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DOI: 10.1177/1468018108100399
2009 9: 79 Global Social Policy
Jean Grugel and Nicola Piper
Do Rights Promote Development?

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Do Rights Promote
Development?
J EAN GRUGEL
University of Sheffield, UK
NI COLA PI PER
Swansea University, UK
abstract Human rights of various sorts are now seen as
central to the development process. We argue that rights
claims can sometimes be effective in advocacy campaigns for
some rights if those campaigns can find a way to resonate
with the predominately liberal ideas that shape the global
political economy. But this is not always possible and many
rights, especially economic rights or claims made by or on
behalf of some social groups, are difficult to put onto the
agenda of states. We suggest as a consequence that there is a
need to be wary of an unreflective embrace of rights
discourses and that other arguments for development and
justice are also required, alongside sustained theoretical
reflection on and engagement with the state.
keywords advocacy, development, human rights, international
law, Latin America, the state
ARTI CLE 79
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http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav 1468-0181 vol. 9(1): pp 7998; 100399;
DOI: 10.1177/1468018108100399 http://gsp.sagepub.com
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For a long time, human rights were regarded as window-dressing on the develop-
ment process or evenirrelevant to it. Now, however, for the United Nations (UN),
many development agencies, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and aca-
demics, rights are intrinsic to, and may even define, development and underdevel-
opment. This shift is generally seen as positive, for reasons that range froma view
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that rights theory serves to define injustice, to a belief that state-led approaches of
development have failedtodeliver individual well-beingandempowerment should
be replaced with models that place the individual at the centre of the development
process or an assumption that rights serve as a tool that can allowadvocacy move-
ments to challenge inequity more effectively than in the past and promote social
inclusion and community and individual self-realization. It is an exploration of this
latter approach, namely the idea that rights arguments can provide a useful under-
pinning, as well as a moral argument, for advocacy by or on behalf of groups,
organisations or individuals that are experiencing exclusion, that we wish to probe
here. Put simply, if somewhat crudely: are rights useful for tackling the multiple
forms of exclusion (social, political, economic, cultural, age-, race-, ability- and
gender-based, etc.) and marginalization experienced by poor people?
Although this question is central to the success of strategies adopted by a
range of activists and development practitioners there is, in fact, very little
generalizable evidence as to what rights discourses achieve in situations of
underdevelopment. In this context, we want to make two arguments. The first
is that, leaving aside their philosophical appeal, the effectiveness of rights dis-
courses in framing and moving issues up political agendas varies from issue-
area to issue-area. Some injustices are more amenable to framing as a rights
violation because they reflect or echo high priority concerns in international
politics. In particular, where rights claims can be made to resonate with the
predominantly liberal ideas that shape the contemporary global political
economy they have a greater chance of being heard. This is not, of course, to
say that advocacy, tactics and persistence are not important. But even very
sophisticated advocacy campaigns and very determined advocates cannot
always make rights arguments work as a tool for change. One consequence
here is that, if rights frames come to dominate development debates in a way
that screens out other kinds of arguments for justice (based, for example,
around notions of need, obligation or core state responsibilities), there may
be a risk of focusing on those kinds of issues that fit the international agenda,
while at the same time screening out other, less tractable problems.
The second part of our argument depends on recognising that the deploy-
ment of rights-based arguments takes debates for or about development over-
whelmingly onto the terrain of international law. Making the case for
development becomes, in effect, a demand for state compliance with interna-
tional agreements, conventions or global norms. This can be useful in that it
suggests that there are independent, agreed standards above the state that
benchmark how states should behave and the quality of services they should
deliver. But there are also dangers inherent in this approach, some of which we
identify later. In particular, we focus on the risk of excessive legalism, which can
sometimes lead to an emphasis on formal (legal) entitlements rather than the
delivery of, or access to, services and material well-being. Elsewhere (Grugel
and Piper, 2007), we refer to this as stressing rights-in-theory rather than
rights-in-practice. There is also a danger that the complex, multi-level politics
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that shape public policy and state decision-making is oversimplified and the
question of state capacity sidelined. We need to remember that states rarely, if
ever, deliver services and goods simply because they have undertaken a legal
obligation to do so. In fact, they frequently seek to avoid their legal obligations
or implement the letter, not the spirit, of the law (Hathaway, 2007).
We illustrate these arguments mainly with some examples of rights-based
development work in Latin America. But our chief aim here is not to present
in detail the rich, empirical research from which our arguments draw (see
Grugel and Peruzzotti 2007a,b; Grugel and Piper, 2007; Piper, 2005, 2007)
but to open up a broad debate about development, rights, welfare and the
state. The conclusion we offer is that the rights focus would seemto be instru-
mentally useful, as well as morally robust, for putting some issues on the agen-
das of states and international organizations; but it does not work to address
injustice effectively in all cases and it should not serve, therefore, as the only
moral or intellectual framework for challenging global, national and local
injustices, deprivation and marginalization. The implications of this argu-
ment, especially with regard to how to pursue social inclusion, positive devel-
opment outcomes for vulnerable people and eliminate injustice, are addressed
in the final section of the article.
