1 Rights in development: conceptual issues

Rights-based development as it evolved in the 1990s was a product of a specific historical moment, one that was quite exceptional politically. The end of the Cold War signalled a renewed confidence in liberal values, confirmed by the restoration of democratic governments in Latin America and the former Soviet Union, and the end of apartheid in South Africa. At the end of the decade, all but a handful of nations were ruled by governments that claimed to be democracies, while the international human rights movement was revitalized by the 1993 UN Conference on Human Rights in Vienna. At the same time, the major international development institutions turned their attention to poverty alleviation and to promoting good governance, understood as efficient, accountable administration in both government and non-government institutions. This entailed substantial political and legal reform, and a spate of new constitutions resulted, notably in South Africa and Latin America.

These different elements combined to forge a new consensus in policy arenas over the importance of integrating issues of rights and democracy into development practice. Along with the greater commitment to tackling poverty, rights-based development led, among other things, to an emphasis being placed on participatory methods and on bottom-up development, both as a more democratic way of managing projects and in order to avoid the pitfalls of development practice imposed from above.

The neoliberal policy failures of the 1980s renewed concerns over poverty and the high social costs of many stabilization and adjustment packages, particularly in the former Soviet Union, Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. Global inequalities rose sharply in the last decades of the twentieth century while poverty remained a persistent and, in some countries, a growing phenomenon. Growing criticism of the policies of international development institutions was one reason why the 1990s were marked by a partial retreat from 'market fundamentalism', while there were renewed attempts to rethink development policy. The turn to an explicit focus on poverty alleviation, endorsed by the World Bank from the late 1980s, was a central plank of the 'post-adjustment' development agenda. However, whereas poverty had been addressed in the 1970s through more universal welfare principles and an emphasis on 'meeting basic needs', in the 1990s the approach was to target the most needy, with a rhetorical emphasis on empowering the poor and securing their rights and participation (Streeten et al., 1981; Caulfield, 1997; Sano, 2000; World Bank, 2001). These policies converged with the 'good governance' agenda in a number of interesting ways. For many development agencies, good governance meant creating a regulatory context that allowed economic stability and increased foreign investment. In turn, this implied a recognition that institutional inefficiency and its common correlate, corruption, was creating a crisis of legitimacy, inhibiting development and obstructing efforts to alleviate poverty. As the DFID White Paper expressed it:

Efforts to reduce poverty are often undermined by bribery and corruption. ... It is generally poor people who bear the heaviest cost of corrupt activities. If people are to be able to exercise their rights and live in a just society, countries must have a framework of law and regulation. To this end, we will support reforms in the legal sector and help make governments and the civil service work more efficiently (DFID, 1997: 16).

For success in these areas, sounder institutional management with appropriate transparency and accountability was required. However, implicit too was a predisposition in favour of democratic governance along with free market economics, although in practice the former was increasingly diluted or waived under pressure from some governments on either liberal or conservative grounds.

While good governance agendas have been subject to criticism on a variety of grounds (Bøås, 1998; Donnelly, 1999; Evans, 2000), it is arguable that they were important precursors to, and allies of, human rights agendas in development, particularly from the perspective of donor agencies. Good governance policies were a means by which donor governments in the West have linked their advocacy of civil and political rights to that of economic growth in arguing that the stability required for the latter can only come via democratic political systems. Bilateral and multilateral agencies are well placed through conditionalities to require strengthening the institutionalization of partner governments, who may also see advantages in terms of their own political interests. Indeed, as Donnelly notes, 'There is a growing tendency to emphasize compatibilities between civil and political rights and development. For example, international financial institutions in the 1990s have increasingly emphasized the economic contributions of "good governance"' (Donnelly, 1999: 627). This focus on 'getting institutions right' strengthened as the doctrinaire market-oriented approach to development gave way at the end of the 1980s to a greater acceptance of the role of state intervention in both economic and human development. Some commentators argue that this shift, which converged with the promotion of human rights, represents a positive step towards what Hans-Otto Sano terms a more 'actor- and social-oriented order' (Sano, 2000: 741). Good governance was also understood to imply greater citizen access to the process of government, whether this be in free and fair national elections, or in local level engagement with policy processes.

