Paul Gready

Rights-based approaches to development: what is the value-added?

Advocates and activists for human rights are currently facing a paradox: the coexistence of profound challenges in familiar territory (civil liberties) alongside expansion into new areas. Rights-based approaches (RBAs) are a part of this latter expansionary stream. This article argues that four kinds of potential value-added can be claimed. First, value-added can be sought through direct, indirect, and strategic uses of the law. Second, value can also be added by re-centring the state and (re)asking the question about its appropriate role in development (delivery, oversight), and strategising engagement with the state. Third, in relation to accountability, RBAs add value by calling the state to account; building capacities of rights holders and duty bearers; and encouraging a new kind of ownership of human rights among NGOs. Fourth, the article explores claims that RBAs re-politicise development, redefining it as rights-based rather than based on benevolence; reclaiming or re-politicising the key (process) terms of development; addressing the root, structural causes of poverty and conflict, rather than the symptoms; and speaking truth to power. Not all of these contributions are unique to RBAs, however, and on all counts it remains to be seen if RBAs will deliver on their promise.

Failures and Successes of Human Rights-Based Approaches to Development: Towards a Change Perspective

Human rights-based approaches to development (HRBADs) seem to be grounded in assumptions of change that remain implicit and therefore often undebated. These assumptions of change play at two levels, i.e. that of organisational change and that of social change. The main emphasis of this article is on organisational change as the logical precursor to social change. Explanatory factors for the challenges in introducing HRBADs in development organizations include the different legitimizing anchors that both use (normative versus empirical), as well as the differences in disciplinary backgrounds of staff and in role definition (confrontation versus collaboration with the state). An important finding is that result-based management and HRBADs may be more difficult to reconcile than often believed. The tension between both may be illustrative of the fundamental differences that continue to characterize development and human rights approaches, notwithstanding the rapprochement that has taken place over the past decade(s). We argue that more empirical work is needed in order to better understand organisational and social change through HRBADs.

Conceptualising globalisation and human rights: boomerangs and borders

This article attempts to address a basic question in relation to human rights: are there conceptual frameworks that can be applied usefully to the entire terrain of globalisation, cutting across its layered processes and the activities of both supporters and critics? Two, inter-related, frameworks are discussed here: boomerangs and borders. Three boomerangs are identified: the advocacy boomerang, the boomerang as campaigning strategy, and the (in)security boomerang. The boomerang is one pattern of global linkage that can originate in either the North or South, with the powerful or powerless, that both potentially undermines human rights and suggests possible forms of activism, prevention and redress. While boomerangs indicate that globalisation is characterised by interconnectedness, borders outline patterns and processes of difference, inequality and division. First, a concern with borders must address the considerable residual importance of the state. But border regimes are being redrawn by globalisation, as borders increasingly transcend state structures and control, highlighting new human rights actors and concerns. The article highlights violent borders, violently policed, dividing the world into those who have and those who have not and ‘relations of disjuncture’ within globalisation itself. Underpinning the discussion is a final question: are human rights part of a neo-liberal globalisation agenda or attempts to challenge its current supremacy? It is still an open question, and one crucial to the future of both human rights and globalisation, for which side human rights will ultimately be secured.

Organisational Theories of Change in the Era of Organisational Cosmopolitanism: lessons from ActionAid’s human rights-based approach

Abstract This article argues that organisational cosmopolitanism is an increasingly common characteristic of international ngos. Cosmopolitanism goes beyond international staffing, to include multi-sectoral mandates, multiple skill sets and multiple levels of working. It also challenges the orthodoxies of its parent discourses. Change within such international ngos represents a new frontier in organisational change, as its ambit and ambition extends beyond the demands of more conventional intra-sectoral change. Using ActionAid as a case study, the article explores what might be gained by rendering explicit previously implicit theories of change within such a context. It focuses on inward looking, organisational change but also explores connections to outward looking, operational change. The article highlights two change-related concepts that are of relevance to cosmopolitan organisations: organisational archaeologies (implying layered, hybrid, evolutionary change) and cycles of misalignment followed by realignment. Lessons learned for cosmopolitan organisations from the ActionAid case study suggest that cycles of internal reflection and planning are an effective way of managing other aspects of change.

