Rights-based approaches are increasingly part of the policy and practice of international development agencies. But how can these agencies support people’s own efforts to turn rights into reality?
While some believe these new approaches offer the potential for a fundamental and positive change for international development agency relations with governments and civil society in aid recipient countries, others remain puzzled or sceptical as to their relevance for achieving the MillenniumDevelopment Goals. Some observers suspect that agencies have appropriated the “rights” language without changing the way they go about their business.
What is clear is that rights-based approaches are challenging. They reveal difficult issues concerning the legitimacy of action, the practice of power and lines of accountability. As argued in the introduction to this IDS Bulletin, rights have the potential to raise important challenges to existing power structures and can lead to significant change. However, for rights in development to be able to be a catalyst for change, rather than a top-down bureaucratic exercise, an understanding of how power and rights are interlinked is essential.
Exploring power and power relations is a critical challenge facing those trying to support rights in practice, as a recent workshop at the Institute of Development Studies for the staff of a range of international development agencies demonstrated. Many of the power structures development actors face, such as the international economic regime, are very difficult to change. However, there is a need to recognise and understand the dynamics of power in the context of day-to-day experience and the positive ways in which individuals within development agencies can use their own power, whatever its limitations. Power is both an obstacle to rights-based approaches to development and a tool that can be used to support struggles for claiming and realising rights.
The premise of the workshop was that it is necessary to understand ourselves as actors engaged in the dynamics of relationships of power in order to be able to understand and promote the realisation of rights.This approach topower, as understood through the lens of personal experience, highlighted some of the deeply rooted obstacles to promoting rights in practice.Many of theparticipants’ experiences revealed the ways in which work promoting rights is political, unexpected, often complex, confused and potentially emotionally demanding (Groves and Hinton 2004; Scott-Villiers 2004).
By approaching the issue of power and its implications for promoting rights in practice through experiential learning, the workshop aimed to link together a conceptualisation of power and rights-based approaches with the daily encounters with power for those involved in promoting rights. Experiential knowing is through face-to-face encounters; through empathy and resonance, as opposed to knowing about ideas or theories (Reason 1998). Experiential approaches to learning can be instrumental in deepening understanding and capacity for adaptation to complex development processes (Pasteur and Scott-Villiers 2004; Irvine, Chambers and Eyben 2004), because these approaches focus on how our own actions constitute our experiences (Reason 1998). Approaching power through experiential knowledge brought out some of the serious tensions and contradictions that emerge in trying to promote rights in development.
An approach to power, developed by French sociologists such as Callon and Latour (discussed in Clegg 1989) would suggest that as the international development agencies have already defined the problem(poverty) and the solution (aid), necessarily their concern is for tools to support the problemsolving effort. From this perspective, power denies questions. Probing the concepts we use is thus a first step to challenging ourselves about the way we think. Examining how rights and power are linked is a way of probing further what Midgely (1996) calls the “philosophical plumbing” of the way we understand the world works and our role within that world. However, any such exploration obliges us to confront our own power and agency and this can be acutely uncomfortable (Scott-Villiers 2004).It is questionable as to whether most of us are prepared to do this unless forced into it by external pressure.
The next section draws out how understanding power, both experientially and conceptually, is essential to promoting rights-based approaches to development. This is followed by some examples drawn from the workshop of the types of circumstances that underscore what makes rights so challenging for international development organisations. We then conclude by summarising the key actions that participants identified as steps to meeting more effectively what has been elsewhere described as the challenge of aligning human rights principles with procedures and practices (Cornwall and Nyamu-Musembi, this issue).
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This article comes from the IDS Bulletin 36.1 (2005) Rights and Power: The Challenge for International Development Agencies
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