Karsten Åström

Gender and Water from a Human Rights Perspective: The Role of Context in Translating International Norms into Local Action

Abstract An important area in the discourse on gender and water is water supply where women are seen as the key actors and beneficiaries. A human rights approach to development has been adopted with access to safe water explicitly recognized as a basic human right. This right places a legal obligation upon governments to translate the international norms into practice. But does explicitly acknowledging the human right to water make a practical difference in women’s lives? Using an actor-oriented perspective, this paper analyzes how the international legal norms for realization of the right get reconstructed in local communities where women are the right holders. The empirical data for the analysis will be drawn from a first-hand qualitative study in rural India. The findings of the study show how the socio-cultural matrix provides the environment for implementing the right and determines its equitable and effective exercise by women.

Welfare as a means for political stability : a law and society analysis

There have been extensive discussions in academic circles of why some countries develop into welfare states while others do not. Two main factors mentioned in these discussions are economic growth and the need for political stability. In these discussions, the example of Sweden, where the welfare state allegedly emerged from a ‘culture of consensus’, has often been treated as an historic exception. In this article we discuss the relevance of the two main factors suggested in the literature, and investigate whether Sweden is a rare case of a country where welfare arose out of a culture of consensus or if welfare in Sweden emerged as a product of strategies that aimed at promoting political stability, and thereby followed a similar pattern to other Western European countries. In undertaking this task, we have conducted a review of the literature and used Migdals ‘state-in-society’ perspective and the ‘institutional approach’ as a theoretical framework. Our results can be summarised under three headings: (a) until the mid-twentieth century, Sweden was a highly unstable, conflict-ridden class society, and thereby a followed similar pattern to other Western European countries; (b) welfare reforms in Sweden were introduced as a means of addressing political and social instability; (c) Sweden is therefore no exception to the theory that deep political crises trigger welfare reforms.