Women and Children's Well-being in the Age of Globalization: A focus on St Vincent and the Grenadines and small island d
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Development. Copyright © 2001 The Society for International Development. SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi), 1011-6370 (200106) 44:2; 53–57; 017702.
Thematic Section
Women and Children’s Well-being in the Age of Globalization: A focus on St Vincent and the Grenadines and small island developing states PEGGY ANTROBUS1
ABSTRACT Peggy Antrobus reflecting on her life and work in the Caribbean looks at how to protect the livelihoods of the poor and the well-being of children in an environment increasingly hostile to the well-being of the majority of people. She sees women’s empowerment and respect for child rights as an important way to foster the needed values of self-reliance, compassion, community and co-operation essential in any lasting development process. KEYWORDS civil society; human development; poverty reduction; small island states; structural adjustment; trade liberalization
Changing development approaches In the 1960s the state played the major role in promoting the well-being of the majority of people in developing countries. Poverty reduction was at the centre of development planning and there was an emphasis on an approach to development which was broad-based and integrated. All of this changed from the decade of the 1980s onwards in the context of the debt crisis and the steep rise in the cost of living in the industrialized countries, which made inflation and deficit reduction major preoccupations of the governments of those countries.2 Within a policy framework set by Washington, the ‘Washington Concensus’, and encouraged by the Caribbean Development Bank, the role of the state to promote broad-based socio-economic development was severely eroded. In many countries macroeconomic policies and structural adjustment programmes took precedence over socio-economic development planning, and economic growth was privileged over social development. In the decade of the 1980s the International Financial Institutions – the World Bank and the IMF – set the policy framework through a strategy of ‘policy dialogue’.
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Development 44(2): Gender Equality and Child Rights Starting in the decade of the 1990s, trade replaced development as the central policy issue and the WTO now sets the policy framework through it is rulings on trade liberalization. The international environment is far from ‘enabling’ and those of us committed to the goals of sustainable human development have to fight disillusionment, despair and, worst of all, cynicism. The cold and legalistic context of globalization has replaced the supportive context of international aid and cooperation, and the consequences for the lives of the majority of people in the small island developing states of this region are devastating, and likely to get worse. In St Vincent and the Grenadines the economy has undergone a major restructuring from one in which agriculture was the chief productive sector to one in which this sector, of such central importance to the well-being of the majority of peo
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