Culture, Testimony, and the Toolbox of Transitional Justice

Transitional justice has become a major pre-occupation of countries emerging from conflict or oppressive rule. Its aim is to address the ills of the past, and to ensure the non-repetition of that past in the future. Many definitions of transitional justice now adopt a holistic approach extending beyond the familiar ground of prosecutions, truth-seeking and institutional reform to include interventions in such areas as educational reform, memorialization, and culture. This article will examine the potential contribution of culture within the broader family of transitional justice interventions. Drawing on the experience of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), and in particular its public victim and amnesty hearings and speaking truth to reconciliation ethos, it will argue that testimony is at the heart of this potential contribution, but that the proliferation of such testimony carries with it dangers as well as opportunities.

Medical Complicity in Human Rights Abuses: A Case Study of District Surgeons in Apartheid South Africa

This research builds on the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission process. At its health sector hearings, while district surgeons were widely criticized, chiefly for their work with detainees, they and their testimony were largely absent. Their views and perceptions of their experiences remain unknown. This article, based on in-depth interviews with eighteen district surgeons in 1999, investigates the charges of medical complicity in custodial human rights abuses from their perspective. Medical practitioners describe behavior, strongly corroborated in the secondary literature, that potentially resulted in complicity in abuse. The four main forms of behavior are the routinization of visits, police presence during medical examinations, the compilation of inadequate medical reports, and a broader pattern of moral disengagement. Among the reasons given for this behavior are ideological conformity, a lack of definitional and moral clarity with regards to torture, inadequate education and training, and an absence of institutional support. Examples are then provided illustrating that district surgeons could have exercised and did exercise their discretion in ways that furthered human rights. Broadly speaking, both the forms of and reasons for complicity mirror those documented elsewhere. Particular insights are gained, however, into how these dynamics play out in the context of institutional racism, and into the layered and interlinked foundations for complicity—individual/attitudinal, professional/systemic, contextual/political. This is a study providing insights of relevance to custodial and noncustodial medicine, past and present, redress and reform, and post-apartheid South Africa and elsewhere.

Rethinking civil society and transitional justice: lessons from social movements and ‘new’ civil society

ABSTRACT Transitional justice has often reduced conceptions of civil society to human rights NGOs, and lacks a rigorous conceptualisation of the role that civil society plays in transitional justice processes. It largely ignores as political actors the social movements that have driven democratisation in various parts of the world and can be credited as integral to the creation of the discourse of transitional justice. While transitional justice in theory and practice remains focused on traditional civil society, institutions and the state, recent transitions highlight that change is driven by a range of different actors, often using modes of organisation and repertoires of action linked to social movement modalities and other forms of collective action. As such we coin the term ‘new’ civil society, associated with events such as the Arab Spring and austerity-led protests in Southern Europe, to argue that it provides new models for understanding change and justice in transition. An effort is made to conceptualise the roles civil society can play in shaping transitional justice and the ‘new’ civil society framework is used to understand how such actors actively contest mainstream social, political and transitional paradigms, and model alternatives to them. ‘New’ civil society actors rethink how justice and rights are understood in transition, and model alternatives that constitute new forms of transitional politics.

DISTRICT SURGEONS IN APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA: A Case Study of Dual Obligations

C entral to South Africas democratic transformation have been attempts to understand how and why human rights abuses were committed under apartheid. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) convened Health Sector Hearings in June 1997 to explore how decades of systematic racial discrimination had shaped South Africas health services and how the health sector contributed to

What do Human Rights Mean in Development

Human rights are an established part of development discourse, yet attempts to bind human rights and development have encountered resistance or scepticism. We argue that concepts and framings in this field are diverse and contested, and that the ensuing debates shed light on the role of power in development and international politics. The chapter explores the forms that convergence between the two fields has taken (economic and social rights, right to development, rights-based approaches (RBAs) and human rights-based approaches (HRBAs) to development); paths to and implications of convergence; and the remaining sources of tension. The chapter concludes with a case study which identifies ways of resolving these tensions, focussing on RBAs and climate change. We argue that convergence between the two fields is neither a fad nor a one-dimensional process. Rather the ‘slow weaving’ of connecting threads sheds light on the politics of development. Human rights have their most profound impact on development when understood through context-based struggles and modes of practice, when they enable practitioners to ‘take sides’ with the poorest and challenge unequal power relations in collaboration with local actors, and when secured through both social and political processes and legal or administative systems.