A Human Rights Approach to Development

There is a growing convergence between human rights and development discourses and practice. This trend derives from increasing concern that economic development has not achieved its promise to elevate people from poverty. Rather, that market driven development has led to rising inequalities within and between nations with an estimated 1.2 billion people living under conditions of extreme poverty.  A human rights approach to development entails a recognition that human beings possess certain inherent dignity which must be assured and maintained as the overriding goal of every development activity.  International human rights law is the only agreed international framework that offers a coherent body of principles and practical meaning for development.  This framework provides the tools to better analyse poverty through a focus on the status of each specific right in a given country, to draft appropriate strategies for improving the status of the rights and set clear benchmarks for their realization.   Human rights can also help transform the economic, social and political power relationships and structures at the local, national, and international levels.  A human rights approach to development requires:

• a recognition that people are valuable in and of themselves, not simply for their potential as economic agents;
• a recognition that development is valuable only because it can serve to promote the enjoyment of greater freedoms and enable people to live dignified lives;
• a mental and process shift on the part of development actors/institutions from that which seeks to “save the world” to that which seeks to “change the world” so that those who are worse off are enabled to take effective control of development processes that concern them; and
• that development practitioners localize their thinking, and subordinate their preferences to the priorities that may be established by the poor themselves.

International development agencies have almost universally focused their mission statements on poverty reduction.  The evolution of the concept of poverty reduction strategy papers that commit governments in collaboration with civil society to formulate plans to reduce poverty has provided human rights defenders with opportunities to integrate human rights in development goals.  The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has produced a set of guidelines on the integration of human rights in poverty reduction strategies.  This has been accompanied with pressure on the international financial institutions to consider the relationship between human rights and development (see Sigrun Skogly, The Human Rights Obligations of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.)

Additional resources on this topic are:

• Human Rights and Human Development, Human Development Report 2002
• Statements and Reports Made by the United Nations Independent Expert on the Right to Development
• “Presentations on Experiences in Using a Human Rights Approach, Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) and UNICEF” (Video Presentations)
• Mainstreaming Human Rights into Development