Rights and Development
Let us start by looking at how rights have entered development debates for,
until quite recently, they were kept very separate. A wide range of human rights
are codified in international conventions, which set out entitlements for people
based either on their (our) common humanity or on membership of a particu-
lar collective such as women, children or migrants. Discourses of human rights
stem from a long and complex philosophical tradition which includes catholic
social thought, the Enlightenment and modern constitutionalism and are con-
cerned both with establishing the conditions under which human flourishing
occurs and the nature of ethical responsibility and social justice (Pogge, 2008).
Initially separate from the study and practice of international politics, human
rights acquired a formal and symbolic importance after 1948 in recognition of
the importance of setting some limits on state power. The UN Declaration of
Human Rights of that year was followed by other international conventions,
including the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of
Racial Discrimination in 1965 and the Convention on the Elimination of all
Forms of Discrimination against Women in 1979. But it was really only after
the seismic shifts in the global system in 1989 that human rights began to be
talked about seriously, as something that might actually transform global poli-
tics and pioneer a global shift from one based on power to one inspired by
respect for individual rights. It was, in other words, in the context of the post-
communist liberal triumphalismthat rights seriously entered global politics and
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they were initially attached to debates about governance and globalization, not
development as such. The importance of rights as a foundation of global order
was further strengthened by global trends such as the agenda of democratiza-
tion (with its emphasis on civil liberties); debates about the role of the UN
systemin newforms of global governance; the emergence of transnational non-
governmental public action organizations and networks; and the uncontested
authority of the West. In short, the authority of rights discourses nowlies in the
legacy of the liberal turn in global politics, combined with the fact that rights
seem to make sense in the West; indeed, individualized human rights entitle-
ments fit almost unreflectively within most western notions of how the world
should be. Even if finding agreement on what exactly constitutes basic human
rights is difficult, the notion that they are first principles of a developed or civ-
ilized society is an ingrained western belief.
The emphasis on rights was, initially, at least, mainly concerned with global
standard-setting and building liberal states. It was largely separated from dis-
cussions of development. In any case, the meeting point between rights and
development was, even 15 years ago, far from obvious. Development debates
tended to focus on the macro, the big picture and were often heavily econo-
mistic. Where development engaged with the political, it tended to refer to
political economy debates about states and markets. Development orthodoxy
in the 1990s, meanwhile, focused heavily on the role of the market and the
notion that growth carried with it a series of social costs was normalized by
talk about winners and losers. By the end of the 1990s, there was an impor-
tant re-encounter with the state, this time in the guise of getting the institu-
tions right for development (World Bank, 2006). But even those who
identified an important role for the state in development tended not to dwell
on the fate of the individual or the ordinary person. Indeed it was usually
assumed that development would entail individual costs. These were perhaps
regrettable but they were seen as unavoidable. In essence, to criticize the
human cost of development was to criticize the very project of development
(see Scott, 1990). In this context, it is not surprising that there was very little
dialogue between human rights specialists and development organizations,
either at the international or the national levels. The former limited their
advocacy mainly to countering state repression, protecting the individual and
pressing for legal reform while the latter were concerned with promoting
growth or more equitable distribution. At best development practitioners
considered questions of collective or community economic, social and cul-
tural well-being (VeneKlasen et al., 2004).
Since 2000 especially, this has changed dramatically. As Molyneux and Lazar
(2003: 17) note, the new liberalism was quickly assessed in terms of its potential
to effect meaningful reform and to promote social justice as the new liberal cli-
mate opened the development field up more broadly to the weight of philosoph-
ical arguments about human rights. Sens (1999) landmark study of development
as freedom in particular cemented the development-rights nexus and served as
something of a text for the encounter between development practitioners and
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rights debates that has fundamentally changed how development is perceived.
The significance of this shift is noted by Piron and ONeill (2005):
Human rights work is seen as both an objective in its own right and as contribut-
ing to improving the quality and effectiveness of development assistance Human
rights are also seen as constitutive of development, drawing on conceptual frame-
works such as Amartya Sens capabilities, human development or multi-dimension
definitions of poverty. Finally human rights are considered to contribute directly to
objectives pursued by donors in the areas of good governance, poverty reduction
and aid effectiveness. (Piron and ONeill, 2005: 7)
In this new dispensation, specialist human rights organizations and human
rights defenders, to use a UN term, have taken centre stage, trying to lobby,
sometimes successfully, for the adoption of newglobal rights codes or for exist-
ing ones to be taken somewhat more seriously. In some specific issue-areas,
they have been joined by states supportive of the creation of global forms of
regulation. A range of international campaigns against human trafficking,
exploitative and hazardous forms of child labour, genital mutilation, etc.
began to be framed, using the language of individual rights, many of which
enjoy strategic support from some western states. New UN rights conventions
were approved, including the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) in
1989 and the Convention on the Rights of Migrants and Their Families in
1990. The CRC in particular has gone on to make its mark on global politics.
Quickly ratified, it set standards for how states should treat the children or
young people (those who have not yet attained the age of legal adulthood) liv-
ing within their domain and established new sets of political, social, economic
and cultural entitlements and freedoms for children.
The changes that all this implies have been felt most profoundly within the
donor community, within advocacy organizations and inside the UN system.
