Bridging the Divides
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Development. Copyright © 2000 The Society for International Development. SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi), 1011-6370 (200012) 43:4; 98–101; 015266.
Last Word
Bridging the Divides PEGGY ANTROBUS
I have been working in the field of ‘development’ all my life. Growing up in a family of public servants in the 1950s in the small island developing states (SIDS) of the Windward Islands,1 my decision to read for a degree in economics symbolized the widespread recognition, at that time, that socio-economic development was the other side of the coin of political independence. It was indicative of the climate of Caribbean nation-building at the time, and related to a personal sense of responsibility as someone who owed their university education to a government scholarship. In those heady post-World War II days of the 1940s and 1950s the world was full of possibilities for the descendants of Africans and Asians who had been transported as slaves and indentured servants to the plantations of the New World. The rejection of colonialism and the pursuit of independence and broad-based socioeconomic development was, above all, a search for social justice. Since that time, through my work with governments as well as NGOs, and now as part of a wider social movement – the women’s movement – at national, regional and international levels, my understanding of development and social justice has deepened and changed considerably. In retrospect, my work enabled me to have first-hand experience of the various development strategies of the time: development planning in the late 1950s; integrated rural development in the 1960s; the importance of working from a gender perspective starting in the decade of the 1970s; and in the decade of the 1980s the link between the international financial institutions (IFIs) and global structures (including the structures of gender relations), processes, and policy choices at local/national and regional levels. In the 1950s the conventional wisdom was that ‘development’ was a linear process, which would be ensured by the ‘right mix of land, labour and capital’. The role of technology and markets was not fully understood in those days of
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Antrobus: Bridging the Divides innocence when we also thought that political independence would set us on a sure path to material progress. Even less did I understand the ways in which neo-colonialism, perpetuating dependency, would serve as an even greater obstacle to true independence and social justice. Events since the 1980s have shattered the assumptions of Keynesian economics and revealed the true power of structures established in the post-colonial era to ensure the perpetuation of colonial and neo-colonial relations of dependency. Today, international trade has become synonymous with development and the pursuit of social justice is something for the lunatic fringe of NGOs and social movements. The women’s movement is one of the few that holds to a vision of a wo
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