The idea of incorporating rights into development therefore had many tributary currents and was promoted by a range of institutions and agents in the course of the 1990s. The corpus of international human rights legislation, along with other UN protocols, agreements and statements, established the fundamental principles and provided the overall framework for rights-based work. But much of this had been in place for 50 years or more. It was only in the post-authoritarian context of the 1990s that this work was revitalized when governments, international development agencies, social movements and NGOs combined to elaborate the connection between rights and development. The result was a proliferation of legal instruments and policy recommendations and a growing scholarly literature on the subject.

Much of this work was stimulated by and fed into the UN's end-of-millennium summits. The various departments of the UN were actively engaged in developing conceptions of rights, including the right to development, as well as in refining the meanings of social and cultural rights, indigenous, children's and women's rights. As noted, the Vienna Human Rights Conference of 1993 provided an important impetus for this work, but other summits also focused on various aspects of rights. The Cairo Conference on Population in 1994, the Social Summit in Copenhagen in 1995 and the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, also in 1995, gave a high profile to the role of human rights in their proposals for action, broadening normative interpretations of human rights with their emphasis on the need to tackle inequality and exclusion as well as to design and implement appropriate social policies.

Governments, particularly the Northern Social Democratic states, also played an important role in this process. In Britain, the Labour government's reorganized Department for International Development (DFID) was one of the first governmental agencies to highlight the importance of human rights in its policy statements. The White Paper of 1997 was followed by a number of strategic policy documents that addressed the issue of how the Department should implement its rights-based agenda (DFID, 2000a,b,c).

Arguably, however, the most influential actors in promoting, and to an extent also radicalizing, rights-based agendas were international NGOs. They were able to take advantage of a change in their own circumstances to bring more leverage to bear on international policy settings and to help set and promote agendas in development work. NGOs had seen an increase in their scope for influencing policy agendas from the 1980s, not least through acquiring greater rights of participation in such agenda-setting forums as UN summits and their preparatory and follow-up meetings. This incorporation of non-state actors as observers and consultants was allowed in principle from the earliest days of the UN, but NGOs acquired considerably greater presence in recent times, notably in the end-of-millennium summits where more organizations acquired accreditation than before. Argued by some to have brought about a 'pluralization', albeit limited, of global governance, it meant that multilateral economic and policy institutions had actively to engage with non-governmental and civil society organizations and through them with their constituencies.

The expanded scope of NGO involvement was one of the most significant developments in recent decades and reflected the greater role they were playing in development processes. This was partly a result of the international political context, and was driven from the 1980s by the prevailing distrust of the state and by neoliberal policies that sought to reduce its size and limit its functions. NGOs, seen as more efficient and less corrupt than many states, took on an increasingly important role in service delivery and in the production of development knowledge. During the 1990s, NGOs debated rights agendas, and sometimes opposed them, but many were also promoters of rights discourse in international forums, as well as practitioners working with rights at project level, generating a range of innovative programmes and projects.

Throughout the 1990s, a growing number of influential Northern NGOs incorporated the language of rights into their development work (inter alia Oxfam, Save the Children Fund, Action Aid, International Planned Parenthood Federation). This anticipated and at the same time influenced the shifts undergone by government development agencies. In turn, NGOs were influenced by these agencies' demands on them. When seeking governmental and private funding, NGOs were increasingly impelled to orient their work strategically. They were, for example, required to justify their activities in terms of the social impact on the wider community, rather than restricting it to service provision for a narrow base of users. If this was partly driven by funding squeezes, such an emphasis was welcomed by many NGOs, who shared in the enthusiasm for the more strategic principles expressed in human rights discourses. Northern NGOs were also influenced by the concerns and activities of their Southern partners. All these factors, combined with the changes in the international political and developmental context described above, contributed to a shift in NGO priorities towards more rights-based work.

