Offenheiser Etal 2003 Implementing RBA OxfamAmerica PDF

Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly
http://nvs.sagepub.com Challenges and Opportunities in Implementing a Rights-Based Approach to Development: An Oxfam America Perspective
Raymond C. Offenheiser and Susan H. Holcombe Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 2003; 32; 268 DOI: 10.1177/0899764003032002006 The online version of this article can be found at: http://nvs.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/32/2/268
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Challenges and Opportunities 10.1177/0899764003251739 Offenheiser, in Implementing Holcombe a Rights-Based Approach
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Challenges and Opportunities in Implementing a Rights-Based Approach to Development: An Oxfam America Perspective
Raymond C. Offenheiser Oxfam America Susan H. Holcombe Brandeis University
Two practitioners/thinkers take old ideas about human rights and make a new case for an economic and social rights-based approach to development. Our mid-20th century predecessors recognizedin Franklin D. Roosevelts Four Freedoms and in the Universal Declaration of Human Rightsthat a secure world requires a social contract that assures everyone access to basic economic and social rights. In todays globalized world, the private sector and civil society join the state in influencing the ability of the marginalized to enjoy basic rights. Pursuing a rights-based approach is an end to business as usual for international development nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). NGOs will need to move beyond supporting delivery of services to building the capacity of civil society to be an organized and effective balance to the power of governments and of the private sector. This transformation will have profound effects on the basic business plans, evaluation systems, and staff competencies of international development NGOs. Keywords: rights-based approach; human rights; economic and social rights; right to development; civil society organizations; Oxfam; implementing rights; social contract; the state and rights; justice; equity; globalization and rights; legitimacy; rights
In the late 1990s, the members of the Oxfam International community undertook a serious reexamination of their development programming, searching for the common philosophical threads that united their development practice. Our goal was to reach deep into our organizational cores and ask what we believed was most important in the way development programs were being
Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, vol. 32, no. 2, June 2003 268-306 DOI: 10.1177/0899764003251739 2003 Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action
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Challenges and Opportunities in Implementing a Rights-Based Approach
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conceived and implemented. Our hope was to find the essential elements for forging a common project and building the trust and understanding among our organizations, staff, and partners to carry it out. This process of reflection and planning led us to conclude that the Oxfam approach to development and humanitarian response was fundamentally anchored in a rights-based perspective, with a particular focus on social, economic, and cultural rights. At first glance, that was hardly surprising. Most Oxfam staffs think that they have always supported human rights, and indeed a cursory review of past programming would show a strong presence of grants to partners representing the interests of marginal groups or arguing for greater civil and political rights. Concern for rights has woven its way through partner relations, probably throughout the history of most Oxfam affiliates. Yet rights had never been articulated as the overarching framework for our development practice. The funding portfolio of Oxfam field offices contained a wide range of programs, from social service delivery to hard-edged human rights work, but the concept that people have basic rights to livelihoods, social services, security, voice, and protection from exclusion had not been fully thought through and developed. The conscious choice to center all programming on a rights-based approach and to emphasize economic, social, and cultural rights represents a major shift for all Oxfam affiliates (Oxfam International, 2000). It forces each organization to reexamine its funding portfolio and to ask some tough questions about the relevance of particular partner relations to a rights-based agenda within each country. It compels a deeper examination of the states role as the guarantor of rights, and of the means that individuals require to exercise those rights. It requires us to look at civil society as an essential vehicle for citizens to amplify their voice and counterbalance governmental and private-sector power in shaping the social contract. It reframes the discussion about effect, evaluation, and development practice. It suggests the need to examine the core of the Oxfam business model and see if it really supports a rights-based approach. It raises serious questions about staff competencies and the ability to envision and support programs that are rooted in a rights perspective. This article explores some of the rationales that have led Oxfam Americaas a member of Oxfam Internationalto embrace a rights perspective, as well as the conceptual constructs that support the new paradigm and the challenges to implementation it poses. The first section probes the historical circumstances that have marginalized economic and social rights and focused international dialogue on political and civil rights. The second section analyzes the philosophical and conceptual foundation that supports implementation of a rights-based approach in development practice and humanitarian response. The final sections explore the organizational and management challenges that flow from the use of the rights-based model as an organizing principle for development practice.
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Offenheiser, Holcombe DEVELOPMENT MODELS AND THE HISTORY OF HUMAN RIGHTS
Why has Oxfam America embraced a rights-based approach? What does it offer that is essentially new and different? Why has it taken so long to decide that this approach makes sense and can be incorporated into development practice? Why does it appear to be so relevant now? Answering these questions begins with an understanding of the shortcomings of previous strategies and their relationship to an evolving definition of human rights.
