Global Change, Small Island State Response: economic restructuring and its consequences in Seychelles and Mauritius.

This paper responds to recent analytical and empirical demands to investigate and explain patterns of change within contemporary processes of global capitalism. More specifically, it contributes to understandings of the impact of increased global competition on the development trajectories of small island states. The paper examines how Seychelles and Mauritius, societies on the periphery of the world economy, have come to depend upon global linkages and the impact of increasing global competition on their socio-economic landscape. It focuses on their responses to these recent changes, the forms of economic restructuring that they are adopting and the consequences of these for their national political economies. More specifically, the paper demonstrates that the increasingly precarious position that small island states occupy globally have created new, and reworked existing, local inequalities. In so doing, we also seek to contribute to the literature on small island states which we argue tends to construct them as internally undifferentiated entities whose development strategies are framed primarily as a response to external global forces. This literature is also inclined to be ideologically monolithic, dominated as it is by proposals for liberalisation that further homogenise small island states and conceal their historical and political specificities. We suggest that rather than concentrating on developing generalisable accounts of their problems, detailed theoretical and empirical work into the national political economies, societies and histories of small island states can contribute to a better understanding of the specific challenges with which they are confronted, the forms of development which might be more appropriate, and the consequences of the restructuring programmes upon which they are embarked. While we do not directly address all these issues here, this paper provides an initial attempt to challenge prevailing orthodoxies in understandings of small island states and their responses to global change. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]