As multilateral and bilateral donor agencies, as well as the larger Northern NGOs, took up issues of rights and democracy in their development work, other, less enthusiastic agencies were prompted to respond. The World Bank, initially hesitant as its constitution commits it to political neutrality and bars it from activity deemed 'political', nonetheless became increasingly involved with the human rights issues raised by environmental protection, gender equity and civil society participation (Moser et al., 2001: 9). In 1998, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), it published a report on development and human rights which stated that

the World Bank believes that creating the conditions for the attainment of human rights is a central and irreducible goal of development. ... The world now accepts that sustainable development is impossible without human rights. What has been missing is the recognition that the advancement of an interconnected set of human rights is impossible without development (World Bank, 1998: 3, emphasis in original).

In its World Development Report of 2000/01, the Bank published what some saw as a landmark statement, where it stressed the importance of the 'empowerment of the poor' in attacking poverty (World Bank, 2001). The concept of empowerment had been enthusiastically taken up by NGOs in the 1980s, particularly by those working with women, and in some interpretations it was explicitly linked to rights: 'real' empowerment meant gaining rights and leverage in decision-making arenas. More recently, the Bank has begun to explore how to incorporate rights into its approach to poverty alleviation. An Overseas Development Institute (ODI) workshop held in London in June of 2001 was designed to feed into the World Bank's exploration of how to combine rights-based and sustainable livelihoods approaches in its thinking on poverty elimination (see Moser et al., 2001). In the words of a member of the Bank's general council, '... our mission of fighting poverty directly involves the advancement of human rights through legal and judicial reform, and tackling health, environment education and other basic needs' (Bretton Woods, 2002: 1). Other bilateral agencies, including those from Australia, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and Denmark, responded in similar ways (Sano 2000; UNDP, 2000). Both UNDP and UNICEF developed rights-based policy agendas for their work (UNDP, 2000; Rozga, 2001; van Weerelt, 2001). In some cases this represented a new departure; in others, such as the UN Women's agency, UNIFEM, it represented a strengthening of a pre-existing agenda.

Such developments gained momentum in a favourable international political environment. As the ideological polarities of the Cold War faded, so the scope for rights work broadened. The historic divide between Western governments that prioritized civil and political rights and those who gave primacy to social and economic rights gave way to a more holistic and integral view of rights as mutually interdependent, at least at the level of rhetoric. This integral view was affirmed in the 1993 Vienna UN Conference, and in subsequent UN summits international endorsement was gained for the principle of the indivisibility of human rights. The new consensus evident in the 1995 Copenhagen UN Social Summit responded to demands from the developing countries for social provision to be understood in terms of rights and entitlements rather than being left to market forces. Hans-Otto Sano argues that 'during the 1990s, development was increasingly perceived as a right, whereas earlier it had been perceived as an instrument of solidarity' (Sano, 2000: 736). In this spirit, Amnesty International, historically a rights-based organization with a traditional focus on civil and political rights, voted in August 2001 to extend its mandate to include discrimination understood as the violation of social, economic and cultural rights (Amnesty International, 2001). However, such enthusiasm for rights was not unopposed: some developing countries viewed rights agendas as a form of Western hegemony and entered multiple reservations exempting them from compliance with certain clauses, notably where these were argued to be in conflict with religion or custom. These latter usually implicated women's rights (Charlesworth and Chinkin, 2000; Merry, 2001). Even among supporters, opinion continues to be divided on how far to apply rights to development, given that the proliferation of rights has produced problems of legal consistency, and has raised false expectations of what governments can or will deliver. A significant number of governments remain critical of universalist principles, and in some areas, notably family law, invoke multicultural arguments to defend the reservations they enter on becoming signatories (Molyneux and Razavi, 2002). Meanwhile, the focus on security issues following the attacks of September 11 2001 has set the human rights agenda back, causing some to wonder if the ascendancy of the human rights agenda is over.