resources. Yet, global systemic change, represented by the targets in the current goal 17 (previous MDG 8), is not the discourse that frames the SDGs. Implicit in the SDGs, therefore, is the assumption that addressing the major problems of underdevelopment and environmental degradation rests primarily on eradicating the maladies in goal 1–16 that plague countries more so than the broader macro issues, some of which are compressed in Goal 17 of the SDGs. As such, there is a tautological logic to the SDGs, similar to that of the MDGs, as it relates to the means of achieving them.
But by no means should we reduce the role and importance of the global development goals in helping to raise awareness of some of the most critical global challenges that need to be addressed. In fact, many of the aspirations represented in the targets, if achieved, would be seen as significant improvements in the living conditions and prospects of the people of the Caribbean. Does the Caribbean want better health, education, a healthy environment and many of the other objectives noted in the goals? Of course, Caribbean societies have been working towards them since their independence, and the region’s progress in these areas has rendered some of the previous set of goals (MDGs) less relevant to most of the CARICOM countries. These aspirations are too important to be dismissed. What my analysis has shown, however, is that these goals are virtually impossible to achieve, given the existent structures of power within the neoliberal global capitalist system, notwithstanding the Caribbean’s own complicity in its development failures as explored earlier. Thus, most of the aspirations of the SDGs are not under question here; rather it is the logic and process of achieving them, or the means of their implementation, that seems dubious. Poverty reduction, inequality and environmental degradation seemed to have been decoupled from structural factors that have produced them.
How then might the broader positive aspirations of the SDGs be achieved? Perhaps a start is to dare to imagine global social change in the 21st century that both challenges and moves beyond neoliberalism to a system that is more equitable and balanced. In fact, such a vision is hinted at by the very SDGs under review as noted in the General Assembly Resolution adopting the goals that suggests that ‘economy, social and environmental’ dimensions ought to be ‘integrated and indivisible and balance[d]’ (italics added for emphasis; United Nations, 2015a: 1) to achieve desirable social change. However, as we have explored, these dimensions are not balanced in the current development model; the social and environmental dimensions have played second fiddle to the economic in the West’s neoliberal conceptualization of social change. In other words, there needs to be a radical reversal of the calculus of our priorities in order to contest the dominant neoliberal development model. Here, I would suggest three levels through which this may be pursued—a combination of contesting the global governance process through regional and global social organizing and activism, and improved Caribbean regionalism.
Based on our knowledge of global institutions and their vested interest in crass neoliberal development, we cannot reasonably expect that the change will come from them, unless they are forced. There is evidence that social organizing and activism to challenge global neoliberalism has great potential. The Jubilee Debt Campaign was a significant effort to raise awareness of the crippling effects of debt in developing countries, as well as an advocacy campaign to reduce and relieve debt just ahead of the new millennium (Pettifor, 2006). This resulted in arguably significant public consciousness-raising, but also multilateral action to reduce debt for the poorest countries in the world (Dijkstra, 2007). In another example, in 1999, social activists took to the streets to protest the undemocratic structure of the WTO that was increasingly building a perverse ‘free trade’ global structure. These events brought much attention to the work and effects of the WTO, slowed some of its negotiations and also forced this body to be more inclusive of social interest groups. Further, as explored by Smith (2008), the influence of NGO activism is already pressing corporations to be more sensitive to NGOs’ justice agenda, such as trading practices, labelling and code of conduct. She notes that social movements are already democratizing global governance and that ‘[i]f a more democratic form of governance is to emerge, citizens and the social movements they comprise must gain power relative to corporations’ (Smith, 2009: 383). This is where leadership comes in from Caribbean social activists, who must foster grass-roots movements that will stir the people of the Caribbean and Caribbean diaspora in the Western world to activism. More democratic global institutions will pave way for important structural changes to global economic system, which could, for example, open the doors to negotiate more humane arrangements for debt amelioration and the terms of economic engagement globally, outcomes that could change the social development prospects of many countries of the Caribbean.
The outcomes of the Addis Ababa development finance summit provide clear examples that, left to the usual global governance systems to negotiate such arrangements, developing countries will always be excluded from major decisions that affect them. This summit was geared towards devising sources of financing for development, in which one of the major subjects on the agenda was the design of a global tax mechanism that would reduce tax loopholes and allow developing countries, in particular, to collect tax revenues from corporations. Developing countries and NGOs pushed for a designated global body to manage this process. In the final agreement, developing countries were largely excluded from the decision-making process, and there was no agreement for the establishment of a tax body, and ‘no major changes to the existing UN tax committee of experts’ (Chonghaile, 2015). All that was arrived at were seemingly empty promises for tax reform going forward.
