Is CARICOM Sustainable? Assessing the (Youth) Participation Deficit
Dr Terri-Ann Gilbert-Roberts (University of West Indies) - ‘Implementation Deficit’ has been framed as the principal threat to the sustainability of the Caribbean Community. Consequently, limited attention has been paid to analysing the correlated ‘participation deficit’ and the extent of ‘citizen’ inclusion/exclusion within the regional framework of governance.
Focusing on the role of young people, this paper assesses the inclusiveness of CARICOM governance and argues that recent changes to the regional youth development framework create a modest space for the emergence of a regional citizenship construct. Drawing on a qualitative text analysis of focal intergovernmental decisions, declarations and strategies from 1973 - 2016, as well as surveys and interviews with young leaders, the paper documents a gradual process of rhetorical regional ‘citizenisation’ of youth alongside constrained youth engagement. It concludes with an assessment of the opportunities and threats to the full realisation of regional citizenship and the implications for the sustainability of CARICOM, considering Jamaica’s current exercise of ‘rethinking CARICOM’.
Terri-Ann is a Jamaican regionalist with an interest in the politics of development, particularly at the intersection of governance, regionalism and youth development. She is a Research Fellow at the Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies (SALISES) at the University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona, Jamaica where she chairs the SALISES 50/50 Youth Research Cluster which supports evidence-based youth policies and programmes in the Caribbean. She is the author of The Politics of Integration: Caribbean Sovereignty Revisited, Ian Randle, 2013 and Editor of Youthscapes’ of Development in the Caribbean and Latin America, a 2014 Special Issue of the journal Social and Economic Studies (63:3&4). While at UCL-IA as a Commonwealth Academic Fellow, she will be exploring the dynamics of youth participation in regional governance and the governance of development.