Advocacy organizations and development NGOs strategize not only on the
basis of their moral principles but also in accordance with their readings of
what we can call the political opportunity structure that is, the political envi-
ronment in which demands are made and expressed and where incentives are
generated for some particular forms and arguments for collective action over
others (Tarrow, 1998). The opportunity structure for advocacy is increasingly
transnationalized across a range of domains including the environment, gen-
der and development that is, it is shaped by global values and norms
(Doherty and Doyle, 2008; Grugel and Peruzzotti, 2007b; Grugel and Piper,
2007; Keck and Sikkink, 1998). Not surprisingly, therefore, development
NGOs working in a range of different areas, from water provision to access to
contraception or education, began to frame their demands as simultaneously
about development and rights from around 20012. The United Nations
Development Programme (UNDP, 2000), meanwhile, now takes the view
that rights are an integral feature of development. The International Labour
Organization (ILO) frames its decent work campaign in the context of col-
lective social and economic rights and its work to eradicate hazardous forms
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of child labour as childrens rights (ILO, 2000, 2005). Many donor agencies
such as the Department for International Development (DIFD) have also
embraced rights as central to development (Piron and Watkins, 2004). Many
of the NGOs concerned with conventional human rights violations, such as
Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Americas Watch, have also
experienced transformation and some now undertake pioneering research
work into the individual and collective costs of producing and labouring
within the global economy. But, although they have widened their brief, they
still understand their core functions to be those of pressing for legal imple-
mentation, monitoring standards and exposing violations, rather than advo-
cating for something as broad or wide-ranging as development.
As such, it is the development agencies that have made the bigger leap in
assuming that international rights law can provide the foundation for improv-
ing the well-being of vulnerable individuals and that the global rights move-
ment can open the way for disenfranchised individuals and communities to
lead lives of dignity and security. How are these arguments being made?
Despite the enthusiasmwith which most development agencies have embraced
rights-based approaches, there is still a lack of full agreement on what they
imply for development strategies. DFID suggests that rights-based develop-
ment means encouraging individuals and communities to claim rights and to
become the drivers of change:
a human rights approach to development focuses on empowering all people to
claim their rights to the opportunities and services made available through pro-
poor development. (DIFD, 2000: 3).
The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights takes a similar
approach:
Human rights contribute to human development by guaranteeing a protected space
where the elite cannot monopolize development processes, policies and programmes
For people to be enabled to assert a legally binding claimthat specific duty-holders
provide free and compulsory primary education (International Covenant on
Economic and Social to and Cultural Rights, art 13) is more empowering that it is to
rely on needs alone or to observe the high economic returns on investment in edu-
cation. (Office for the High Commissioner of Human Rights [OHCHR], 2006: 14)
But this places the burden of claiming rights on individuals and communities
not on states to deliver them. Moreover, there are considerable practical diffi-
culties in the way of vulnerable people claiming rights, especially when they
experience multiple deprivation which rights come first and why should we
expect such people to agree on a rational articulation and prioritization of their
rights (Gledhill, 2005)? It is not even clear whether people living in situations
of deprivation in fact experience their lives as ones of rights-violation, and nei-
ther is it easy to persuade people to claim rights since it requires resources,
mobilization and a capacity to engage in sustained contentious action. Is it
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reasonable to expect rights-deprived individuals and communities to exist in a
state of permanent claims-making? (Archer, 2005). Moreover, once different
deprived and vulnerable communities have articulated and claimed their rights,
howshould states act should they respond to the loudest voices or in the areas
where there is greatest international pressure?
Beyond these dilemmas, there are other, practical issues. Who should deter-
mine what rights mean in terms of NGO practices? For some NGOs and
agencies, rights-based discourses of development are serving in practice pri-
marily as a way of rethinking relationships between Northern and Southern
NGOs and as the basis for transforming NorthSouth relationships into part-
nerships (Nyamu-Musembi and Cornwall, 2004; Veneklasen et al., 2004). But,
while this is admirable, it evades, and perhaps even obscures, the issues of
power and knowledge in donor relations. It can easily lead to an assumption
that Southern partners have better knowledge simply because it is local but
is this always true and does it compensate for the other kinds of knowledge and
the financial authority that Northern partners usually retain? In cases where
donors witness a lack of respect of rights inside the organizations they work
with should they interfere? Should they seek to work only with organizations
that share their own rights-based approaches? Practical problems of this sort
emerge constantly in the new North-South partnerships but are rarely dis-
cussed openly (for an exception, see Crewe, 2007).
Another, equally important issue refers to the new dependence on law that
rights discourses imply. Emphasizing development as rights can all too easily
focus on the importance of winning legal recognition of rights (rights-in-theory)
or legal redress over the delivery of rights (rights-in-practice). Because rights
talk derives from legal studies, it carries with it a faith in the transformatory
capacity of law, and with it assumptions that legal reform necessarily leads to a
cascade of deeper political changes and that international human rights charters,
in themselves, can put in train domestic processes of reform. But do they? There
is no real evidence that ratification of international charters always leads to dra-
matic changes in state behaviour (Hathaway, 2007). Even in cases where some
measure of domestic legal reform follows ratification, this rarely heralds the
introduction of substantive or redistributive reform. In the worst of cases states
may be able to offer legal reform as a symbolic redress to people suffering
poverty and escape far more costly transformations. In circumstances such as
this, delivering rights can become a ritualistic and limited display of conform-
ity with international norms rather than a serious attempt at grappling with
injustice. We return to this point in more detail below.
