Labour-intensive garment-based industrialization with social sustainability? The case of Mauritius

We address the social sustainability dimension of labour-intensive industrialization (LII) and manufacturing activities and apply it to the analysis of Mauritius, a regional forerunner in textile and garment production. While the country’s socioeconomic development trajectory has caused some scholars to label it as an African success story, we do not evaluate its industrialization against traditional economic theory on achieving sustained growth. Instead, we analyze the LII component based on garment manufacturing from the early 1970s onwards against the criteria of social sustainability. We investigate the specific interplay between the development of social policy and the establishment and transformation of the garment manufacturing sector. Further, we follow changes in workers’ conditions in the manufacturing sector over time. Based on primary and secondary data and building on new developmentalist research, we examine the fulfilment of basic needs, employment levels, and the quality of jobs applying inclusiveness as a cross-cutting theme. Moreover, we address social policy’s role in tackling problems of inequitable outcomes from industrialization. We contribute a more nuanced understanding of Mauritius’ industrial history by highlighting its mixed outcomes, with some periods working more towards properties and outcomes of social sustainability than others. Finally, we provide some lessons for global South countries currently forming their industrialization strategies pertaining to trade-offs between sectoral change and social sustainability, and we hypothesize about the future of Mauritius’ textile and garment industry.