New Rights Advocacy: Changing Strategies of Development and Human Rights NGOs

The Development Field and the Call for Rights-Based Approaches

ment. Other changes in development policy have proposed new prioritiesforgovernmentsanddonors ;integratedruraldevelopment,basic human needs, sustainable development and human development, for example, all assert new priorities for development aid and policy. But like neoliberal development doctrine of the 1980s, which called for a fundamental change from state-directed development planning to market-driven development and a sharply reduced regulatory role for the state, human rights–driven development does something more. It calls for a new set of rules for development practice, a reconceptualization that involves a radical change in the authority and power behind the development industry. By calling for governments’ policy and donors’ projects and programs to be accountable to a set of standards and principles, and by acknowledging the authority of internationally recognized standards, rights-based development would give poor people’s organizations and movements a source of leverage indemandingimprovedservices,transparentdecisionmaking,meaningful participation and freedom from discriminatory treatment, and real accountability over policy outcomes. In short, a rights-based approach moves development from its present framework—international goal setting and charity driven by enlightened self-interest—to entitlement to a quality of life for all individuals , based in an internationally recognized set of standards that governments and international institutions have specific obligations to meet. The Development Field and the Call for Rights-Based Approaches To understand how human rights–based approaches have been received among development agencies, one needs to recall the history of shifting and evolving fashions in the field. Sixty years of fads and fashions, new theories, technologies, and slogans have disappointed observers, participants, and “beneficiaries,” and new initiatives are now greeted with skepticism in many quarters (see e.g., Escobar 1995; Dichter 2001; Isbister 1998). With each new fashion, aid agencies 95 The Development Field and the Call for Rights-Based Approaches adopt new approaches, incorporate the new buzzwords into programs and documents, and join new interagency working groups. Development has arrived at an impasse whose dimensions—skepticism about impact, accountability, corporate globalization, and the compromised independence of NGOs—make human rights–based approaches particularly attractive. Sociologist Stephen Browne (2000) traces the history of development assistance through four eras: development as growth, as basic human needs, as liberalization, and as NGOs and good governance. The typology captures the movement of aid donors toward the current environment of frustration and dissent over neoliberal policies and the shoring up of the neoliberal model with a patchwork of strategies involving governance, NGOs, targeted social investments, and market-friendly reforms. (Browne’s book appeared at the beginning of what might be a fifth development “era,” one decisively shaped by human rights. Whether this turns out to be so remains to be seen.) The theory and practice of development as economic growth in the 1950s and 1960s was driven by the belief that capital investment could help a growing agrarian economy “take off” into rapid economic growth and industrialization (Rostow 1960). Troubled by slow progress in reducing global poverty and hunger, development practitioners shifted emphasis in the 1970s toward agriculture, health, education, and other services to improve well-being among the poor and stimulate growth in the sectors where they worked. “Basic human needs” and “redistribution with growth” dominated development agencies in the 1970s, but they were swept aside by the neoliberal revolution in the early 1980s. Neoliberal theorists in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the World Bank believed that aid programs would continue to fail until governments removed the flawed policies that distorted economies and created disincentives to investment and exports. Two decades of aid programs beginning in 1980 featured policy conditions to cut government spending and employment, privatize government-owned enterprises, and create incentives for trade and investment. The World Bank, the most influential proponent of neoliberal strategies, used its 96 NGOs and the Development Industry financial leverage as well as personal, intellectual, and professional networks of influence to win at least partial implementation of the free-market agenda (Mosley 1995; Goldman 2005). The profile of NGOs in the aid sector skyrocketed during the same period, as donors enlisted both national and international NGOs’ services to replace government-provided social services and help manage emergency social funds and social investment funds designed to soften the human impact of rapid economic reform. Although some international development NGOs were troubled by the role voluntary agencies were playing in the dismantling of government enterprises and agencies, NGOs participated in nearly all of 108...