The Importance of Advocacy
What we have said so far should not be taken to imply that rights have no place
in development processes. Far from it. In fact, rights discourses have made a
huge contribution in terms of emphasizing the importance of agency and the
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ordinary person in development; and they have helped refocus attention on the
importance of bottom-up change. Talking about rights moves us beyond
abstract development conundrums or mega-projects to the level of human
experiences and it identifies some of the many forms of abuse and injustice that
much of the strictly development literature tends to ignore.
The rights focus has also opened unprecedented opportunities for advocacy
movements to shape some international debates. Advocacy coalitions have
become central actors in global politics since the 1990s and they are adept at
putting information into the public domain (Keck and Sikkink, 1998). Much
of the work, in terms of gathering data, naming injustices and framing them as
rights issues is done by advocacy movements that take global rights charters
and norms as their standard. Over time, advocacy organizations have become
more confident, visible, professional, active and authoritative and they have
won an important place within the international compliance and monitoring
machinery of UN charters. NGOs frequently submit shadow reports to the
various UN monitoring systems. These reports are undoubtedly taken seri-
ously and constitute important sources of information, especially in situations
where states cannot, or will not, admit the extent of their own failure to com-
ply and even when international bodies can do little directly to effect change.
Many transnational development NGOs are also involved in day-to-day mon-
itoring, mimicking the transnational human rights movements in naming and
shaming and pressing for redress of specific, well-documented abuses.
We can see this very clearly if we reflect on the changes within the childrens
NGO sector globally, following the CRC. Before 1989, most childrens
NGOs were concerned mainly with providing services, welfare and identify-
ing the needs and the best interests of children and youth on their behalf, on
the basis of an unreflective assumption that children and young people were
not able to do it for themselves. Since the CRC, there has been an exponen-
tial increase in terms of rights advocacy and an extensive discussion of what
this might mean on behalf of children and young people, at the global level
and within many states. Much of this has been extremely positive. As a result,
we know much more about where children fit in the global political economy
and the multiple roles they play in families and communities. Internationally,
organizations such as the ILO have expanded their operations and brought
children and young people into the scope of its activities. UNICEF has been
transformed from an organization that delivered primary care into an explic-
itly rights-based institution, focused on rights abuse and rights delivery across
all its programmes since 1998. At the same time, UNICEF also became an
advocacy body, really for the first time, moving away from its original aim to
provide immediate poverty relief in situations of extreme need. It began, in
other words, to try to influence public policy debates in favour of social and
economic rights for children and young people (Rozga, 2001).
One consequence is that children and young people are much more visible
in the global political economy. Newtransnational campaigns to take children
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out of warfare, close sweatshops that employ children, end the participation
of children in the sex industry, close the market in sex tourism, expand pri-
mary education, eliminate Internet child pornography and end child traffick-
ing all emerged in the aftermath of the CRC. Moreover, some of these
rights-related campaigns appear to have had a policy effect. Certainly, if we
consider the issue of trafficking, for example, there are some notable successes
that can be identified. Although the largest advocacy organization working in
the field, ECPAT, was only formed in 1991, it now has groups in 70 countries,
including the USA, Canada, Europe, post-Communist countries and most
of Asia, Latin America and Africa. High profile campaigns and celebrity and
business endorsements have established ECPAT as an influential voice in
global trafficking debates and it has been able to push sex tourism and traf-
ficking up the international agenda. The Stockholm World Congress against
the Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children in 1996 was followed by the
2000 Optional Protocol to the CRC dealing with the sale of children, child
prostitution and child pornography, which is now widely ratified.
In national and regional contexts too advocacy for children has become
closely tied to the demands for rights, using the CRC as a template. In Latin
America, an area where civil rights claims resonate strongly but the power of
the Catholic Church tends to block advances in reproductive rights, the Cairo
Consensus (along with the CRC with regard to adolescents) is being used to
open up legal struggles to enable women to claim these rights (Center for
Reproductive Rights, 2001). The CRC, meanwhile, has helped push child-
saving, charitable or service-based groups for children into rights advocacy
movements. Grugel and Peruzzotti (2007a,b) have traced the ways in which
the CRCreshaped the children service sector in Argentina after ratification of
the CRC, turning it into an effective compliance constituency able to lobby
for the legal reform of the countrys antiquated and repressive Childrens
Code. The changes that have been set in train as a result include a root and
branch reform of national adoption and fostering services. Advocacy move-
ments, in short, have seized on rights as a frame both for exploring injustice
and for demanding policy reform and there are some real successes that we
can point to.
The Limitations of Rights Claims
Many of the examples where rights claims work are issues with a high moral
content the abuse of children in state-run facilities for example and some,
such as trafficking, also play into larger debates of crucial importance to states
such as border security. It is relatively easy to capture the attention of both the
public and of international and national policy makers on such issues. Other
issue areas, however, are far less amenable to being framed, or at least success-
fully framed, as rights abuses.
