Dr Dinah Hippolyte

Why this work

Research: from norms to authorship

To study small states and the Global South well is to read them not as cases, but as sources of theory and agency.

Her doctoral research asked what happens when international norms arrive in Caribbean states, using tobacco control in Trinidad and Tobago and Jamaica as its case. These norms carry embedded ideas about economics, expectations of behaviour and context, and their impact reaches beyond policy to people and society, provoking contestation and, at times, resistance. To explore this process, Dinah developed a framework combining conceptual change theory and social constructivism. Through this lens, change occurs in layers, depending on whether new ideas take hold, are rejected or become stable over time. That, in turn, reflects how far actors are able to align the local context with what the norm requires.

Her research found that local actors do not simply accept international norms. Instead, the extent to which an international norm shapes policy depends on how far they make it fit their circumstances, history, beliefs and ideas, and on the resistance it meets along the way. Local ideas about reasonable behaviour, local history, existing policies, the work of advocacy groups, and the platforms and forms of public engagement available all shaped how international norms took hold. From this research, Dinah has shown that institutional fit and local context are essential to understanding change and stability in policy, and to explaining why states resist some international norms and adapt to others.

The same pattern held across her later work, in different sectors and regions: local context, existing ideas and the agency of local actors shaped the outcomes. That raised a further question: why do local contexts look the way they do? To answer it, she returned to the Caribbean political economy tradition of Lloyd Best, Kari Levitt, George Beckford and Norman Girvan, with its account of how colonialism and the plantation economy shaped the institutions small states inherited, and drew on postcolonial thought on knowledge, power and method. Together, they showed that small states and the communities within them are not simply reacting to the global. They are sites of agency and sites of theory-making in their own right.

That premise is at the centre of her current work, which asks what follows when these places are understood on those terms. Three analytical tools take that question forward. Institutional Adaptation follows how outside rules settle into domestic institutions. Epistemic Fit asks whose concepts define the problem in the first place. Generative Fit asks what development looks like when it begins from the histories, institutions and lives of the places it is meant to serve. Together, they move her work from studying how small states receive the world’s ideas to how they author their own.

Where We Stand: A View From Elsewhere carries this premise into public conversation. Speaking from the Global South, the podcast explores power, place and the politics of knowing, on the premise that where we stand shapes what we see, what we know and what we imagine is possible.