ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the National Commission for Sustainable Development of Barbados, which was initiated in 1997. It explores two potential sociological processes that are shaping the adoption of the approach to planning: the role of symbolic power and the fabrication of conscience. The chapter also explores the extent to which economic, social and cultural capital may shape the unconscious drive to appropriate the ideal of participatory planning at the national level in Barbados. It considers how transnational elites have been central in introducing pluralist democracy into the developing world, in order to maintain a particular order of social positions. P. Bourdieu argues that a particular language becomes normalised and sedimented. The chapter highlights that one of the major difficulties of Bourdieu's theory is in his persistence over maintaining that symbolic power is the innate and unconscious driving force shaping all human actions.
