The One Where the Development Movie Plays on Repeat

In 2022, Jason Hickel and his co-authors published findings that should have unsettled the foundations of contemporary development thinking.

They estimated that, between 1990 and 2015, the Global North appropriated approximately US$242 trillion in resources from the Global South through unequal exchange. In 2015 alone, the transfer was valued at US$10.8 trillion. For every dollar the South received in development assistance, approximately US$30 moved in the opposite direction through unequal trade relations.

These figures disrupt one of the most persistent stories in development: that wealthy countries developed primarily through their own superior institutions, policies and productivity, while poorer countries remain behind because they have not yet adopted the correct reforms. It was with these questions in mind that I read the Caribbean Development Dynamics Report 2026, published in April.

The outlook is sobering. The recommendations are familiar: deepen regional integration, attract more foreign direct investment, expand exports and invest in climate-resilient infrastructure.None of these proposals is inherently wrong.

What troubled me was the ease with which the Caribbean’s development challenges were once again presented as technical problems, largely detached from the histories and power relations that produced them.

The report offers solutions without seriously examining how some of the states and institutions now offering advice helped create and continue to reproduce the conditions they are seeking to “fix”.

“ A diagnosis that ignores history is not medicine. It is maintenance."

I have seen this movie before

I understand the demand for practical recommendations. The Caribbean’s problems are real and urgent. Governments must act. People living with high food prices, unemployment, debt, deteriorating infrastructure and increasingly destructive climate events do not have the luxury of waiting for perfect theories. There is little patience for analysis paralysis, endless critique or policy conversations that never move towards implementation.

My argument is not that governments should reject investment, infrastructure, exports or regional integration. It is that I have sat through a version of this development conversation before.

Years ago in Trinidad and Tobago, I watched intelligent and committed people present Singapore as a blueprint for Caribbean development. Singapore’s industrial policies, infrastructure, state capacity and integration into the global economy were held up as evidence of what small states could accomplish.But there was remarkably little discussion of what our fundamentally different histories, economies, geographies and positions within the international system meant for the transfer of those policies.

Singapore became a model detached from the circumstances that made the model possible. The question was not whether particular lessons could be learned. Of course they could. The deeper question was whether policies developed within one historical and institutional environment could simply be imported into another—and whether their apparent success could be separated from the geopolitical, economic and strategic conditions surrounding them.

"Singapore became a model detached from the circumstances that made the model possible."

When development becomes a technical problem

There is a cost to treating Caribbean development primarily as a collection of technical deficiencies. It pushes aside a long tradition of Caribbean thought represented by scholars such as George Beckford, Lloyd Best, Norman Girvan and Hilary Beckles, who demonstrated that Caribbean poverty and dependency are not simply the outcomes of weak administration, limited productivity or inadequate policy choices. They are also historically produced and globally structured.

Caribbean economies were not originally organised to generate broad-based development for Caribbean societies. They were organised around the extraction and export of value. Their infrastructures, commercial relationships, production systems and external orientations were shaped through colonialism. Formal independence did not automatically dismantle those structures.

Yet technical development language has a way of stripping these histories from the problems it describes. A decline in the Caribbean’s share of global exports from 0.35 per cent to 0.23 per cent becomes a competitiveness problem, rather than also a question about the terms on which Caribbean states enter global markets. Tax revenue averaging 21 per cent of GDP becomes a problem of administrative capacity, rather than also a story about capital mobility, tax competition, financial extraction and the limited fiscal room available to small states.

"Technical development language has a way of stripping these histories from the problems it describes."

Intra-regional trade of 6.7 per cent becomes evidence of regional failure, rather than also the legacy of economies historically constructed to face outward towards metropolitan markets rather than towards one another. Annual climate-related losses amounting to 2.13 per cent of GDP become a resilience challenge, rather than also an environmental justice issue involving states that contributed little to global emissions but bear some of their most devastating consequences. The technical interpretation is not necessarily false. It is incomplete.

"The problem begins when one explanation is treated as the whole story and the other is made invisible."

Both explanations matter

Caribbean governments must improve administrative systems. Regional institutions must function better. Businesses must innovate. Infrastructure must be strengthened. Economies must diversify. But these responsibilities exist within an international political economy that distributes power, risk and opportunity unevenly.

Both levels of analysis matter. The problem begins when one is treated as the whole story and the other is made invisible.

When development frameworks focus only on domestic reform, they quietly relocate responsibility. Structural inequalities become national shortcomings. Historical extraction becomes contemporary inefficiency. Unequal bargaining power becomes insufficient competitiveness. The Caribbean is then asked to become more investable, more productive, more integrated and more resilient without a corresponding examination of the systems to which it is being integrated.

This produces a familiar cycle. A report identifies deficiencies. Governments adopt reforms. Progress is measured against indicators. The deeper structures remain intact. A few years later, another report is commissioned to diagnose many of the same problems. We keep managing the consequences while leaving the structure largely undisturbed.

The question is not whether to act

The choice is not between structural analysis and practical policy. Good policy requires both. Without immediate interventions, people suffer. Without historical and structural analysis, interventions risk reproducing the conditions that made them necessary. The more useful question is whether proposed policies fit the realities they are intended to transform.

• Do they fit the Caribbean’s historical experience?

• Do they fit its position within global trade and finance?

• Do they fit the capacities and limitations of its institutions?

• Do they fit the lived realities of Caribbean people?

  
  

And do they expand the region’s ability to define development for itself, or merely improve its ability to function within a system whose underlying terms remain unchanged?

"The choice is not between structural analysis and practical policy."

Development policy cannot be built only around what is politically convenient to measure or technically possible to recommend. It must also confront the structures that determine which possibilities are available in the first place.

This is not an argument for waiting until the international system becomes fair before taking action. Nor is it an argument for using colonialism as an explanation for every contemporary failure. Caribbean governments and institutions must still be held accountable for the decisions they make, the opportunities they neglect and the systems they fail to reform.

But accountability becomes distorted when history disappears from the diagnosis.

The challenge is to hold multiple truths together: Caribbean states possess agency, but they exercise that agency within inherited structures and unequal global relationships. Domestic reform matters, but so do the terms on which the region participates in the international economy. Technical solutions matter, but they cannot substitute for political and historical understanding.

Otherwise, development becomes an exercise in maintaining the system more efficiently.Another report will arrive. The recommendations will sound familiar. The language may change, but the movie will continue to play.

The question is whether we can find enough intellectual and political breathing room to imagine another version of development and, if we can, how much longer we are prepared to wait before building it.