Gender Politics and Global Democracy: Insights from the Caribbean

Patricia Mohammed

University of the West Indies, St Augustine

Modern democracy centred on the nation-state has been invariably patriarchal. Men are viewed as the natural leaders of countries and dominate the national political arena. Women are generally relegated to the private sphere of the home and to roles of supporting men in the process of political decision-making.

Thus the question arises how global democracy could and should be grasped as an opportunity to overcome patriarchy and work towards gender equity. Certainly there have been some promising developments to bring women’s voices, participation and control into global politics. Examples include the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and the Beijing process through the United Nations. Such global initiatives have also furthered struggles for gender democracy in national spheres, including in Caribbean countries more particularly.

However, full incorporation of gender equity into global democracy has not yet been achieved. Instead, prevailing methods of global governance have remained patriarchal, insufficiently incorporating women into decision-making and treating gender as a marginal aspect of achieving democracy. True, global imperatives have required that Caribbean states ratify global conventions and draft national policies for gender equity. However, governments have shown little commitment to accept and implement the drafted national policies, let alone to press for gender equity as a central feature of global politics.

What could be done to correct this situation and bring gender concerns to the heart of ideas and practices of global democracy? Perhaps recent experiences with national gender policies in the Caribbean could offer important suggestions. In particular, this analysis assesses the possible implications for global democracy that might be drawn from experiences with national gender policies in the Cayman Islands, Dominica, and Trinidad and Tobago between 1999 and 2006. These gender policies have been valuable in stimulating change and initiating a democratic process of engaging women’s and men’s voices at national and local levels, although they have also struggled with limitations.

The three Caribbean experiences suggest a range of approaches and propositions that could help put gender equity at the heart of strivings for global democracy. Primary among these is the need to ensure that there is a more integrated link between national and global regulatory institutions, despite the cultural differences and sensitivities that will necessarily create different policy options and possibilities for each country. In addition, it is important to ensure that issues of gender equity lie at the heart of global civil society and associated practices of global deliberative democracy, for example, through the World Social Forum. It is also advisable to approach with caution proposals to construct global representative democracy based on elected global parliaments, given that such processes on a national scale have invariably yielded patriarchal outcomes, with only lip-service paid to gender by increasing the number of women in leadership positions as a concession to global conventions. Moreover, the experience of gender policies in the three Caribbean states emphasizes that gender equity needs to be treated as an integral concern across all areas of global politics and not only as a separate realm of ‘women’s issues’ that can easily been sidelined. There is a crucial need for gender to be treated as central to global aspects of the human condition as it is to national, local and household settings.

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