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

Crisis of Development, Promise of Human Rights

thinkers in the UN system. By emphasizing government’s obligation to create conditions that preserve human functioning above minimum levels, Nussbaum, although preferring “capabilities” to rights, provides an intellectual framework for an approach to development that starts from the inalienable rights of individuals and obligations of governments. These intellectual challenges to conventional thinking about development have lent support and legitimacy to efforts to link development more closely with human rights. More important in explaining the movement toward rights-based approaches, though, are the political , moral, and organizational challenges discussed in the section that follows. Crisis of Development, Promise of Human Rights By the late 1990s, the development aid enterprise faced a crisis both of substance and of image, felt most acutely by leading NGOs and the donors most concerned with social welfare outcomes. Four critical issues capture the dimensions of the crisis: the continuing growth of inequality and social exclusion in most low-income countries; the desire by many NGOs to challenge prevailing neoliberal economic norms in the field; the deeply compromised independence of NGOs as participants in civil society; and the weakness of accountability by development programs and donors to those they purport to serve. Collectively, these changes and the pressures they created for international development NGOs—financial, moral, political, and intellectual—are the motives that drive NGOs’ strategic choices to adopt human rights–based approaches. POVERTY AND INEQUALITY The increasing intensity and complexity of poverty and global inequality is the most significant of the global factors driving some NGOs to find ways to increase the impact of their programming and to influence trade, finance, and other policies more decisively. The UN-sponsored Millennium Development Goals and Campaign and 99 Crisis of Development, Promise of Human Rights 100 NGOs and the Development Industry the development NGO–led “One” campaign against global poverty have helped bring poverty reduction back to the center of official development discourse, emphasizing quick impact interventions in health education, water, and sanitation. But the extent and severity of global poverty, outside of rapidly growing China, continued to worsen in the late 1990s and the first years of the new millennium. Even in the measured language of the 2006 UN report on the Decade for the Eradication of Poverty (1997–2006), the progress “has been mixed” (United Nations Economic and Social Council 2005, 12). “[A]t the global level” the incidence of extreme poverty declined by 118 million persons, but in one country, China, 165 million people were, statistically speaking, lifted out of poverty. On balance, then, except in China’s superheated new industrial economy, “all other regions have experienced setbacks since 1990,” not only in Africa but in Latin America, Europe, and Central Asia as well (United Nations Economic and Social Council 2005, 13). In the context of this persistent and growing poverty, both NGOs and official agencies have searched for a magic bullet, a change in outlook and strategy that would restore development’s luster in the public eye and make a rapid and sustainable difference for 1.2 billion people living in extreme poverty. The Oxfam agencies, for example , according to Oxfam America’s president, wanted a new, dynamic approach to poverty that “defines poverty as social exclusion ” and identifies the “critical exclusionary mechanism,” rather than resource deficits (Offenheiser and Holcombe 2003). DFID similarly argues that human rights–based development recasts poverty as a result of exclusion and discrimination, not simply a “lack of resources ” (2000, 13), and Sida (2001) claims that the improved ability to analyze poverty and its causes is the most important benefit of its rights and democracy approach. ActionAid’s 2005–2010 action plan highlights the “unacceptable truth that poverty remains deeply entrenched around the globe” and that the “gap between rich and poor communities and nations is . . . widening.” Acting on “our deepening understanding of the causes of poverty and injustice,” it adopts a “Rights to End Poverty” strategy (ActionAid 2005, 2–3). 101 Crisis of Development, Promise of Human Rights CHALLENGING THE MARKET-DRIVEN DEVELOPMENT PARADIGM If the urgency of securing global commitments to eradicate poverty is the principal factor motivating development NGOs to embrace rightsbased approaches, resistance to the dominance of free-market ideology is nearly as important. While many agencies seek to reconcile rapid privatization and free-market strategies with poverty reduction, the rights-based approach subordinates free markets to the legal and moral claims to a standard of...