A Critical Political Economy of the Small Island Developing States Concept

The 1994 Declaration of Barbados and the Barbados Programme of Action (BPOA) was a watershed in the scale and scope of international cooperation between small island developing states (SIDS). It was also the beginning of a heightened international concern with the particularities of SIDS developmental trajectories, constraints and opportunities. However, while the Declaration opens with the affirmation that ‘sustainable development programmes must seek to enhance the quality of life of peoples, including their health, well-being and safety’, it does not affirm the centrality of island peoples as key agents in this development. In order to investigate this issue, this article demonstrates historical shifts in SIDS discourse and provides a critical evaluation of contemporary claims for the particularity of SIDS. It goes on to critically assess empirical and theoretical examples of South–South cooperation in order to generate possible insights for the SIDS grouping. The article argues that for the genuine ‘sustainable development’ of SIDS, a popular democratic base of island citizens must exist within island societies that in turn cooperate and coordinate–including material, political-social and operational linkages–across the spatially disparate regions of the global oceans. It is suggested that only through the heightened consciousness of island citizens of linkages across oceanic regions and their explicit incorporation as social agents to complement and, if required, counter inter state negotiations and strategies can contemporary forms of inter-island cooperation in the global ‘South’ be sustained.