Whitehall in the Caribbean? The legacy of colonial administration for post-colonial democratic development

Abstract

Colonial-era administrative institutions and doctrines are fundamental to any analysis of Westminster's legacy in the Caribbean. Applying the lens of 'Public Service Bargains' (PSBs) -the formal and informal understandings of reward, competence and loyalty of public servantswe first examine constitutional and administrative doctrines regarding the public service of Crown Colonies, before analysing how these worked themselves out in Jamaica. Our analysis reveals a number of perceived deficiencies in the PSB in the pre-independence period that cast a shadow on future relations in the post-independence period.

Who Decides Social Policy?: Social Networks and the Political Economy of Social Policy in Latin America and the Caribbean

“…The literature on the policy-making processes in The Bahamas and Trinidad and Tobago is virtually nonexistent. Despite some comparative work on civil services in the Caribbean (Draper 2001;Lodge, Stirton, and Moloney 2015;Mateo Díaz and Echebarría 2008;) and a few pieces focused on ethnic recruitment and promotion in Trinidad and Tobago (Brown 1999;Premdas 2007) and the budgetary process in both countries (Abuelafia 2013a(Abuelafia , 2013b, no systematic description or analysis of policy-making processes exists for either of the countries. Although such an analysis is beyond the scope of this chapter, sufficient information exists to describe the formal structure of policy-making processes in The Bahamas and Trinidad and Tobago, and to use that description as a benchmark to compare the effective social networks that actually carry out social policy formulation.…”

The core executive and small states: Is coordination the primary challenge?

“…77–78; Ott 2000, pp. 37–39; Lodge et al 2015); and this results in small states being prone to hyper‐personalism and power concentration (Farrugia 1993; Sutton and Payne 1993, p. 587; Gerring and Zarecki 2011, p. 23; Baldacchino 2012; Corbett and Veenendaal 2018). These findings are significant because within large states there is an increasing desire to devolve or decentralize decision‐making to smaller political units (Lowndes and Sullivan 2008; Hooghe and Marks 2016; Ladner et al 2016).…”