Feminist Knowledge | Policy

The Rights-Based Approach to Development: Potential for Change or More of the Same?

by Dzodzi Tsikata

(Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Statistical, Social and Economic Research (ISSER) of the University of Ghana)

1. Introduction

The endorsement and or adoption of the Human Rights-Based Approaches (RBA) by the World Bank, the UN and its agencies such as UNICEF, UN Division on the Advancement of Women, WHO, UNAIDS, UNDP UNDAF, bilateral development agencies from Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, Norway, Sweden and Denmark, and international development NGOs such as Action-Aid, OXFAM, CARE, Danish Church Aid and Save the Children (Interaction, RBA Definitions, 2003) has allowed human rights language to enter the world of development programming as a welcome and legitimate friend. Not surprisingly, much timber and ink have been used up debating the merits and demerits of this development. Sceptical voices are arguing that the development industry has simply taken the high minded concerns of human rights instruments and moulded them to its own purposes and therefore, not much is likely to change in policies and programmes (Uvin, 2002).

While a literature search reveals much more endorsement of the RBA than disagreements with it, the critique of the RBA is striking in how it reads very much like feminists' anxieties about the use of gender and gender mainstreaming in development practice. As was extensively discussed in the conference on which this bulletin issue is based, since the 1970s when gender issues became part of the development industry, different approaches to gender inequalities have become dominant and then waned under the critical gaze of feminists within and outside the development industry. How the development industry has taken up and digested the analyses and prescriptions of feminists has neither been predictable nor always happy in outcomes.

The discussion about why the rights based approach is sweeping through the development industry is instructive. There are two aspects of this story which interest us. One is why governments and some NGOs of developing countries have given such a lukewarm response to the RBA. In particular, it is interesting to ponder how it is that the same governments from the global South who championed the Right to Development within the context of a New International Economic Order (NIEO) would rather not work with an approach to development said to be based on the Declaration of the Right to Development they fought to hard to have adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1986. The second interesting question is why a section of the women's movement, specifically its human rights wing is rejoicing about this widespread "adoption" of the RBA. Are they rushing to judgement or is there something new and interesting happening within the development industry? Are they right to hail the progress of the RBA as a happy convergence of the women's movement with the development industry? What if anything has changed with this development and what does it mean for the old ways of doing development in general and gender and development in particular? An examination of some of these questions should shed some light on the discomfort within certain feminist circles about the RBA.

In this contribution, we begin with a discussion of the RBA and the debates about its policy and programmatic implications. We argue that these differences in interpretation alone signal the need for caution in our attitudes to the RBA. As Brian Pratt of the International NGO Training and Research Centre (INTRAC), one of a growing number of sceptical voices in the West has argued in a critique of the unquestioning attitudes of much of the literature, the RBA needs normal scrutiny like any other development approach (ONTRAC, 2003). We then discuss how gender has been treated within certain RBAs and relate this to the claims being made for the RBA by women's rights organisations. We conclude that many of their hopes for the RBA are not likely to realised given the overall critique of the RBA. As well, this has implications for the struggles of women's organisations for gender equality and development.

2. The RBA According to its proponents

There is no one RBA. Marks for example has identified seven approaches through which human rights thinking is applied to development (Marks, 2003). [1]Whether or not one accepts this classification, it points to certain differences in approach to linking human rights and development. However, the RBAs have important commonalities. One is their basis in human rights instruments- both international and regional. These include the UN Declaration on the Right to Development (1986), the UN Declaration on Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. In relation to gender equality, three instruments - the CEDAW, the optional protocol to the CEDAW and the Declaration on Violence against women- are also relevant (AWID, 2002). There is also emerging consensus on the basic elements of the rights based approach. These include an express linkage to rights, greater accountability on the part of states and international actors, a greater stress on empowerment, participation and non-discrimination and attention to vulnerable groups (OHCHR, 1996-2002).

The OHCHR argues that while the RBAs are currently receiving much attention, the idea is not new and many of its elements have been tried over the years by organisations such as the ILO, UNICEF, UNDP, OXFAM and Care. Their experiences have contributed to the evolution of the RBA. The main advantages of the RBA cited in the literature include the following:

•  Identifies rights and duties holders thereby enhancing accountability.

•  Strategies are directed at redressing injustice rather than relieving suffering

•  Normative stance on the side of the oppressed and excluded thus compelling a focus on vulnerable groups such as women

•  Underlines that rights are inalienable, universal, non negotiable, indivisible and interdependent

•  A starting point is that people have agency and can drive change and are therefore not passive recipients of development aid

•  Violation of rights are taken as a point of reference and this is helpful for systematic analysis

•  Efforts directed at the roots of structural injustices rather than effects

•  Promotes institutional change rather than charity because it moves the discourse from needs to rights.