Here is a good opportunity for social movement and organizing to put pressure on global governance power structure to be more inclusive in devising a new global tax system and a mechanism that will allow developing countries like those of the Caribbean to collect funds from transnational organizations that often find ways to avoid national tax requirements. Clearly, given the size and demographic limitations of the Caribbean, this, like many other accountability tasks, cannot be successfully undertaken solely by them.
This is where social movements can have significant impact, and the Caribbean has a rich history in this regard, which can be used to inspire global civil action. As explored earlier, the modern Caribbean was born and continues to evolve in a milieu of resistance movements, and has never wholly submitted to dominant power and development discourses. The Caribbean has a rich history of social activism and resistance theories to call upon that have helped overcome slavery and colonialism, and that have challenged the imperialist notions of identity. From movements such as the Haitian Revolution, the Maroon resistance to British occupation and enslavement, to the Morant Bay rebellion that challenged colonial neglect and poverty in colonial Jamaica, there is a deep reservoir of historical experiences of resistance to draw from. The Caribbean’s history of activism is also enriched by intellectual movements from regional independence movements, anti-colonial expressions, Garveyism to labour movements that are still prominent across the Caribbean and are the foundations of many of the political parties in the region (Mars, 1998).
As it relates to environmental issues, Caribbean peoples have also had their way of contesting dominant discourses; such discourses often come in the guise of modern scientific planning for market efficiency, but which ultimately have the effect of decoupling the environment from the lived experiences of the ordinary people. As Jaffe (2009) observes, dominant global environmental discourses filter down to state and non-state stakeholders in the Caribbean; these often reflect business-oriented concerns or what Mistry et al. (2009) refer to as the commodification of the environment, with limited relevance or appeal to many citizens of the very urbanized islands of the region. As a result, Jaffe (2009) notes that dominant environmental concerns often do not take account of the social vulnerabilities of many of its citizens, and therefore represent a continuation of colonial eroticized environmental identity of the Caribbean. Such dominant discourses are characterized by technical and scientific expertise allied with hierarchical governance that limits local citizen participation (Mistry et al., 2009).
Important, therefore, is Conway and Timms’ (2003) exhortation that in order for the environment to be an integral part of Caribbean development, the most negative tendencies of neoliberalism must be challenged and resisted. In this regard, the Caribbean people’s capacity for resistance and counter-discourses to dominant environmental discourses that marginalized them is evident. As several examples from across the Caribbean have shown, local knowledge and populist reactions have served to question, challenge and offer alternative environmental possibilities. For example, Pugh (2005), through his reflective analysis of St. Lucia, shows how in the post-emancipation era people negotiated ‘metayage’ arrangements in which peasant classes could ‘work through their own common aspirations’ (p. 386) for their own development. Comparing this to modern ‘participatory planning for sustainable development’, Pugh (2005) finds that the former approach was more able to ‘challenge the power of elites’ over development resources. In Trinidad, rice farmers and fresh water fishers in the community of Kernahan on the east coast of Trinidad co-opted dominant conservation discourses to contest powerful institutions with commercial agricultural interests (Sletto, 2005). Sletto also shows how the Kernahan villagers claimed and appropriated land through mapping processes of a supposedly disputed land threatened by government ownership, and conservation and commercials interests (Sletto, 2002). Additionally, there is the example of how Jamaican farmers used their space-specific local knowledge of yam farming techniques, even over supposedly newer rationalistic scientific methods, to provide food security (Beckford and Barker, 2007). In these examples, one can find several representations of environmental resistance and ordinary citizens charting alternative paths to social change in the contemporary Caribbean.
In the realm of Caribbean culture, as Hall (2001) reminds us, various forms of ‘expressive culture … allowed men and women to survive the trauma of slavery’ (p. 29); Caribbean cultures have allowed more recent generations to critique dominant discourses and inspire movements. This is consistent with James Scott’s (1990) views that those under the social, political, economic and class domination of others find ways, explicitly or subtly, to express displeasure or inspire a movement. From the enslaved who would mock and undermine their ‘masters’ through mimicry, deception and outright revolt to the reggae music of Bob Marley (and others) that gave voice to the oppressed Rastafari who were significant in the Black Consciousness Movement, Caribbean culture represents a foment of resistance (Hall, 2001). Similarly, the Mighty Sparrow decried the tragedy of neoliberalism in his famous song ‘Capitalism Gone Mad’, challenging the choices of the political leaders in his own country, Trinidad, with a larger message about the coercive and dehumanizing global economic system. Singing Sandra (1987) forced us to consider the plight of Caribbean women ‘who faced nothing but humiliation’ in a patriarchal society where men manipulated employment scarcity to sexually exploit women in her appropriately titled song ‘Die with My Dignity’. Artistic expressions have always been a part of resistance and aspirational expressions, and can be utilized in a time of the primacy of modern technology that can disseminate messages around the world with great ease. The region can dip into this reservoir to inspire regional and global movements.
