Caricom’s communication gap

Bear with me for this circuitous, but I think necessary, approach to addressing what is being dismissed by too many as an elementary issue regarding effective communication and the effort to manage the current barrage of challenges to Caribbean survivability.

Make no mistake about it, among the several features of the current global environment, dominated by superpower extortion and coercion, is the prospective dismantling of multilateralism and collective action as solutions to developmental needs.

Look today at where countries have long been rallying to the cause of shared resources and vision and witness the unravelling impacts. The challenges are nothing new but have intensified in recent times everywhere you turn.

Caricom’s longstanding embrace of open regionalism (maintaining a strong core while pragmatically embracing external opportunities) as a coping mechanism involving small, vulnerable states has predisposed its constituents to generally elastic approaches to changing external conditions.

In the process, and as part of the accompanying perils, anomalous global and hemispheric alignments have often proven disruptive. There is thus understandable room to agree to disagree on some things.

If it’s of any comfort, this is neither something unique to us nor new to integration movements wherever you find them. But the astute management of information flows is a constant, pervasive, mitigating requirement.

For us, in this small space and constantly confronted by questions of sustainability, there is a much more urgent need to ensure that conditions exist for sustained joint endeavour and that the populations involved are a knowledgeable part of it.

In the context of its indispensability to the region and given the importance of cohesive approaches to developmental demands, there have been successive examinations over the years of the work of the Caricom Secretariat as administrative centre of the integration project.

A few adjustments have followed, but insufficient to achieve the level of modernity, responsiveness, and leadership required under demanding circumstances.

As explained earlier, this is a lengthy introduction to the single point of effective communication as an institutional imperative indicative of the vital connection between the integration process and the people for whom it has been designed.

For example, it took a full week for the communiqué emerging from the Caricom summit in Barbados between February 19 and 21, to reach media and other interested parties.

By the time the document reached us, foreign ministers and other officials were scrambling to address several new and emerging issues. These included the Cuban medics and US visa threats on Caribbean officials, the cessation of Venezuelan oil licences, and that country’s incursion into Guyanese marine territory.

The outcome has been that some critical features of the belatedly released conference communiqué became lost in the immediate news agenda.

There has since been nothing to remind us of the continuing relevance of a few key points considered at the summit. Yes, there is a role for media and others in this and some of this has already occurred – Haiti, for example - but to focus on this responsibility would be to miss a major point.

Believe me, I am aware of the process to distil the proceedings of such meetings into a single, concise, publicly chewable document. I have been there myself.

Such an exercise must simultaneously meet the criteria of precision and timeliness and generate minimum discomfort among sensitive, self-aware hosts, participants who lead countries, their official contingents, and the numerous bureaucrats charged with ensuring that countries are not left angry, confused, or dissatisfied.

However, as has been the most recent case, the main purpose of such communication is too often lost in a maze of political and bureaucratic behaviours.

It must occur to all concerned that particularly in the current geo-political environment some principal elements of public communication need to be more urgently met.

This is why, in almost all other groupings of this kind, prompt accounts of discussions held, and decisions made are considered as almost important as the deliberations themselves, with communication teams forming an integral part of the proceedings.

Should the latter not be the case, information and communication departments become little more than post offices for dispatch. Resultingly, in the modern era, such a responsibility can be easily displaced by social media algorithm, propaganda, parochialism, and misinformation.

However, if from the start media are thought of as a needless, routinised bother and nuisance – as now seems to be the case - then all concerned should be prepared to confront the fallout.

Just a little advice.