•  Forces collective action and alliances rather than individual efforts.

Very few would disagree with such advantages, or what should be properly called values, or even aims and objectives. The injection of rights into development discourse and programming is a positive development and indeed has always been part of the strategy of certain NGOs. This is because rights are very important in contexts which privilege functionalist and instrumentalist gender equality discourses across the government civil society divide. Much damage has been done by the promotion of gender equality or equity solely on the ground that it is good for national development, poverty reduction, better population indicators, basically everything and everyone, except for women themselves as citizens with rights. Citizenship as the basis for development is weakly integrated in development programmes not just those concerning women's rights. Many African countries, though republics with flags are dominated by the culture and idioms of chieftaincy and hereditary office which conceive of people as subjects and therefore supplicants rather than as citizens and this permeates national politics. Thus the language of rights would be a helpful counterpoint to some of these reactionary streams within the political economy of development.

At the UN, rights have been useful in making gains for gender equality activists. Also in public interest law cases such as those brought on behalf of communities affected by development projects or natural resource extraction, rights are a useful basis for legal arguments.

However, the disagreements between proponents and critics of the RBA have been less about the importance of human rights and the right to development and more about whether aims such as accountability, participation and people centredness which have long been fought for in development circles are now realisable simply because of the adoption of the RBA. In other words, do the HR instruments on which the RBAs are based and the RBAs themselves have the ability to transform development practice? A related question is whether the stated advantages of the RBAs are particular to these approaches. After all, several pre-RBA approaches have in their time claimed several of the advantages listed above. We take up these issues in the next section.

3. What the RBA sceptics are saying

The scepticism about the RBA arises from a feeling that not more than the language of development has changed. This feeling is fed by the positions of certain proponents of the RBA such as the World Bank which has argued that much of its work since its formation has been to create the environment in which human rights can flourish. This position suggests that a fundamental change in the way the Bank operates and in its economic policy directions is not on the agenda. As some have asked, who decides whether a certain approach to development such as economic liberalisation and all it has stood for has been inimical to development? In any case, within the RBA framework, economic liberalisation is not up for discussion and whatever human rights are on the table have to be realised within its framework (Piron, 2002; Uvin, 2002). Therefore, programmes such as HIPC and the PRSPs even with the dressing up of the millenium development goals will remain essentially liberalisation programmes with poverty alleviation added on. While the World Bank embraces the language of rights, it continues to push for the privatisation of essential services such water and national banks in several African countries and is engaged in land reforms which expand the access to land of trans-national corporations, rejecting arguments based on decades of experience that these policies would further impoverish poor households and their members. The growing convergence of the aims and policies of the IFIs, the WTO and the European Union in relation to both the liberalisation agenda and the rights based approach show in the words of Uvin, that "the powerful and the rich have voluntarily set out to collaborate and redefine the conditions of misery and exploitation for the rest of the world…" (2002, p. 1).

Given the history of donor fadism, it is anyone's guess how long it will take for a new development approach to take over the "holy grail" status of the RBAs. This can happen quite easily because of the continuing confusion about what the RBAs are and are not, and the fact that what is being claimed for them have been advocated within the development circles for decades. Demands for the full participation of disadvantaged social groups in policy and programme decision making to promote local ownership and for bottom up and people centred approaches to development, have been the staple of development literature since the late 70s. Chambers and others have long advocated participatory approaches to development without claiming it for human rights. As well, the growing popularity of policy advocacy among NGOs which has involved making demands on governments, trans-national corporations or the IFIs certainly predated the rights based approaches. The use of targets and indicators to measure the outcomes of development efforts is also not new, even if the particular indicators are now couched as fulfilling certain rights. AWID concedes this indirectly when it argues that the rights based approaches are not a rejection of former development models, but have evolved from lessons learned from the development experiences of many countries (2002).

One of the problems raised by the RBA is the role of the nation states in its implementation. Much of the discussion about responsibility and accountability has been in terms of what governments of developing countries need to do differently. Given the dismantling and disabling of the state under structural adjustment, the proactive role being given to the state under the RBAs is unrealistic. Even more significant is the fact that not much is being directed towards the accountability of the IFIs, trans-national corporations, western governments and international NGOs. Thus it seems that it would not stick if citizens of certain African countries were to accuse the IMF and World Bank of human rights violations on account of SAPs policies resulting in increased levels of poverty. Or would it? Given that the site of development policy making has changed from the state to the international arena, the focus of the RBA on national actors- citizens and governments- and the exclusion of the corporate sector, foreign governments and the IFIs from scrutiny makes it a non starter. Some may note the irony that while the rights based approaches are a response by the UN, northern governments and the IFIs to demands by countries from the South that the right to development be taken seriously, much of its provisions are directed at Southern governments to implement. The lukewarm reception given to the RBAs in capitals of the developing world has been attributed to fears that they represent another round of donor conditionalities which continue in the tradition of protecting donors and the IFIs from having to take equal responsibility for policy errors. The change of name from conditionalities to triggers under the PRSPs has not surprisingly failed to allay fears.

