Doing the Rights Thing: Rights-based development and Latin American NGOs (Viewpoints) - Softcover

Molyneux, Maxine

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1853395684 ISBN 13: 9781853395680

Verlag: ITDG Publishing, 2004

Inhaltsangabe

The authors examine the ways in which rights-based strategies have been understood in development practice in Latin America. They stress the political and personal nature of development û especially the importance of enabling people to make their own demands of the state and other institutions.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Molyneux is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Institute for the Study of the Americas, School of Advanced Study, University of London.

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Doing the Rights Thing

Rights-based Development and Latin American NGOs

By Maxine Molyneux, Sian Lazar

Practical Action Publishing Ltd

Copyright © 2003 Maxine Molyneux and Sian Lazar
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-85339-568-0

Contents

Acknowledgements, vii, 
List of figures, tables and boxes, ix, 
List of acronyms and abbreviations, x, 
Introduction, 1, 
1 Rights in development: conceptual issues, 20, 
2 Latin America: the right(s) time and the right(s) place, 31, 
3 NGOs and rights approaches, 44, 
4 Implementing rights: participation, empowerment and governance, 50, 
5 Campaigning for rights: violence against women and women's citizenship, 63, 
6 Meeting challenges: problems with rights, 82, 
7 Consequences: organizational implications of the shift Changing visions of the subjects of development, 94, 
8 Case studies, 112, 
Conclusions, 137, 
Appendix NGOs mentioned in this book, 142, 
Endnotes, 145, 
References, 149, 
Index, 158, 

CHAPTER 1

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...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: ITDG Publishing
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2004
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1853395684
• ISBN 13: 9781853395680
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 178
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland