ISTR Sixth International Conference Toronto, Canada / July 11-14, 2004 Contesting Citizenship and Civil Society in a Divided World

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	Abstracts

Human Rights and Development: New Rights Advocacy and Development NGOs.
by
Paul Nelson
University of Pittsburgh

Human rights and development have been pursued by organizations, including NGOs, in two distinct sectors. This paper examines the growing interaction between them, and focuses specifically on the application of human rights standards by development agencies. By developing a set of hypotheses and research questions, it systematically assesses the implementation of rights-based approaches in several development NGOs.

Development NGOs, along with some other development aid agencies, are increasingly using the language of internationally recognized human rights as the philosophical and programmatic basis for their work. Enthusiasts of this trend argue that grounding development work in human rights would give a new basis of accountability for development NGOs, and could constitute the first fundamental challenge to neo-liberal, market-based development orthodoxy. If this rhetorical shift leads to enduring changes in NGOs’ programmatic and policy advocacy work, it will have important implications for third sector organizations and their position in the development industry.

Skeptics of the “rights-based” trend fear that development agencies are cloaking themselves in the language and moral authority of human rights, and that careless use of human rights language could diminish the power of international human rights standards and agreements. This paper takes the first steps toward assessing the significance of several global NGOs’ “human rights-based approach” for their operational work and influence.

For most development practitioners, discussions of the economic and social human rights – the right to food, health, education – have been largely divorced from development planning. Development agencies articulate their agendas in terms of (variously) promoting growth, meeting human needs, upholding human dignity, and promoting self-sufficiency, community development, solidarity, and justice, rarely in terms of international and universal standards of social and economic rights.

Human rights organizations articulate their agendas and missions in terms of strengthening international human rights norms and protecting and implementing recognized human rights. Economic and social rights have also been peripheral, at best, to the agendas of traditional human rights groups. Most human rights NGOs have not strayed far from a focus on civil and political rights, and, targeting governments, they have been slow to take on corporate actors directly.

The paper’s first part outlines the rapid expansion, since the mid- 1990s, of interaction between human rights, development and environmental organizations. Three trends -- a rights-based approach to development, collaborative advocacy by human rights and development NGOs, and the adoption of economic rights orientation by human rights groups -- are the substance of the growing interaction. The interaction leads to NGO campaigns that facilitate exchanges, across sectors, of methods, staff, political strategies, and conceptual tools.

The second part of the paper focuses on the work of international development NGOs. Drawing on theory and experience in organizational change and transformation, it the paper lays out a set of hypotheses and research questions to be investigated, over time, to track the changes in development NGOs associated with human rights-based approaches. These indicators include rhetorical, structural, strategic, personnel, grant-making partnerships, evaluation, and advocacy.

These research questions are then applied in a preliminary analysis of four international development NGOs. The results will have implications for the course of interaction between human rights and development, for understanding INGOs’ position in the international system, and for the relationships between INGOs and NGOs and social movements of the poor countries.

Date received: October 10, 2003

Copyright © 2003 by the author(s). The author(s) of this document and the organizers of the conference have granted their consent to include this abstract in Atlas Conferences Inc. Document # camp-53.