The manner in which powerful players within the economic policy establishment have adopted the RBAs and are pushing it within various constituencies has meant that a programme touted as ensuring grassroots participation is being imposed top down on governments, civil society organisations and communities in much the same way as the results based management approach (RBM) was. The neo-liberal consensus, occurring as it is at the height of the war on terrror and the erosion of political and civil rights and certain women's rights in America does not create auspicious circumstances for proceeding in a way which realises the hopes that the feminist human rights constituency is investing in the RBAs. Unless they share the "trojan horse" analysis of the RBA which suggests that once it is adopted, it implies obligations which citizens can then demand implementation of, and through that progressively change the landscape, it is very hard to point to concrete achievements of the RBAs (Uvin, 2002; Slim, 2002)

The Right to Development (RTD) on which the RBA is based is itself being vigorously debated within the UN (Sengupta, 2000; Piron, 2002; Mark, 2003). While many third world governments have argued that it is a new right, Western governments and the World Bank have argued that it crystallises the social and economic and cultural rights. The roles of national states and international actors in ensuring rights are still being debated. Northern governments have denied that a duty exists to provide resources to address the problems of developing countries. There are also disagreements about whether the right to development is a group right of the rights of individuals and the legal force of the rights being enumerated, which some have argued are mainly in the realm of values without the force of law. The independent expert on the Right to Development, Arjun Sengupta has tried to address some of these debates by arguing controversially that the RTD is about the right to a particular process of development which allows all fundamental freedoms and rights to be realised and which expands capabilities. The RTD in his interpretation cannot be equated with the right to the outcomes of developments or the sum of all existing human rights (Piron, 2002).

These debates about the link between the rights based approaches and the UN Declaration on the Right to Development and the enforceability of certain HR instruments and rights under the RBA point to the legal paraphernalia needed to work within a rights paradigm. This contradicts the idea that the powerless would take centre stage. After years of legal literacy directed at poor African women, very few of them use lawyers and the courts to address violations of their rights. This is likely to deepen the technicisation and depoliticisation of gender and development work which many have justly criticised. Moreover, are the expectations of legal institutions and the legal and para-legal professions justified given their poor record as champions of the rights of the poor and social groups such as women? In the case of women, the complicated relationship between them, the state and the law makes rights at best, a contested arena for the fight for women's rights. The inability of rights discourses to address human rights abuses against women taking place in the private sphere in relation to issues such as sexuality, marriage, reproduction, inheritance and the custody of children is also an issue (Human Rights Dialogue, 2000). The inability of rights analysis to account for the nuances of gender and other social relations, especially their relational aspects is a problem. This is most clearly expressed in the differences between feminist anthropologists and lawyers in their analysis of women's land interests. Where did this wealth of analysis about the state, the law and rights generated over the years go in all the optimism about the rights based approaches?

The role of the UN in promoting the rights based approaches has meant that the MDGs have been tagged on to the RBAs. Feminists who have worked for years within the NGO economic justice caucuses of the UN have been worried about the MDGs, arguing that the achievements represented by the documents adopted by the various 1990s conferences were under threat from the MDGs. This is because they represent a ruthless distillation of undertakings, done in a way which takes the essence out of the rich analysis and detailed commitments of the various platforms. The 8 goals, 15 targets and 48 indicators of the MDG document are so selective that achieving them would not significantly take the development and gender and development agenda forward. It is also doubtful if rights are the best analytical tools for understanding the challenges of globalisation, militarism, the rise of the trans-nationals, the impacts of neo-liberal policies, class, gender, race, kinship and other social relations? Does the rights language help us to understand the world trading system, or even marriage and intra-household relations?

All these issues should concern us because they raise fundamental questions about the development paradigm of the RBAs. Given that the RBAs are said to have special relevance for gender and development and that what women failed to achieve under other gender and development approaches would become possible under the RBAs, it becomes even more critical to tackle the gender dimensions of the RBAs. We now turn to these issues.

