The Coloniality of Measurement and the Making of Smallness as Deficit

ABSTRACT

In global environmental governance, small island developing states (SIDS) are routinely described as vulnerable, fragile and capacity constrained. These characteristics are treated as natural consequences of smallness and are frequently interpreted as markers of deficit, despite the diversity, agency and resilience that characterise many SIDS. This intervention argues that this conversion of smallness from a neutral description of scale into a deficit category reflects the coloniality of measurement : the inherited systems of comparison, classification and valuation that establish smallness as a deviation from norms derived from larger states, that institutionalise that deviation and that assign it negative value. Drawing on examples from Caribbean SIDS, it examines how contemporary measurement regimes produce this deficit, and how Caribbean counter metrics challenge the assumptions embedded within them. In concluding, it establishes that sustaining small island futures requires questioning why global systems require SIDS to be small in order to be governed at all, refusing the terms on which smallness has been made to mean less and reclaiming the authority to redefine what smallness means.