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

Durability

fundamentally changed. At Amnesty International, the methods by which the movement will work on ESC rights campaigns are still parallel to and consistent with those employed for civil and political rights advocacy, but if Amnesty International infuses rights into its campaigning as fully as anticipated, it may alter its methods over time. Whether these changes alter the perceptions of its constituents or the general public is another matter. Only in a handful of hybrid organizations do we observe a blending of the core methods of the fields. Human rights NGOs have not taken up delivering direct assistance or community development work, nor have established development NGOs begun any systematic use of human rights documentation, reporting, or litigation. The worries of some human rights activists that the field might lose its clear identity in expanding and deepening its ESC rights agenda do not seem to be justified by the pattern of organizational change we have observed. Beyond the NGO and United Nations agencies, the professional and academic boundaries between the fields are still seldom traversed . Research on human rights–based development is almost completely dominated by practitioners active in the field or situated in specialized think tanks such as the Oxford-based International NGO Training and Research Centre. There will continue to be a real need to document and evaluate these substantial changes in the human rights and development fields. Further research on the institutional relationship between the fields should also track the development of academic and professional centers of training and research. Durability Are the trends detailed here lasting, durable changes to the development and human rights fields, or are they fads, fashions that rise for a decade and recede into memory or are absorbed into a kind of global business as usual? Predicting the future is risky business, and we are wary of extending our analysis into the unknown. But if the 178 Human Rights and Development past and the shape of organizational behavior in the two sectors can be reliable guides, then it is possible to make some informed projections and pinpoint key actors to watch in assessing the impact of changes in development and human rights. We argued in chapter 1 that the two sectors have historically different tendencies, conditioned by the fact that human rights advocates have been more strongly and consistently united in an adversarial effort to establish the authority of internationally recognized human rights standards and principles over states, while international development NGOs have often been more cooperative with the state and less united as a sector of organizations. One result is that the movement to adopt ESC rights as a source of power and leverage is clearer and more decisive among human rights NGOs. Among international development NGOs, rights-based approaches remain a countercurrent to the mainstream in the field. How enduring will the trends be in individual organizations and in the sectors? International human rights NGOs’ new commitments have been made in the context of a growing global movement for ESC rights, especially in the poor countries, and would be difficult to reverse. Any step by the major international NGOs to retreat entirely to a civil and political rights–focused agenda would be interpreted as backing away from conditions of widespread abuse and denial of economic and social human rights, as well as from the expressed concerns of many colleague organizations around the world, and would carry a high cost for unity, trust, and cooperation among human rights advocates worldwide. Such a move would open NGOs to criticism for bifurcating rights and undercutting the core concepts of indivisibility, as governments did in the cold war era. The degree to which economic and social rights will be effectively integrated in organizational agendas and in public conceptions of human rights remains to be seen, but the direction of the movement is clear. The future course of rights-based development approaches is harder to project. International human rights NGOs are, in a sense, embracing a long-neglected and coequal part of the existing legal structure of human rights, but in development the move to embrace 179 Durability human rights is more voluntary and tactical, not completing an incomplete agenda for the sector, but seizing an opportunity to reframe key development issues, refurbish organizational images, or both. Organizations such as Oxfam and ActionAid that have made widespread commitments to colleague and partner NGOs would find it difficult directly to renounce or retreat from...