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

What Is New?

The new rights advocacy is diverse, and not all of its dimensions are new or unanticipated. But the organizations and movements discussed here, including government agencies, international NGOs that are household names in many parts of the world, and specialized NGOs and social movements that may be little known outside of their fields, are collectively responding to rapid change in the international system and in their operating environments by seeking new sources of power and influence. When seen through the multiple lenses of social theory, international relations, human rights theory, and organizational theories, several new and important developments emerge that challenge contemporary practice in human rights and development and theories and models of international politics. Within and among the human rights and development sectors we have documented a gradual increase in the level and intensity of cooperation , shared agendas, joint action, and (less frequently) adoption of shared methods. In local debates over major development projects, global meetings on social, environmental, and human rights policy, and in thematic advocacy campaigns on transnational policy issues, collaboration grew slowly in the early 1990s. Since then it has grown more rapidly as NGOs in both fields sought sources of leverage to challenge and regulate the growing power of transnational corporations or to subject national development policy decisions to public scrutiny and to the principles and standards of international human rights. What Is New? The new rights advocacy borrows methods drawn from the experience of civil and political rights advocacy, and many of its participants are veterans of advocacy on social policy, human rights, and environmental issues over two decades or more. But while there is important continuity in the story of human rights–development interaction , four major features and developments, outlined in chapter 1, set it apart from the patterns of previous NGO political action, and require our attention and reflection. 168 Human Rights and Development POWER, STRATEGIC ACTION, HUMAN RIGHTS, AND THE SECTORS We have invoked the concept of power, and the varied postures of international NGOs toward power, in many parts of this account. NGOs invoke human rights in critical circumstances as a source of power, as a way of reframing a debate, as a tool for gaining legal and political leverage for resisting neoliberal economic norms and the dominance of intellectual property rights, and as a source of empowering concepts and language at the individual level. International NGOs, we posited in chapter 1, embrace human rights and broaden their human rights agendas because they are compelled to make strategic choices by changing international systems that dramatically affect their operating environment and require a response. They make these responses, in some cases, decisively enough to change the orientation not only of individual NGOs or programs but of the fields themselves. NGOs and social movement organizations have adopted human rights strategies in response to the rapid rise of privatization of water utilities and the creation of new trade and intellectual property rules that restrict societies’ ability to respond to critical public health threats, as well as in debates and battles over dam building, oil exploration , conscription of children, and agrarian reform. In the process, the human rights and development fields have begun to reorient and redefine themselves at the international level. The extent and limitations of this redefinition are further discussed below as an issue of convergence. But to assume that NGOs are driven solely by these principled agendas would be too simplistic. NGOs, we have seen, also act to protect their own independence or appearance of independence, to sustain their reputations, and to protect their access to resources that are vital to their missions. Can we speak of this organizational behavior in terms of power? We argue that this organizational behavior , too, should be understood in terms of power, and that by doing so we can integrate understanding of organizational behavior with the political behavior of NGOs. NGOs’ search for sources of power, 169 What Is New? in this sense, has been motivated both by the organizations’ need to defend their own interests, as when international development NGOs shore up their independence from official donors by embracing human rights, and by the need for political leverage or traction in an effort to influence powerful institutions or entrenched policies, as in the choice of a human rights strategy to campaign for housing or access to essential medicines. Often, these organizational and principled political objectives are difficult...