4. RBA and gender

If the RBAs raise so many questions, why are women's human rights activists so enthusiastic? It is mainly because of the possibilities represented by their interpretation of what the RBAs. That such views are not necessarily shared by the main actors in development programming in capitals around the developing world does not appear to be of concern. And yet, as in the case of any development approach, it is how its concepts get digested and used that would determine whether the possibilities are realised. On the record, such processes have rarely delivered expected benefits.

Two arguments have been made for why the rights based approaches are good for women. One of the them is that the norm of gender equality is central to the rights based approaches not "as an add-on" because "equality and non discrimination are central tenets of human rights and are included in most conventions". Secondly, since the rights based approaches focus on the most marginalised in society, women are a natural constituency (AWID, 2002). These are good reasons to pay attention to human rights, but they do not translate into the rights based approaches being superior to other gender and development approaches.

Interestingly, there is no agreement about the fate of gender mainstreaming. UN organisations involved in the RBA argue that it will enhance gender mainstreaming. Others have argued that the RBA is a triumph of many years of struggles for the acceptance of human rights standards in development will bring to an end the dubious agenda of gender mainstreaming, or at the very least modify its aims and objects (Kerr, 2000). That the treatment of gender in the RBA would at best have uncertain outcomes is evidenced by OXFAM international's approach to gender within the RBA. The RBA as set out by OXFAM International has 5 rights: a) sustainable livelihoods, b) basic services, c) life and security, d) to be heard and e) to an identity. In a matrix which explains the RBA approach by identifying which HR Instruments speak to which rights, it is stated that CEDAW speaks to the right to an identity, the optional protocol speaks to the right to be heard and the declaration on violence speaks on the right to life and security. As a member of OXFAM international explained, gender is part of the right to identity, but will also be mainstreamed. The gender strategy therefore has two tracks- gender mainstreaming and support for women's organisations and networks. If we accept the argument that gender mainstreaming initiatives have not been successful because of inadequate analytical skills, lack of political commitment and inadequate funding and a lack of focus on the ends of gender mainstreaming (Kerr, 2001), how far does the RBA address these problems?

The approach of human rights activists to the RBA could be an issue of positionality and history. They are no novices to struggles within the mainstream human rights movement, have a well deserved reputation for fighting long and hard and have been successful injecting women's rights into the discourse of human rights. However, with a few exceptions, their contribution to gender and development advocacy, particularly on questions of economic social and cultural justice has been less significant. Many of their allies in African countries are human rights lawyers organisations who have tended to work with specific women's rights issues such violence against women, discrimination under customary law rules of marriage and inheritance and more recently women's land rights. They are less known for their work on the broader issues of the direction and orientation of development policies although a few have been active in research on the impacts of structural adjustment on women workers. Thus in spite of a critique of globalisation and its impacts on poor countries, HR feminism continues to be dominated by forces not particularly worried about the development paradigm and its implications for women.

As they did fight long and hard for the appreciation of women's rights as human rights and have worked with others to establish the importance of HR in development, women's human rights activists needed to claim some victories and document their contributions. This was necessary because accounts of the struggle for the right to development highlight the role of African governments and the non-aligned movement, with no acknowledgement of what women's rights activists have contributed. The few exceptions are the accounts of women's organisations themselves (AWID, 2002). The growing confidence and optimism of certain sections of the women's human rights movement and their growing stature in the UN system as the world conferences of the 90s rolled by from Vienna to Cairo to Copenhagen to Beijing became apparent in their ability to influence conference outcomes.

In the late 90s the movement, fed up with the machinations of the Vatican and its attempts to determine the positions of governments with catholic majorities on certain issues of women's reproductive rights, the movement waged a campaign to have the Vatican removed as a member of the general assembly, arguing that it was not really a country. While they were unsuccessful, it put the Vatican on notice and forced it to strategise more carefully about the composition of its delegations. That optimism of the 90s has been reduced quite rapidly in the ten years since Beijing . The war of attrition between women's groups on the one hand and powerful conservative governments from the USA , certain parts of the Middle East and Latin America and the Vatican has taken its toll. Women's groups, wary of the possibility of the erosion of their hard won gains under the Beijing Platform for Action, are proposing that the Platform document be not open to review at this time. Instead, they are proposing a review of implementation and a discussion of how to improve implementation. This is not because the Platform does not have provisions they would like to change. It is that the geo-political situation in the world today and the assaults on women's rights the world over do not give grounds for optimism. As it is in this same context that RBAs are being adopted, the grounds for optimism are not very clear.

