Freedom from Poverty: NGOs and Human Rights Praxis

Chapter 5. Humanitarian Organizations

5 Humanitarian Organizations While social justice groups have adopted economic and social rights rather quietly, the incorporation of human rights into the work of Western humanitarian NGOs1 over the past decade has arrived with much fanfare. The diverse and multifaceted trend among humanitarian NGOs has coalesced into a single label: the use of a “rights-based approach” to development work. This chapter will describe and investigate that trend by asking: Why are humanitarian organizations adopting or resisting rights-based approaches in their work? Does this trend signal significant changes in humanitarian organizations ’ programming? How do these groups approach subsistence rights, and what are the strategic implications of their approach for the human rights field? In this chapter, I argue that humanitarian organizations have responded to the growing definitional linkage between human rights and development by increasingly adopting rights-based approaches in their project work. For these groups, human rights has been interpreted as an umbrella term that encapsulates many of the recent trends emerging in the international development industry, such as becoming more politically engaged, focusing on systemic causes and solutions to poverty, and empowering the poor. In so doing, organizations such as CARE and Oxfam International have adopted a moral approach to subsistence rights (similar to social justice organizations) that translates international law into basic principles to guide organizational programming. While some organizations have used human rights primarily to legitimize their existing practices, the rights-based approach is beginning to result in some important changes in how humanitarian organizations view their mission, analyze local contexts, and relate with their stakeholders. 12771-Freedom from Poverty.indd 104 12771-Freedom from Poverty.indd 104 3/11/10 10:52:10 AM 3/11/10 10:52:10 AM 105 Humanitarian Organizations Human rights require humanitarian organizations to fundamentally redefine development not as a technical process of delivering aid but as a political negotiation that they must enter on behalf of the poor. As such, humanitarian organizations are demonstrating that a moral approach to subsistence rights can be effective in changing widespread behavior even outside of legal processes and institutions. Yet adopting a rights-based approach also imposes significant challenges for humanitarian NGOs to overcome. My focus in this chapter is on humanitarian NGOs (often called private voluntary organizations) with an international mission to provide goods and services to the poor. I will briefly discuss state-based and multilateral development agencies, however, as well as international financial institutions, which act both as sources of funding for NGOs and as implementing agencies . I discuss state-based actors primarily to compare their perspectives on rights-based approaches to those of humanitarian NGOs. Although there are various definitions of rights-based approaches with slightly different emphases, one of the most widely used among humanitarian agencies comes from CARE’s Andrew Jones: “A rights-based approach deliberately and explicitly focuses on people realizing their human rights. It does so by exposing the root causes of vulnerability and marginalization and expanding the range of responses. It empowers people to claim and exercise their rights and fulfill their responsibilities. A rights-based approach recognizes poor, displaced and war-affected people as having inherent rights essential to livelihood security—rights that are validated by international standards and law.”2 In other words, rights-based approaches include working with the most vulnerable people in society to make claims on resources that would allow them to live in basic dignity. By allowing human rights to guide the implementation of their project work among the extreme poor, humanitarian organizations are increasingly promoting freedom from poverty. The earliest efforts to link development and human rights were at the conceptual level. Throughout the 1990s, economists, academics and human rights theorists worked through the UN and other arenas to provide a conceptual and theoretical basis for rights-based approaches and began to integrate them into organizational programming. For example, thanks in large part to the work of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum in the 1990s, development and human rights became increasingly integrated by definition. The 2000 Human Development Report in particular, which was based largely on Sen’s Development as Freedom,3 argued that: “The promotion of human development and the fulfillment of human rights share, in many ways, a com12771 -Freedom from Poverty.indd 105 12771-Freedom from Poverty.indd 105 3/11/10 10:52:10 AM 3/11/10 10:52:10 AM 106 Chapter 5 mon motivation, and reflect...