RESEARCH PROGRAM
The questions driving the work
The research agenda asks how Caribbean states, institutions, and enterprises navigate a world order that was not designed for them — and what happens when the frameworks built to help them reproduce the conditions that marginalised them in the first place.
How do Caribbean states and institutions engage global and regional governance amid shifting power, contested rules, and multi-site authority — often on terms not of their own making?
What strategies enable Caribbean states to assert agency and convert geopolitical attention into durable developmental gains?
How do international norms travel through development frameworks, trade agreements, and procurement systems — and whose economies are served when they arrive?
How do changes in development, climate, and financing arenas reshape the region's room to manoeuvre, even as its core needs remain unchanged?
How do Caribbean institutions navigate simultaneity — managing multiple, overlapping governance regimes at once?
What forms of regional coordination and coalition-building become viable as the old order fragments and new configurations emerge?
RESEARCH AREA
Three areas of focus
Caribbean MSME Development and Emancipatory Entrepreneurship
Examining how CARICOM's enterprise policy frameworks engage — and often reproduce — the colonial economic logics they claim to dismantle. What does a genuinely emancipatory entrepreneurship ecosystem look like in the Caribbean context, and how do we measure whether policy is moving toward it?
Post-Colonial Trade Governance and Ocean State Economies
How do Caribbean and Pacific small island states navigate trade agreements, development frameworks, and international governance architectures that were not designed with their interests at centre? How does Australia's post-colonial positioning shape the modalities through which it engages these regions?
Norm Diffusion, Institutional Logics, and Procurement Policy
How do international norms about economic empowerment travel through procurement systems — and what happens when the frameworks designed to deliver that empowerment produce goal and means ambiguity that communities and enterprises cannot navigate? Examining Australia, the Caribbean, and the comparative case.