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

Tracking the Origins

42 New Rights Advocacy nexus call for a less state-centric approach, drawing on social movement theory and broader conceptions of power, and taking into account the growing understanding of corporate influence in the international political economy. IMPLICATIONS FOR THE DEVELOPMENT PARADIGM The new rights advocacy is the first fundamental challenge to a market -dominated development framework that reshaped national economies and international trade and finance during the 1980s and 1990s. New movements are drawing on human rights standards to challenge the application of market logic to the delivery of water and basic services, to argue for the right to agrarian reform and education, and to assert the primacy of human health considerations in setting national and international policy regarding HIV/AIDS. Resistance to privatization and liberalization plans has been a feature of national politicsindevelopingcountriesatleastsincethe1970s.Newrightsadvocacymovementsarechallengingmarket -drivenorthodoxyattheinternationalinstitutionswithgreaterpoliticalforceandlegitimacythan critics of structural adjustment policies have previously mustered. Tracking the Origins As we turn in chapters 2 and 3 to the two fields—first human rights, then development—we investigate whether and how international NGOs are adopting new strategic postures and methods for advancing human rights and development, and what effects these changes have on the organizations and the broader fields. We will observe important parallels and symmetries in the changes, limitations, and resistance to change across the sectors. But there are also important differences among major international NGOs in the fields and between the two fields. International NGOs in the two fields were affected differently by major political trends in the 1980s and 1990s, their embrace of ESC rights has a different organizational significance, and they are affected differently by some of the factors that have long led to the secondary status of ESC rights in the human rights field. 43 Tracking the Origins They begin in very different positions with respect to ESC rights. For international development NGOs, the turn to human rights, and to ESC rights in particular, constitutes a potential paradigm shift, a reorientation that embraces the international legal and moral framework of human rights as a new kind of ethical and operational guide for development practice. For human rights NGOs, the shift has a different meaning. Mainstream international human rights NGOs find themselves in the position of turning toward the second of the twin covenants that codify human rights principles, reintegrating through their active agendas the two halves of the human rights legal corpus after de-emphasizing and largely neglecting economic and social rights throughout a generation of promotion of civil and political human rights. This effort to reintegrate and reorient the fields will not be easy. Fulfilling social rights is costly, and although countries and major subnational regions such as the Indian state of Kerala have achieved remarkable health and education outcomes on modest budgets, in general budget constraints present barriers that are much less troublesome for civil and political rights. The principle articulated in Article 2 of the ICESCR, that international actors share the responsibility in some measure through a variety of means including “providing assistance,” is yet to be fully operationalized, and any extensive obligations are sure to encounter resistance. International NGO activists in both fields also recognize that the international obligations articulated in Article 2 will extend beyond providing development assistance to shaping the rules of the global economy in ways that make it possible for governments to meet the full range of their human rights obligations. The partial and sometimes tentative embrace of new rights advocacy by the leading international NGOs in the two fields, then, offers a study in the differences and adaptations driven by both political and organizational factors. But it is also the story of a kind of convergence between two historic fields that is reshaping both while also reshaping the relations among NGOs in the global North and South, social movements, and rich- and poor-country governments. This page intentionally left blank ...