Caribbean countries’ small-size and turbulent economic history, allied with more modern global economic mechanisms to structurally limit their growth, make the region in its current state, uncompetitive in the global neoliberal economic model as clearly seen in the economic indicators cited earlier. Therefore, the region must also look beyond the often seductive and coercive rhetoric of global integration and come to terms with the structural limitations it presents in Caribbean countries. Since independence in the 1960s, regional governments have been vacillating between regionalism and integration into the global economy (Meeks, 2001). There is a need to return to the commitment that ‘developing countries require economic theories [and policies] tailored to their own circumstances’ (Girvan, 2006: 345). Caribbean governments must strategically return to regionalism with more steadfast commitment, an idea that was pursued in the immediate post-independence era for the very situation that exists now— inequity in the global system and the structural limitations of the small island states of the Caribbean. This approach is achievable even within existing stipulations of the so-called free trade global economy of the WTO. In this regard, there have been positive signs over the past decade and a half, especially with the emergence of the CARICOM Single Market and Economy (CSME) in 2002, which ‘seeks to implement provisions for the removal of trade and professional restrictions’ and ‘facilitate the right to establish businesses, to provide regional services, the free movement of capital and the coordination of economic policies’ (CARICOM, 2016: 1). Regionalism may allow the Caribbean to engage in development on more reasonable terms with countries with a shared history and understanding, thus reducing the gap in power relations between its most immediate partners.
Towards a conclusion
Perhaps the greatest weakness of the global development goals examined here is the failure to develop a means of realization that more credibly challenges Western universalist notions of change in the neoliberal capitalist era. This has resulted in potentially detrimental decoupling of the causes of underdevelopment from the design of how to pursue the goals. The SDGs employ poverty reduction, and now equality and environmental sustainability, as the primary issues to be addressed for development. However, the framework for realizing these aspirations does not engage in a sustained critical interrogation of the causes of poverty, environmental degradation and inequity in the first place. This failure to create a credible change logic that links these development maladies to structures of exclusion betrays the unwillingness, intentionally or unintentionally, of the world’s major powers to engage with the political and ideological aspects of development. Given the history of conceptualizing social change from Western perspectives, and the ways in which dominant development ideas foster a world in which the global power structure is skewed in favour of Western interests, Caribbean activists must heed Smith’s (2008) and others’ warning that global governance institutions must be challenged in order to change. At one level, there must be a resolve on the part of Caribbean activists to educate the masses about macro causes and the sources of the difficulties they experience on a daily basis, even as the frantic pace of their enforced capitalist existence increasingly distracts them from the real causes of their distress. This is the only way to raise the consciousness and build social movements that will challenge ideas and institutions by organizing for action.
The Caribbean has a rich history of social activism, resistance and alternative pathways to development theories to call upon that have helped overcome slavery and colonialism, and that have challenged the imperialist notions of identity. Granted, these cited resistance examples predate SDGs, a period defined by coercive neoliberalism as the new development and governance scaffolding. While we cannot definitively describe or prescribe what regional resistance and alternatives can or should arise, given the complexity of social change in an increasingly complicated world, these past resistances suggest there will be responses that challenge and or redefine the SDGs. I suggest that it is by coordinating the raised voices of the people of the Caribbean in concert with other marginalized societies of the Global South and their allies, particularly campaigners already involved in the process, that there will be a more effective contemporary global movement to challenge the dominant development model and governance structure that supports this particular issue.
The renewal of regionalism suggests possibilities to advance shared interests of the Caribbean. The central lesson learned from Caribbean struggle through social activism is that sustainable change is often best pursued through locally and regionally driven energy and ideas about the type of change that is desirable. Now, perhaps, these ideas and movements need to inspire a new and more global fight against the tyranny of neoliberalism which has woven itself into the most recent development initiative, the SDGs. In this way, we might be able to preserve and pursue the aspirations of the goals while improving their means of realization. Still, it would be foolhardy to assume that external change alone would guarantee achievement of all the major aspirations of the Caribbean peoples, as I have also discussed that regional and national power structures and policy choices, and even modes of resistance, can hamper change processes. The larger point, however, is that a global structure in which the fates of societies will rest primarily in their own hands, will more likely determine the possibilities of achieving aspirations that mirror those of the SDGs.