Policy Sovereignty: The Role of Endogenous Policy Formulation and Policy Autonomy in The Survival of Small Island Developing States in The Global World; Case Study on The Maldives.

The world as we know it today, is not only made up of the various countries and the populations who live in them, but also consists of systems, rules and regulations not just at the national level, but at a global scale as well. While some of these global systems, concepts and regulations bring many folds of benefits to those countries who can access them, there are those who are left behind, forever reaching out but not quite reaching it. These would be the smaller states, who remain disadvantaged from their geolocation to their socioeconomics within which they struggle to survive. Although the sovereign state is very much a real concept, on the economic and political front, the ‘bigger’ countries transcend their geographic boundaries through their economic and political institutions, and systems. And although for these countries the world is becoming a smaller place, for the smaller countries the world is becoming a bigger place, with a multitude of economic and political actors who make rules, regulations and legislations by which the smaller countries have to abide, and hence, the question needs to be asked as to how the smaller countries would survive in the ever increasing globalisation of the world. One of the main arenas within a country that can sculpt the way in which it acts and reacts in the global system is its policy arena, where the policies the country adopts, or can adopt, impacts not just the survival in the global world, but lay the foundations to compete in it. In this respect, this thesis takes a new outlook on the old concept of policy formulation and implementation by the country’s own people, to address their ground reality, through the concept of ‘policy sovereignty’ such that smaller states can address their many policy issues that remain overlooked by the global system.