T&T is not yet a literate society. Our education system neither promotes a culture of research and analysis, evidence-based decision-making nor critical thinking for informed public opinion. Valuable studies on national development languish in libraries, on Web sites and even government offices, never consulted. We are even less disposed to draw on relevant information elsewhere. The country continues to repeat mistakes, missing opportunities to right wrongs.
Inevitably, crises arise primarily because of an unwillingness or ineptitude to formalise and institute processes that ensure the best available information and advice and broad citizen participation inform public policy and action. There is also deep disgust for the transparency which these processes imply. For they may reveal too much about murky, backroom deals influencing public policy and expenditure!These deficiencies in governance arrangements provoke eruptions of social activism at varying times, including fasting on the steps of the Hall of Justice in 1986. Some 28 years and seven election campaigns later, with skepticism swiftly descending into cynicism, the fast has today given way to a hunger strike, on course to end in tragedy.
Sadly, much of the social dissonance and distress thus induced could be avoided.In response to widespread concerns, the Sustainable Development Network of T&T (SDN) launched internal discussions on the feasibility and desirability of establishing aluminium smelters in T&T in 2007. The interaction concluded that attention is better focused not on aluminium smelters per se but on an appropriate planning framework for major projects in small spaces like T&T. This spawned the paper entitled: A Sustainable Development Planning Framework for Mega-Projects in Small Places, delivered by the late Dennis Pantin at the inauguration of the SDN in September 2008, and published in November 2009.
The paper defines sustainable development and mega projects in small places; outlines key elements of a planning framework relevant to mega projects in small places and describes the methodology required for implementing such a framework. The framework and methodology are then applied to the case of aluminum smelters. An invaluable contribution of this paper is the review of an influential doctoral thesis examining the problems, causes and cures associated with mega projects globally.The paper notes that the central deficiency in the planning and implementation framework for mega projects (aluminum smelter, Point Fortin highway in T&T), lies in the governance arrangements. It advises that the sustainable development framework concept incorporates consideration of "... procedural issues that are deemed important dimensions of the democratic process: participation, consultation, transparency, accountability, and public right to information." The paper therefore advocates halting "... the implementation of new mega projects in T&T until such time as there can be a full national conversation on the lessons of the global experience (outlined in the paper) and the implications..."
Pantin concludes perceptively: "This recommendation is one which is unlikely to find favour with the powers that be. It will therefore be left to the will of civil society to give effect to this recommendation."Today, the country is again exhausting itself in the throes of a continuing crisis of distrust not dissimilar to 2007. Are citizens sufficiently moved to exert pressure on officialdom to institute the governance measures outlined in Pantin's six year old paper?The issue is neither smelter nor highway but the absence of meaningful conversation!
Winston R Rudder
Petit Valley