That the RBA dissemination is UN led means that it comes with the UN's baggage. In relation to women's rights, the demobilisational effects of the UN's uptake of the gender equality agenda of second wave feminism has gone hand in hand with the greater visibility and legitimacy it has given to these issues at the national and international levels. The UN continues to be an important player in top down agenda setting and while it is today one of the few progressive but increasingly wobbly voices in discussions about development and women's rights, its current political weakness and its desperate alliances with trans-nationals and powerful governments to deliver some crumbs to the poor make it an unreliable ally in the fight for gender equality and development.

5. What challenges are posed for feminists by the RBA?

The main challenges posed by the RBA is that it represents another instalment of contestation within the gender and development approaches. This is not helped by the multiplicity of RBA approaches and the confusion about what they represent. The RBA has been touted as representing a convergence of two strands of feminism- the women's human rights organisations and those working from a gender and development perspective which have had distinct terminologies, different experts, specialised methodologies, separated agencies and targeted different institutional actors. Kerr has argued that this divide, which was not good for the women's movement because it had duplicated efforts and resulted in a lack of holistic understandings, was now undergoing change because of a convergence on issues related to globalisation. The nature of the convergence was that the development constituency was recognising a link between laws and institutions and the outcomes of development schemes and programmes. On the other hand, rights activists were increasingly focusing on economic and social well being, cultural practices, traditions and state economic policy (Kerr, 2001).

This convergence, if it is real, will be a fragile one in the light of the critique which has been made of the RBA, especially around issues of globalisation and gender equality. Thus there could be an even greater danger of fragmentation in the international movements. The array of forces on the different sides of the RBA divide- Northern governments and their development agencies, the World Bank, the UN and Northern NGOs for the RBA and southern governments and certain southern NGOs and other civil society organisations sceptical about the RBA- makes fragmentation an even greater danger. It is time to debate more fully the RBA and what it represents, and this time, voices from developing countries need to take the lead. While there is not one position emerging in the developing world, and certain NGOs have already began to vote for the RBA, such an airing will be most beneficial for civil society groups and governments in the developing world. The international women's movement should champion this approach for its own good.

Without such interrogation, we may be seeing myth-making in progress. At the very least, all the elements are there- claims based on high moral principles backed by selective evidence, a large army of convinced proponents, eloquent and elegant defences and even taller claims when the myth is questioned but not much more besides. Is the myth that the RBA will deliver gender equality and development a good or bad myth? Does it have strategic import in the sense of being a trojan horse, or is it a prematurely celebratory myth which gives the carte blanche for unmentionable things to be done in the name of human rights? Does the fact that a respected section of the women's movement is heavily involved in this myth making make a difference? I would like to end by returning to the theme of this section of the bulletin- repositioning gender in development. Given the preceding discussion of the RBA, would it help to reposition gender? Some think it that it might- but in what directions and to what ends?

Short Bibliography

AWID, 2002. "A Rights-based Approach to Development" Briefing Paper, Association for Women's Rights in Development, Toronto .

Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs, 2000. Silence Breaking: The Women's Dimension of the Human Rights Box, Human Rights Dialogue, Series 2, No. 3, summer 2000.

Interaction, 2003 Definitions of a Rights-Based Approach to Development, Washington D.C.

Kerr, J: 2001. International Trends in Gender Equality Work: A Discussion Paper for the Gender Review Workshop at NOVIB, November 2001, Den Haag.

Marks, S. P. 2003. The Human Rights Framework for Development: Seven Approaches, Working Paper No. 18. François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights, Harvard University , 2003.

OHCR, 2004. Human Rights and Poverty Reduction: A Conceptual Framework", Geneva .

Piron, L-H. 2002. The Right to Development: A Review of the Current State of the Debate for the Department of International Development, Overseas Development Institute, 2002.

Pratt, B: Rights or Values? ONTRAC, The News Letter of the International NGO Training and Research Centre (INTRAC), No.23, January 2003.

Slim, H. 2002, "A Response to Peter Uvin, Making Moral Low Ground: Rights as the Struggle for Justice and the Abolition of Development", PRAXIS The Fletcher Journal of Development Studies, Volume XVII-2002.

Uvin, P. 2002 “On High Moral Ground: The Incorporation of Human Rights by the Development Enterprise ”, PRAXIS The Fletcher Journal of Development Studies, Volume XVII-2002.

Footnote

[1] These are the holistic approach, the rights based approach, the social justice approach, the capabilities approach, the right to development approach, the responsibilities approach and the human rights education approach. The UNDP's approach is holistic, the approach of other UN agencies are rights based, OXFAM's approach is the social justice approach, Amartya Sena and Nussbaum's analysis is classified as capabilities while the right to development approach is attributed to the Non-aligned movement, etc.