Development, change and society: an interview with Kari Levitt

In this wide-ranging interview, the renowned development economist Kari Polanyi Levitt reflects on the nature of social transformation in the English-speaking Caribbean and the cultural conditions that would facilitate it. Describing her long-standing collaboration with Lloyd Best and the innovative work on Caribbean economies that they undertook, she indicates both the continuities with the past and the more recent obstacles to the achievement of social and economic justice thrown up by globalisation. In this, she shows how concepts and understanding of what development means have shifted, from a process that, despite shortcomings, entailed some notion of public betterment to one in which the dictates of neoliberalism are paramount — with disastrous social effects.