Gender Politics and Global Democracy: Insights from the Caribbean.

Modern democracy centred on the nation-state has been invariably patriarchal. Men are viewed as the natural leaders of nations and continue to dominate in the political arena. Women's roles are relegated to the private sphere of the home and in supportive roles to 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, such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and the Beijing process. Such global initiatives have also furthered struggles for gender democracy in the Caribbean more particularly. However, full incorporation of gender into global democracy has been largely subordinated in global discourses. Instead, prevailing patriarchal methods of negotiation have insufficiently incorporated women into decision-making and treat gender as a marginal aspect of achieving democracy internally. While global imperatives required that Caribbean states ratify global conventions and draft national gender policies for gender equality and equity in all spheres, there is no commitment on the part of governments to accept and implement the policies that are drafted. This is highly regrettable, as the persistence of gender inequities undermine democracy in relation to global circumstances as women's voices and the ideas that they propose for change are viewed as incidental to growth and development of nations. What could be done to correct this situation? Perhaps recent experiences with national gender policies could offer important suggestions. In particular this analysis assesses the possible implications for global democracy that might be drawn from the formulation of national gender policies in the Cayman Islands, Dominica, and Trinidad and Tobago between 1999 and 2006. The value of gender policies might be that they stimulate change and initiate a democratic process of engaging women's and men's voices at the national and local levels without yet finding its way to feed back directly into global democracy. The paper has four main sections. The first section explores theoretically the existing relationship and future possibilities for enhancing gender democracy through global democracy. The second section reviews the experiences of the three national gender policies in the Caribbean, assessing how they have and have not advanced democracy in these contexts. The third section indicates how global circumstances have both furthered and frustrated strivings for gender democracy in the three societies of Trinidad and Tobago, Dominica and the Cayman Islands. The fourth and final section of the paper identifies and elaborates the key implications of the Caribbean experiences for ideas of global democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]