Local Vibrancy in a Globalizing World: Evidence from Dominica, Eastern Caribbean

Abstract

Globalization is often described as a process that increasingly encompasses world regions, countries, products, services, and people. Blouet (2001 p.7), for example, states that ‘‘[g]lobalization removes obstructions to movement and creates conditions in which international trade in goods and services can expand.’’ This process of increased movement of goods and services has grown steadily, aided by technological advances. While much of the world’s economic activities move toward free trade and globalization, at the same time there are local areas that remain to a significant extent autonomous and vibrant. The relationship between the local and the global has received much attention in recent years in social sciences and the humanities (Kearney 1995). Local activities intermingle with the global influences; local and global are not distinct and separately analyzable (Porter 2000). This essay centers on locally-focused aspects of the economy, culture, and society, and the people behind them, drawing on the case study of the Eastern Caribbean island nation of Dominica. Primary products, and those that are involved in and benefit from their production, weave into the complexity of the globalized world while at the same time continuing to be locally sustainable. We use marine and forest resources as examples to show how people on this remote Eastern Caribbean island continue to utilize and manage these resources sustainably and how these local producers complement the globalized trade flows and supply chains for these resources. Dominica illustrates how local actors continue to have a sizable role in generating employment and satisfying daily needs, despite the growing outside pressures toward a globalized Western lifestyle. By documenting the continued vibrancy of certain natural resource sectors in an island economy that is otherwise increasingly permeated by imports, this essay furthers our understanding of the status of the local amidst the global.