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Poverty (or economic rights) is perhaps the most intractable of these. The
relative success of the campaign to take children out the sex industry stands in
sharp contrast to international campaigns to make poverty history. Indeed,
even child poverty is difficult to present effectively in rights terms. In 2005,
UNICEF tried to coordinate a campaign to Make Child Poverty History,
which aimed to shame Northern governments into taking the Millennium
Goals seriously, and in particular those that referred to children. Calls were
issued to implement the World Fit for Children programme agreed in the
Special UN Session on children in 2002. This programme was explicitly
couched in the language of rights and set out to encourage governments to
make policies that would ensure the best possible start in life for children,
including access to a quality basic education, free and compulsory primary
education and ample opportunity for children and adolescents to develop
their individual capacities. In this context, UNICEF relaunched the campaign
for all donor states to meet the target of 0.7 per cent of GNP to be spent on
international aid, for changes to international trade legislation that will allow
poorer countries to trade more effectively and autonomously within the
global economy and for debt relief for the poorest countries. But aid and
poverty simply cannot command the prurient attention of the sensationalist
western media that child sex trafficking can. Additionally, aid is costly eco-
nomically and possibly even risky politically, at a time when domestic
demands in the North for increased welfare spending is growing. The result
is that the campaign failed to win much attention and certainly failed in its pri-
mary aim to increased the amount of money spent on the eradication of long-
term and structural poverty.
Rights-based campaigns to eradicate poverty fare no better in the domestic
environment, at least in the developing world. If we consider Latin America, an
area as we noted above that is generally regarded as receptive to rights claims,
states have nonetheless managed very effectively to separate poverty from any
discussions of democratic or civil rights. The real obstacle to economic rights in
Latin America is not the law but embedded state practices, state capture and
fixed, conservative social attitudes, especially among the elites. In such circum-
stances, abstract claims for economic rights, even when they are backed up by
law, make little headway. We can see how these social and state biases condition
government policy time and again in the developing world, irrespective of legal
frameworks and indeed sometimes also irrespective of mass mobilization or
popular demands. If we examine government responses to the financial crises
which affected Asia and Latin America after 1997, for example, we can see that,
as living standards plummeted, measures were taken to protect the interests and
the well-being of those close to the government, groups with strong lobbying
capacities or established channels of influence in the formation of policy, per-
haps some particular public sector employees or those with particularly strong
unions, or particularly crucial electoral constituencies, such as the farmers
lobby in Indonesia (Grugel et al., 2008). The social and economic rights of very
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vulnerable or at-risk communities did not really figure in the calculations of
government officials who, faced with the need to take difficult decisions quickly,
responded by making policy in the interests of established or influential groups
and to guarantee the provision of law and order. In the process, they undoubt-
edly failed the most marginalized social groups those without voice, who find
organization difficult and who are beyond the circuits of political influence. We
can see this quite crudely in Argentina after the financial meltdown of 20012.
In the midst of mass protest and imminent social collapse, the government
response, which was supported by the World Bank, was to direct relief towards
heads of households, providing them with some minimal income without
concerning themselves as to how it was spent to be distributed via provincial
governments. Plan Trabajar (later Programa Jefes y Jefas de Hogar), provided
approximately US$50 a month to heads of households irrespective of family
size. Useful initially as a crisis measure, it has since become a semi-permanent
clientelist subsidy of the sort that has characterized Argentine welfare since the
1940s and which has consistently been ineffective at ameliorating extreme or
structural poverty (Grugel and Riggirozzi, 2007). Subsequent governments
have left the programme largely untouched and have done nothing to address
the long-term social fall-out from the crisis for the very poor, including rising
levels of drug dependency, the collapse of much of the social infrastructure that
sustained poor peoples daily lives and a huge educational deficit.
Poverty is not the only issue, which is difficult to frame effectively as a
right. Some groups or communities find that all their rights, social, eco-
nomic, political and cultural, can be ignored they are effectively placed
beyond citizenship or they are socially constructed in a way that presents them
as beyond even meaningful membership of human society. Grugel and Piper
(2007) refer extensively to the difficulties of putting the rights (of any sort) of
economic migrants, who are increasingly subject to violent, degrading and
inhuman treatment by states, employers and society at large, on the political
agenda. A less well-known example perhaps, but an equally important one is
the treatment of poor adolescent boys and poor young men in many coun-
tries, especially (though not exclusively) in Latin America. For many people,
accepting that poor adolescent boys and young men suffer rights violations is
very difficult since there is an increasingly widespread social construction of
young men as rights violators; they are seen as physically intimidating, fright-
ening and even intrinsically violent. Making arguments in favour of even their
elementary civil rights can be very difficult because it may well be extremely
unpopular socially and electorally. In Argentina, generally regarded as one of
the less violent of the Latin American countries, at least 470 young people,
mainly male youths, were executed by the police between 1983 and 1998
(Colectivo de Derechos de Infancia y Adolescencia, 2002: 37) and very lit-
tle fuss was made, either nationally or internationally. A report by Amnesty
International in 2002 captures some of the run-of-the mill violence and
harassment young men in poor communities in Argentina suffer:
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Lidia Zarate and her family were reportedly threatened on 2 January 2001 by a police-
man, who works at the same station as those believed to have killed her 17-year-old
son, Juan Marcelo Gonzlez Zarate in March 2000 Reportedly the policeman
warned her: Take care of yourself. Why dont you look after your other children?
What do you want? For all the family to end up like him? Since the killing of Juan
Marcelo the police have detained his younger brother, Martn, three times. They
reportedly beat him and told him that he was going to die even younger than his
brother. Shortly after he was threatened, unknown men driving a car shot Martn three
times in the leg On 16 March 2001 16-year-old Martn Gonzlez Zarate was shot
dead by an unidentified gunman driving by in a vehicle in Buenos Aires Province.
