Reconfiguring islands

Abstract

Thinking about islands in a global context offers a perspective that underlines the interconnectedness and flows in new ways that facilitate our understanding of the differences and disparities that are produced and even enforced through long-standing and ongoing global processes. Looking at social, cultural and economic processes in the contemporary clustering of islands that comprise sub-national island jurisdictions underlines the ways in which the intense circulation of commodities, people and ideas, connections and flows are now accentuated in an era of globalization. Gupta and Ferguson (1992: 16) suggest that globalization "differentiates the world as it connects it" and it is from this vantage point that sub-national island jurisdictions may provide an effective lens through which disparities can be viewed. Global economic processes shape and reshape islands in complex and complicated ways, and islanders have long been engaging, accommodating, resisting, embracing and initiating such changes. T he framework and analyses of the diverse experiences of sub-national island jurisdictions highlights the agency of islanders and their political machinery in ways that counter representations of island jurisdictions as dependent, spatially peripheralized and fiscally constrained. It is instructive to examine the experience of a range of islands with the same set of governance issues and structures as PEI.