DISILLUSIONMENT WITH THE WELFARE MODEL
Most development programming is rooted in Western European and American notions of the welfare state that emerged in the early years of the 20th century. This model defines poverty as the absence of some particular set of public goods or body of technical knowledge. If the state or another mechanism can deliver these public goods or services or introduce the missing technical know-how, it is assumed that poverty can be reduced and development will occur. Over the decades, dialogue within the development community has been largely confined to the narrow orbit of welfarism, seldom questioning its core precepts. Instead, debate has focused on three issues: 1. How are the public goods or technical knowledge delivered to the poor? 2. What is the missing input or catalystseeds, nutrition, or family planning strategythat will power development? 3. Which cruciblestate-led infrastructure expansion and industrialization, or the marketcan most efficiently reduce poverty and spur development? For 50 years, we tinkered with a welfarist approach. Development institutions were created to manage the effort, and billions of dollars were poured into the struggle. Despite some real achievements, the gap between rich and poor is widening, the numbers of people in poverty are increasing in many parts of the world, and hundreds of millions are trapped in conditions that pose long-term dangers to the welfare of everyone. The World Development Report 2000/2001 (World Bank, 2000) notes the seriousness of deepening poverty and widening inequity. Nearly one half the worlds people live on less than $2 per day, and one fifth live on less than $1. Income disparities have widened within countriesNorth and Southand the gap between the worlds 20 richest and 20 poorest countries has more than doubled from 1960 to 1995. For 50 years we assumed that governments first, and then the market, would provide for basic needs, but each has failed to address the deeper problems of social justice and transform the embedded systems that reproduce poverty. It is not enough to assume that a rising tide will lift all ships because evidence shows that for a given rate of growth, poverty falls faster in countries
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where income distribution has grown more equal (World Bank, 2000). Despite what seems to be a deliberate character to the sustained impoverishment in some societies, we lack systems to hold governments and economic institutions accountable for their actions or inaction. Government efforts to address problems are half-hearted or underfunded, or promised funds are diverted into the pockets of urban-based actors who make a profitable career as gatekeepers of foreign-aid programs. The poor are treated as objects of charity who must be satisfied with whatever crumbs drop their way.
RIGHTS-BASED DEVELOPMENT AS AN ALTERNATIVE MODEL
The rights-based approach envisions the poor as actors with the potential to shape their own destiny and defines poverty as social exclusion that prevents such action. Instead of focusing on creating an inventory of public goods or services for distribution and then seeking to fill any deficit via foreign aid, the rights-based approach seeks to identify the key systemic obstacles that keep people from accessing opportunity and improving their own lives (Center for Economic and Social Rights, 1995). From the very outset, the focus is on structural barriers that impede communities from exercising rights, building capabilities, and having the capacity to choose. Viewed in this fashion, development is about assisting poor communities to overcome obstacles rather than about never-ending pursuit of grants for social goods. It assumes that poor people have dignity, aspirations, and ambition and that their initiative is being blocked and frustrated by persistent systemic challenges, such as apartheid, biased lending policies, and nonfunctioning state social service delivery systems. It assumes that those who are most directly affected know firsthand what institutional obstacles thwart their aspirations and who are essential actors in deciding what to do about it. Rather than imposing cookie-cutter solutions, this strategy is anchored in the reality of local context. A primary problem, indeed, has been the inability of outside actors to imagine adequately the situation confronting the poor. Some of that blindness, ironically enough, is a byproduct of the emergence of a rights-based culture in the late 20th century whose progress in civil and political rights came at the cost of ignoring economic and social rights (Lauren, 1998). The opportunity for change today depends on understanding how the definition of human rights narrowed and must now be broadened.