(Colectivo de Derechos de Infancia y Adolescencia, 2002: 37)
In much of Central America, meanwhile, the civil rights of poor young men
has been sacrificed to the social fear of the gang. Many young men belong to
the numerous gangs that have developed in the context of demobilization
after decades of war and a lack of opportunities for employment and social
inclusion. They are constructed as a threat to respectable society (and in
many ways the threat is real) and are, as a result, subjected to extremely tough
law and order policies (mano dura or super mano dura) that have rolled back
previous rights-based legal reforms that drew their inspiration from the CRC
(Rocha, 2007; Maclure and Sotelo, 2004). In this context, even to speak of the
rights of young men in Central America or at least to speak of rights in this
context in a way that is effective if they come from marginal communities or
dress in a way that betrays membership of a gang, is extremely difficult.
These examples all tell us something important about the ways in which
rights have been absorbed into global politics and the use that can be made of
them. It suggests that the liberal rights agenda can be effectively deployed in
some policy domains but less effectively in others. Certainly, where rights
cost money, whatever the strength of claims in theory, governments are much
less likely to prove receptive in policy terms. Political/legal rights, it seems,
can be more effectively claimed than social and economic rights. Additionally,
rights claims often depend for their success on advocacy movements being
able to persuade governments and international organisations of the correct-
ness of the claim. To do so, successful advocacy movements encourage iden-
tification with or sympathy for the person or the community whose rights
have been violated. But, in situations where the people whose rights have
been abused do not provoke sympathy, this is very difficult. Even if their
claims are legally as strong, it is likely they will be ignored. For these com-
munities, rights discourses may not be of any use at all. The example of finan-
cial crisis throws up a different problem. Not only does state bias mean that,
even in democracies, governments tend to respond to the needs of certain,
usually politically mobilised, constituencies rather than the very poor but
rights-based development, as a long-term process of deep change, has little to
say to already marginalized people who are suddenly faced with a set of cir-
cumstances that mean immediate pauperization.
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Rights, Legality and Development
We want in this section to probe further the link between rights discourses and
legalism, for, in our view, using rights takes us ineluctably onto the terrain of
international law. When advocacy movements talk of rights, they make refer-
ence to international agreements and global standard setting and the thrust of
their activism is to force states to comply with their international obligations.
Development thus becomes framed as a set of rights upheld and codified under
international law. The significance of shifting notions of development so fixedly
onto the legal terrain has not yet been fully explored. One way to look at what
it means is to explore how legal rights play out on the ground. We want, there-
fore, to offer now a brief narrative of how claiming legal rights for children via
the CRC has shaped advocacy in the case of poor children in Argentina. We do
not of course claimthat we can generalize about rights advocacy tout court in any
way from this example; merely that it illustrates some of the dilemmas inherent
in entwining rights, development and legalism together.
As background to post-CRC advocacy in Argentina, we should note the
dramatic decline in the living standards of poor children in Argentina through
the 1990s. The neonatal mortality death rate was 40% higher in the urban
conurbation of Gran Buenos Aires (that is, the poor areas of the city) than it
is in the more affluent capital city and the post-natal mortality rate (the death
of infants aged up to one year) was 80% higher (Arrossi, 1996: 56) before the
countrys catastrophic collapse in 2001. By 2002, according to a UNICEF
report in the country as a whole:
53 per cent of children and young people under 18, more than 6 million live in poor
households 46.7 per cent of the almost 14 million of poor people in the country
are minors who belong to families that do not have sufficient income to obtain basic
goods such as housing, warm clothes, health and education. (UNICEF, 2002: 6)
Since the crisis, despite the return to growth, child poverty continues to be
a major problem. Children and adolescents make up 50% of the informal,
night-time labour force that makes a precarious living via recycling discarded
paper and cardboard in the cities (La Nacin, 2006). Yet, following ratifica-
tion of the CRC, Argentinas principal networks of childrens NGOs focused
their attention mainly on achieving the introduction of a rights-based legal
code rather than substantive socio-economic reform or campaigns around
education. Socio-economic claims were not ignored but a hierarchy of con-
cerns was established, with legal reform at the top. Achieving legal reform,
which would turn children formally into rights-bearing people, came to be
seen as the crucial first step to other kinds of reforms.
Legal reform was eventually achieved in 2005 after several years of cam-
paigning (Grugel and Peruzzotti, 2007a,b). But, beyond changing the formali-
ties of state-child relationships, the impact of the new law has not been very
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extensive. It has, in fact, mainly been confined to the changing regulations
around at-risk or looked-after and, as a result, issues such as ring-fenced chil-
drens budgets, educational reformor welfare reformare not even under discus-
sion. Overall, the meaning of the new law in terms of the detail of government
policy broadly is very unclear. Although the state has undertaken to rethink its
relationship and its responsibilities towards children, there are few signs of any
serious reflection as to what this might mean. It is hard to escape the view that,
from the perspective of the state and its obligations vis--vis poor children, the
introduction of the new law has offered an easy, high-profile, visible proof of its
commitment and intentions, without having actually to introduce substantive,
costly or socially divisive reforms. For Mary Beloff, long time advocate and lead-
ing expert on child law in Latin America, the impact of the new law on the lives
of poor children will be slight:
My argument is that we over-estimated in the 1990s the value of legal change .
how to protect children, assure them of a dignified life, make sure that they eat, go
to school, their family doesnt hit them, have access if necessary to an alternative
family, fit into the world and grow up to have a happy adulthood [these are the real
questions] (Interview, December 2005)
The impact of the new law on local advocacy movements, meanwhile, has
been complex. It certainly was a victory of sorts. But it was a costly and time-
consuming campaign and, having won some concession from the state, chil-
drens groups are finding it difficult to sustain the momentum of protest. The
attention of politicians and state officials, having delivered one reform, has
shifted away from children to what they see as the next problem. A campaign
for the introduction of universal child benefit is gradually taking shape, but
there is no sign that it will be able to command a high profile or benefit from
social mobilization on the scale of the campaign for the new law.
