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

Durability and Limits, Constraints and Resistance

Alston may be proven correct, but if this is to come to pass it will require a much stronger, more concerted effort than is now visible to link the MDGs to the standards, principles, and power of human rights and to encourage the power that human rights standards should afford to people living in the indignity of extreme poverty. Durability and Limits, Constraints and Resistance Is this ambivalence within the United Nations a symptom of a general lack of substantive change by the official and nongovernmental agencies embracing human rights–based development? Skeptics have argued that the rush to adopt rights-based approaches is an expression of donors’ continuing effort to win greater legitimacy for the development enterprise. Donors may be doing little more, as Uvin (2002, 1–2) suggests, than attempting to occupy the moral “high ground” by “incorporating human rights terminology into development discourse,” a rhetorical gesture that need not involve substantive changes in the policies, projects, and programs they promote. Skepticism is entirely appropriate in light of the history of development fashions, and to reach a more definitive understanding of what development agencies are doing with the rights-based approach , agencies and those who monitor them need to use a set of standards and methods that would provide convincing evidence of genuine, substantive changes driven by human rights–based approaches . What changes are apparent in organizational systems, such as management and training, funding, and cooperative partnerships , to show in the longer term that fundamental change is in process? What course the embrace of human rights will take in the development field is difficult to anticipate. To date it has been selective, irregular, and sometimes frustrating to those who advocate a thorough transformation. There are reasons, both inherent to human rights and social policy themselves, and specific to the politics of the development field, to think that impact in the development sector will continue to be somewhat limited. 119 Durability and Limits, Constraints and Resistance Foremost among these is the relative reluctance to exercise power in a forthright, direct manner. ActionAid is the most prominent exception to this aversion to power, as the agency directly affirms its objective of increasing the power available to poor people’s organizations and others with whom it works. Other agencies—Oxfam and MSF, for example—while not engaging in a discourse of power, do position themselves to be able to use human rights principles to give greater force to their demands. But until development NGOs become more comfortable with the highly politicized world of social movements, their embrace of human rights principles will have less than resounding impact. The organizational and international politics of the development field also seem likely to limit the impact of human rights–based approaches . Resistance from some donors constitutes the most obvious limit. CARE staff members specializing in developing and promoting its rights-based approach acknowledge that the organization ’s donors, particularly government agencies including USAID, have some hesitations about the emphasis on rights that will have to be overcome or dealt with (Bode et al. 2005). How independently can international NGOs in the development field be expected to act? Development NGOs are often lumped in an amorphous, wide-ranging collective referred to as “global civil society” (e.g., in Anheier, Glasius, and Kaldor 2004; Salamon, Sokolowski , and Associates 2004). Tvedt (2002) and others have recently challenged the assumption that international development NGOs should be so treated and argue that they are better understood by grasping their place in the aid industry. Development NGOs, in this view, behave based on their structural position in the aid system , not the moral and independent position sometimes attributed to them. Few international development NGOs have managed to build large-scale programs without bilateral and multilateral donors’ support , and the largest of these donors—the U.S. and Japanese aid agencies and the World Bank—have little enthusiasm for a human rights–driven strategy. 120 NGOs and the Development Industry The United Nations, which provided the principal source of initiative , has not proven to be a strong leader. Compromised and preoccupied by events relating to the September 11 attacks and the Iraq war and beset by constant criticism from the United States, its initiative has been weakened by the shift of focus to the Millennium Development Goals. However, UN agencies themselves have shone on a small scale: UNDP country programs such as that in BosniaHerzegovina , UNICEF’s...