A UNIFIED VISION OF HUMAN RIGHTS
The 1940s were a golden age for defining human rights, and economic and social rights were integral to the dialogue. Franklin D. Roosevelt included freedom from want as the third of the Four Freedoms established as an American objective in World War II. In 1944, Roosevelt called on Congress to find the means to implement an economic bill of rights that focused on the right to a livelihood and to social services. In 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human
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Rights gave global recognition to economic and social rights. The framers of the declaration, led by the first chairperson of the UN Commission on Human Rights Eleanor Roosevelt (Glendon, 2001), were not fuzzyheaded idealists; they understood how a failed social contract had contributed to the Great Depression and two world wars. They saw the need for a new social contract to prevent future war in an age of mass destruction. Although the Covenant on Economic and Social Rights amplified the meaning of these rights in 1966, the politics of the Cold War exerted constant pressure that eventually focused the global human rights movement on political and civil rights, relegating economic and social rights to the care of the market.1 Generations of Americans have grown up believing that human rights refer exclusively to civil and political rights. In the United States, the Cold War increasingly was seen as a competition between economic systemsbetween capitalism and markets on one hand, and socialism and state planning on the other. In addition, from the perspective of the ultimate winners, this incorporated the struggle for human rights, which was depicted as a zero-sum battle between freedom and the tyranny of an evil empire, between individual liberty and the power of the state. Attempts, chiefly from the South, to raise concerns about economic rights (e.g., the New International Economic Order) were isolated by the dichotomized mind-set of the Cold War. The end of the Cold War certified the failure of the totalitarian socialist model, and accelerating globalization put severe pressures on Western social democracies as well. Trade-led models of economic growth combined with the internationalization of capital flows to create a world economy modeled on an unregulated market economy (McMurtry, 1998). The paradox is that economic globalization began leapfrogging the frameworks of laws, norms, and civil societies that restricted excesses and created domestic social stability within the very national economies whose private-sector firms were now leading the way in world markets (Korten, 2001). The absence of any clearly defined short-term threat to the social order undermined the rationale for urgent assistance to reduce inequities during the 1990s, leaving globalization as the default development paradigm. Globalization, to the worlds financial leaders, is about the integration of markets. The solution to poverty was for third world countries to join the bandwagon and reinvent themselves as emerging markets, dropping barriers to imports and capital, cutting public budgets, and privatizing state assets to create the conditions for optimal economic growth and profits. The assumption is, as it has been for decades, that development is economic growth and nothing more. If GNP is high, all is well with the world. This leaves political and civil rights dominant in the human rights dialogue and in the discourse of international affairs, giving free reign to imposition of market-based prescriptions by multilateral financial institutions. Meanwhile, civil society actors were left to confront not only the legacy of failed social policies by the state but deep cuts in state spending. Globalization offered no Midas touch for the problems of failed education systems,
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collapsing health systems, inadequate water supplies, privatized commons, and ethnic discrimination that defined the world of the poor. Serious responses by the international community to these problems are few. Foreign aid is dwindling. Sectarian conflicts proliferate, driving poverty. G-7 nations must be dragged, guilt tripped by the Pope himself, to the altar to sign on to debt relief. Understandably, civil society leaders are seeking a new language and new approaches to deal with these harsh realities. During the 1990s, the dialogue on rights began to shift. The UN sponsored a major series of summits on economic and social rights that drew their legitimacy from the UNs earlier work on the Human Rights Charter (Korey, 2001). As a result of these meetings and exposure to the language of the Charter and its endorsement of economic, social, and cultural rights, civil society organizations (CSOs)like the womens and the environmental movements before thembegan to see rights as a lever for change (Lauren, 1998; Eade, 1998). Growing unease about the merits of globalization has fueled the drive to reconnect civil and political with social, economic, and cultural rights. Many of the disparate actors who gathered in Seattle to protest against the World Trade Organization (WTO) found that the discourse on social and economic rights was the glue that bound them together. Old adversaries, like U.S. labor organizations and developing-world nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), realized that they actually shared many core values and could work together on a range of issues within the framework of economic and social rights. These new sociopolitical realities made it possible to rekindle the kind of rights perspective that Franklin and then Eleanor Roosevelt brought to the founding discussions of the Charter, without fear of being labeled a socialist or communist. Yet traditional rights organizations did not rush to fill the space that was opening to readdress economic and social rights. Before the 50th anniversary celebration of the UN Charter in 1998, a number of people approached the major human rights organizations (including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch) to sound out their willingness during the ceremonies to call for social, economic, and cultural rights. It became clear that these organizations feared that their supporters and donors might misconstrue such a call as a dilution of their core mission and vision. They also cited the great work yet to be done in addressing critical challenges to civil and political liberties in Asia and the former Soviet Unionconsolidating work that had built their reputations and given them a clearly identified institutional niche. The unspoken irony in this understandable strategic choice was how it perpetuated the Cold War dichotomy between civil and political and social and economic rights in the public consciousness. Oxfam leadership was surprised to find that the human rights organizations were leaving the area of social, economic, and cultural rights unattended. Recognizing the need for a prominent global organization to champion social and economic rights, Oxfam decided to focus on implementing a rights-based approach in the field and to become more active in their home
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countries in putting these issues on the public policy agenda. With this in mind, Oxfam leadership moved to reposition its brand in the public mind as centered on social and economic justice and implemented through a rights-based approach (Oxfam International, 2000).