In this example and it is, perhaps, an extreme one rights campaigning has
achieved little in the way of asserting the social and economic rights of poor
children. This is not to minimize its impact elsewhere (especially for looked-
after children and potentially, at least, in terms of the criminal justice system).
But we have to face the fact that, by opting to press for a law that focuses on
the civic status of the child and not linking rights directly to socially divisive
issues such as poverty, education and exclusion advocacy groups may have
effectively chosen to prioritize legal concessions from the state over other
kinds of reform. It is true that the law opens up the possibility of using it to
claimother rights; but this will be far more difficult to apply to economic rights
than, say, the juvenile penal code. Advocacy is always about selecting some
issues over others and packaging issues in particular ways to appeal to or com-
mand the attention of politicians and society; if we focus on one issue, we are,
by implication, deselecting another. In this sense, economic rights, which are
at the heart of development claims, tend to fare badly in terms of advocacy,
which focuses mainly on changing or upholding the law.
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All of this suggests that we should be wary of an unreflective embrace of
rights and development arguments and of the idea that, on their own, rights
should necessarily form the principal plank of aid and development policies,
whatever the moral appeal that claiming rights has, at least in the West. In
particular, the assumption that legal rights-based change necessarily consti-
tutes a first step to the introduction of rights-in-practice needs to be ques-
tioned. Our view is that it can lead to overly simple understanding of how
politics works. The view that legal rights (rights-in-theory) signify a first step
to successfully claiming rights-in-practice ignores the complex relationship
between lawand politics, on the one hand, and policy and power, on the other.
At least with regard to Latin America, the gap between the legal and consti-
tutional rules of the game and the actual behaviour of state agencies is very
considerable and resources and class bias shape policy preferences in ways that
are often straightforwardly in contradiction of the law.
This leads on to another potential problem with emphasising development
through legal rights: it assumes that good law will lead to a cascade of social,
political and even economic transformation. It establishes an implicit hierar-
chy of change with legally enshrined rights coming first and becoming a
springboard for other kinds of rights. But this is not really a very accurate rep-
resentation of the way ordinary people have fought for different entitlements.
Demanding inclusion and redistribution in the real world is and has always
been a messy, chaotic affair, involving the simultaneous pursuit of political,
social, cultural and economic demands. It is not really a stagist process, with
legal rights rigidly coming first and economic and social rights following on. If
we consider rights struggles in the UK, for example, we can see that the fight
for political citizenship (the vote) in the 19th and 20th centuries took place
alongside, not before, labour struggles for trade union rights and demands for
the introduction of clean water and public health. At the same time, legal
advances in both political and social citizenship, when they were achieved,
were not in practice universal; men achieved political, social and cultural enti-
tlements long before women and children. The application of rights was sub-
ject, in other words, to power inequalities within society more generally.
Moreover and this is perhaps not a very comfortable truth today activists
have often had to break, not uphold, the law in order to win entitlements.
Conclusion
Rights discourses clearly have a huge moral and ethical appeal, not only for
those committed philosophically to the concept of rights as the core of the
human being but also to those working with, or witnessing, people living in sit-
uations of dire of need, extreme inequality, injustice and violence. Claiming
rights, and seeking state compliance with international standards and norms is
a hugely significant project, based on the importance of respecting, and if
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necessary restoring, human dignity to each person. In that sense, as Deacon
et al. (1997) clearly indicate, it is consonant with the social democratic project
of universal welfare and the drive for global social redistribution (see also Yeates,
2001). But the association between development and rights reflects not only the
underlying morality of social democracy but also the rise of global liberalism,
the contemporary fear of over-weaning states and a suspicion of mega-, often
state-run, development projects. As such, it contains some profound ambigui-
ties. To have resonance, rights claims must fit the contemporary liberal agenda
of global politics. While this has provided openings for rights-based discourses
that simply were not there in the past, it also means that the rights project is also
fraught with dangers, at least for traditional social democrats or development
agencies that tended to see development as delivered, at least in part, and guar-
anteed through states. Northern development organizations are usually deeply
aware of these problems but have little choice at present but to continue to
mediate between global discourses that provide a crucial, if limited, entry point
for advocacy and their impact on the ground.
As a consequence, the thrust of this article has been to argue for a more
measured academic assessment of rights in development. We have tried to sug-
gest that scholars, as well as development organizations, should be cautious in
their assessments of what rights can achieve and they should try and provide
evidence for what we intuitively know, namely that claiming rights works very
differently in different domains and different places. We should also acknowl-
edge the very real obstacles in the way of claiming certain sorts of rights, espe-
cially economic rights, and the difficulties some groups and communities face
in terms of claiming almost any kind of rights at all, especially in the current
liberal era. Additionally, we need to recognize that rights are being claimed in
highly politicised contexts in which outcomes depend more on power relations
than on the law. Otherwise, there is a danger of focusing on the importance of
cosmetic legal changes that effectively provide governments with the option of
claiming compliance with international standards without having to imple-
ment meaningful reform, at least in so far as redistribution, which is after all
the essence of the development, is concerned. The difficulties of monitoring
compliance something outside the scope if this article, but important in its
own right further strengthens the states capacity to resist change.
