Freedom from Poverty: NGOs and Human Rights Praxis

Chapter 1. NGOs and Freedom from Poverty

1 NGOs and Freedom from Poverty Human rights advocacy in the West is changing. New issues are being promoted , which extend beyond the relatively narrow range of civil and political rights that nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) historically fought for. New organizations are joining in the fight, using concepts and methods not traditionally considered “human rights” advocacy. This book explains how the advancement of new rights—in particular, freedom from poverty—is redefining what human rights mean and how they can be used as tools for social change. Since the early 1990s there has been a growing movement among NGOs, social justice organizations, UN agencies, and some state institutions in favor of using human rights rhetoric and strategies to combat extreme poverty. This is manifested by initial steps being taken in several domains: • new international conferences relating to economic and social rights;1 • the mainstreaming of human rights approaches within UN development agencies;2 • an increase in national legislation and institutions (such as human rights commissions) that explicitly incorporate economic and social rights concerns; • increasing reference to human rights in public education campaigns on poverty; • an increase in funding for economic and social rights from private foundations and other donors;3 • increasing willingness of traditional human rights organizations to move toward advocating for the “full spectrum” of human rights; 12771-Freedom from Poverty.indd 1 12771-Freedom from Poverty.indd 1 3/11/10 10:51:56 AM 3/11/10 10:51:56 AM Chapter 1 2 • the proliferation of new organizations that focus exclusively on economic and social rights; • increasing use of human rights language by grassroots social movements struggling against poverty, hunger, homelessness, and other social problems; and • increasing adoption of rights-based approaches by humanitarian aid NGOs. For the first time in history, then, extreme global poverty is being seriously considered in the West as more than just a personal misfortune, but as a human rights concern. Hundreds of NGOs are now involved in promoting the realization of economic and social rights in some fashion.4 Yet even as they move to adopt a human rights approach to poverty, NGOs understand and approach the human rights framework in different ways. These different approaches to subsistence rights—that is, claims for social guarantees to guard against extreme poverty—represent differing avenues that organizations take to engage strategically in the politics of human rights. Studying this diversity in approaches to subsistence rights can help us understand how substate human rights politics is changing to adapt to new concerns. At first glance, it is somewhat puzzling why the human rights framework was not employed earlier in Western NGOs’ struggle against global poverty . Subsistence rights figured prominently in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and throughout the Cold War, rights language flourished as people began to “frame every social controversy as a clash of rights.”5 My research , therefore, tries to understand why Western NGOs have only recently begun to delve into freedom from poverty and what emerging NGO practice on subsistence rights implies for human rights politics more generally. I address this overall theme through three specific questions: 1. Why have NGOs begun to adopt subsistence rights—as part of a larger package of economic and social rights—in the past decade? Why do some organizations continue to resist subsistence rights? 2. How do different actors interpret and frame rights differently? 3. What does emerging NGO practice on subsistence rights imply, both for the politics of human rights and for efforts to eliminate extreme poverty? This book focuses on three sets of actors who have increasingly adopted subsistence rights in the past decade: human rights, social justice, and hu12771 -Freedom from Poverty.indd 2 12771-Freedom from Poverty.indd 2 3/11/10 10:51:56 AM 3/11/10 10:51:56 AM NGOs and Freedom from Poverty 3 manitarian NGOs.6 Human rights organizations are groups such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, whose mission is explicitly focused on the realization of human rights. Within human rights organizations, subsistence rights have been promoted both by new organizations specifically devoted to issues related to poverty and by traditional human rights organizations expanding their mandates to include a limited range of economic and social rights. Social justice organizations include local constituency-based groups, national lobbying groups, interorganizational coalitions, and academic institutes that frame their social and economic advocacy campaigns in terms of social justice.7 These groups are...