What is the Human Rights-Based Approach to development?
The human rights-based approach to development (HRBA) is a methodology, a process and a goal in development work. It accompanies development approaches to provide more effective outcomes for human beings living in poverty towards a life in dignity.
Some key aspects around the HRBA
- It prioritises agency for those living in poverty to drive the development process;
- It integrates human rights within the heart of decision-making for transformative change;
- It shifts development initiatives from a focus on the needs of people living in poverty to recognition of their equal rights to access resources necessary for their well-being and social inclusion;
- It tackles the unequal power relations underlying poverty and social injustice;
- It redresses the principle causes of exclusion and empowers those living in poverty to renegotiate their relationship with the State and other groups, to effect meaningful changes in their own lives and to influence their future.
The human rights-based approach is a recent model that continues to develop through a process of learning and sharing experiences. However, there is now evolving global consensus on the essential elements of a HRBA. By clicking on these principles below, you will see how they apply:
(1) Linking development work
with human rights
(2) Accountability
(3) Empowerment
(4) Participation
(5) Non-discrimination and
attention to most affected
groups
The presence and combination of these elements distinguish the HRBA from other approaches, including rights approaches. More traditional rights approaches, for example, focus solely on the State’s obligations and responsibilities, leaving little space for active citizenship or community driven alternatives essential for long-term, sustainable transformation. The HRBA differs by empowering those living in poverty to negotiate their roles and entitlements with the authorities.
For some good practical guidelines on the human rights-based approach and human rights-based programming, please see Resources
For practical examples of how upstream human rights-based strategies are used, go to the Good Practices page
Strategising with the HRBA
There are three central issues that are critical to the very fabric of the HRBA that require clear elaboration. These are:
- The need for a two-tiered strategy. Effective social transformation demands a strong State and empowered civil society, thus efforts must generally target both elements. It is of limited value if the community is mobilised, educated and organised, where the State and local authorities are neither fully aware of, nor capable of meeting, their human rights obligations. This raises issues in relation to failed States and times of crisis/conflict that must also be addressed.
- The HRBA is inherently political. The struggle for rights is an ongoing collective struggle that resists and seeks to transform unequal power relationships and structures at all levels.
- Multi-lateral engagement: The need to move beyond traditional human rights strategies of protest and monitoring violations to:
- Develop creative and holistic strategies that address the causes, on multiple levels, that deprive those living in poverty of the resources necessary to live in well-being and social inclusion. This requires different types of engagement, from policy, legal and political action to mobilisation, networking, leadership education and creativity
- Collaborate and build solid networks among different civil society groups, community actors, academics, activists, and sympathetic members of institutional authority in the local, national, regional and international spheres. This is also essential for the integration of human rights in development work and other fields!
What we think
There is a wide range of HRBA programs and initiatives that are used in practice and fall within the umbrella term "human rights-based approach". This is because the HRBA is defined by underlying principles stretching over a diverse are of issues and circumstances. It is further highly context-based. It is important to briefly outline our position here as current teaching and application of the HRBA is often confusing, narrow, legalistic and imported. Equalinrights seeks to revert this tendency, advancing a broad and holistic application of this framework. For this reason, we prefer to speak of human rights-based strategies, underpinning the need for moving from concept to practice. We support “upstream” human rights efforts for change – in essence, the empowerment of people living in poverty to effect change in ways meaningful to them in order to realise their human dignity.
Equalinrights moves from an understanding that human rights are tools to protect human dignity, as defined by people themselves from within local social and cultural contexts. This means that local dialogue on the meaning, relevance and application of human rights-based strategies within these different contexts is a critical starting point. Human rights come from within, not from without. So for us, our support is about facilitating the internal learning and self-empowering process for people. Applied in this way, we believe that human rights can be a very powerful framework for bringing change to unequal power structures and relationships that perpetuate poverty.