All of this points to the urgent need for a profound engagement with what is
effectively the elephant in the room for rights-based development, namely the
state. The state is acknowledged theoretically as the counterpart to rights: peo-
ple are said to have rights whereas states have responsibilities to protect them.
But not to go beyond this assessment of the state can be dangerously disingenu-
ous, for states do not operate in practice or make policy in accordance with their
legal or contractual obligations to their citizens. States are the primary site in
society where politics is played out and power and privilege protected and repro-
duced. Indeed, we would do well to remember an observation made by Sidney
Tarrow(1998: 141): states do not sit idly by as challengers contest their rule; they
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respond weakly or strongly, selectively or generally, intelligently or stupidly to
the challenges of contention. Students of development, as well as organizations
committed to change, cannot afford to ignore this insight. The lesson is that the
place to start, when we talk of development, analytically and in policy making
terms, is with an exploration, a recognition and a full understanding of the com-
plexities of state power as well as with a sense of the value of each individual
member of the human community.
acknowledgements
Some of the material in this article draws from Jean Grugels ESRC-funded study on
advocacy, childrens rights and global governance financed under the Non
Governmental Public Action Programme and the authors would like to acknowledge
that support.
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rsum
Les Droites de lhomme Favorisent-elles le Dveloppement?
Les diverses types des droits de lhomme sont maintenant vu comme central dans le
processus dlaboration. On lui discutera dans cet essai que des plaintes de discrimina-
tion se rvle parfois efficace pour initier dans des campagnes de dfense des droits de
lhomme si ces campagnes peuvent trouver une faon de correspondre aux ides la plu-
part librales qui faonnent leconomie mondiale et politique; mais ce nest pas toujour
possible. Avec beaucoup des droites il y est difficile de mettre sur lordre du jour des
tats, en particulier des droites conomiques ou des arguments en faveur de certain
groupes social. On discutera par consequent le besoin de se mfier dune acceptation,
sans rflchir, des discours des droites de lhomme. Il y a dautre arguments pour le
dveloppement et pour la justice qui sont galement exigs de lelaboration et la jus-
tice en mme temps quil y a le besoin pour la rflexion soutenue sur ltat.
resumen
Es Verdad que los Derechos Promueven el Desarrollo?
Ahora se considera que los derechos humanos de varios tipos desempean un papel funda-
mental en el processo de desarrollo. Mostramos que las reclamaciones de derechos pueden
ser a veces efectivas en las campaas de propugnacin para algunos derechos, si esas cam-
paas encuentran una manera de resonar con las ideas liberales que determinan la economa
poltica global. Sin embargo, esto no es siempre posible, y con muchos derechos espe-
cialmente los derechos econmicos o las demandas hechas por, o en nombre de, ciertos gru-
pos sociales resulta difcil ponerlos en la agenda de los gobiernos. Sugeremos que, como
consecuencia, haya una necesidad de recelar de un abrazo irreflexivo de los discursos sobre
los derechos. Se necesita otros argumentos a favor del desarrollo y la justicia, junto con una
reflexin teortica sostenida y un compromiso con el estado.
bi ographi cal notes
JEAN GRUGEL is Professor of Politics at the University of Sheffield and senior editor of
the Bulletin of Latin American Research. She has written extensively on democratization
and governance in the developing world. She is currently working on childrens rights,
Grugel & Piper: Do Rights Promote Development? 97
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rights and advocacy in the regional context in Latin America and the place of children
in the political economy of development, as well as on an ESRC-funded comparative
project on governance after financial crisis. Her most recent books are Critical
Perspectives on Global Governance: Rights and Regulation in Governing Regimes, with
N. Piper (Routledge 2007) and Governance after Neoliberalism in Latin America, with
P. Riggirozzi (Palgrave-Macmillan, forthcoming 2008). Please address correspon-
dence to: Jean Grugel, Department of Politics, University of Sheffield, Elmfield,
Northumberland Road, Sheffield, S10 2TU, UK. [email: j.b.grugel@sheffield.ac.uk]
NICOLA PIPER is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Geography and Associate
Director of the Centre for Migration Policy Research at the University of Swansea.
Her research focuses on economic migration and the rights of migrants mainly in
Southeast and East Asia, but also in Europe and more lately Latin America and the
Caribbean. In addition to her book with Jean Grugel, she has recently published New
Perspectives on Gender and Migration Rights, Entitlements and Livelihoods (Routledge
2007) and Transnational Activism in Asia Problems of Power and Democracy, with
A. Uhlin (Routledge 2004). She has carried out policy-relevant work for a range of
international organizations including the IOM, UNESCAP, UNRISD, UNIFEMand
IDRC. Please address correspondence to: Nicola Piper, Centre for Migration Policy
Research, School of the Environment, Swansea University, Singleton Park, Swansea,
Wales SA2 8PP, UK. [email: n.piper@swansea.ac.uk]
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