A RIGHTS-BASED FOUNDATION FOR DEVELOPMENT PRACTICE Mainstreaming a rights-based approach into our organizations is a complex transition. It cannot simply be decreed and implemented. If sound blueprints are to be drawn from this vision, an organization needs to deepen its understanding of the philosophical principles involved and how they apply on the ground in local development contexts. The underlying justifications for new relationships and a rethinking of old ones must be aired if the public is to understand the reasons for transformation and staff members are to follow the lead and flesh out the shift in organizational culture with workable development programs. This section outlines the Oxfam America perspective on the soundness of a rights-based approach to development.
BROADENING OUR VISION OF HUMAN RIGHTS
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights served as the Magna Carta for human rights activism over the past 50 years. Without question, the human rights movement, using the Declaration as an international norm, has made significant contributions to promoting civil and political liberties. Unfortunately, it has failed to address issues of poverty and social injustice. In his paper, The Human Rights Challenge to Global Poverty, Chris Jochnick (1999) presented a major challenge to narrow traditional approaches to human rights. He argued that we have entered a new era and that human rights activists and development theorists need to think outside the box and devise new and more compelling ways of utilizing the Human Rights Charter. One reason the vision has remained narrow, Jochnick argued, particularly in the United States and to a lesser degree in Western Europe, is the predominance of a state-centered view of human rights. Continuing this practice in an era of globalization renders one powerless to prevent or remedy violations of social and economic rights by nonstate actors from beyond national borders. Moving human rights beyond its state-centric paradigm serves two purposes. First, it challenges the reigning neo-liberal extremism that trivializes much public discourse about development and poverty, providing a rhetoric and a vision to emphasize that entrenched poverty is neither inevitable nor acceptable. Second, it provides a legal framework with which to begin holding the most influential nonstate actorscorporations, financial institutions, and third-party statesmore accountable for their role in creating and sustaining poverty.
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Jochnick (1999) reminded us that the distinction between individuals as the holders of rights and states as the holder of duties was premised on the notion of the state as the ultimate guardian of the publics welfare (p. 3). In essence, the state derives this authority and responsibility from the social contract agreed to by its citizens. The Commission on Global Governance suggested that we live in different times. When the UN system was created, the nation-state was dominant and had few rivals, and there was strong faith in the protective ability of governments. The world economy was not so integrated. The vast array of global firms and corporate alliances that has emerged was just beginning to develop. The huge global capital market, which today dwarfs even the largest national capital markets, was not foreseen (p. 3). Jochnick argued that the narrow focus of human rights law on state responsibility is not only out of step with current power relations but tends to obscure them (p. 3). It neglects the decreasing power of the nation-state and perpetuates the belief that states are only accountable to their populations and vice versa. Focusing on the state in a globalizing world may shield other actors (the private sector and international institutions) from responsibility and leave the poor and the human rights movement fighting for justice with both hands tied behind their backs. In encouraging the human rights movement to revisualize their work, Jochnick said that the real potential of human rights lies in its ability to change the way people perceive themselves vis--vis the government and other actors (p. 3). By using the rhetoric of rights, problems can be examined as possible violations, that is, as discrimination or structures that block people from exercising rights. Violations are not inevitable; therefore, they need not be tolerated: By demanding explanations and accountability, human rights expose the hidden priorities and structures behind violations (p. 4). This broader view, providing both economic and social content and applying accountability to nonstate actors, is a vital step toward addressing the root causes of poverty and development. The keystone of Jochnicks presentation is his contention that the broader view of human rights is closely connected to their original foundation in human dignity. Noting that under international law, states either consent to treaties or acquiesce to customary norms, he underlined a significant exception. Human rights law, he added, has in large measure defied these narrow categories by suggesting an additional foundationhuman dignity. Human dignity makes certain claims on all actors, state and non-state, regardless of custom or consent (p. 4). As supporting evidence, Jochnick emphasized that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the twin covenants of 1966 not only recognize customary or agreed-to rights, but also those derived from the inherent dignity of the human person.2 By extending human rights beyond the narrowness of consent or custom, this allows for recognition of a variety of nonstate actors as human rights violators.
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There are important lessons for development organizations like Oxfam to take from Jochnicks presentation.
He challenged the traditional cleavage between development and rights
work, calling for a reexamination based on the philosophical underpinnings of international law and the stress globalization is placing on historic conceptions of the state. He reintroduced the concept of human dignity as the foundation for rights and showed us how human dignity is imbedded in human rights concepts, providing development professionals with new ways of thinking about how to link their concerns. 3 He showed us how a human rights framework can provide a more morally and ethically forceful tool for development professionals to use in naming the inequalities in power relations, along with the structures that sustain social inequity and injustice. He offered an approach that can begin with a concern for people and their needs, one that acknowledges the role of the state but also recognizes that violations of human dignity may have their origins with nonstate actors. He demonstrated how a rights-based approach can challenge the fatalism embedded in the very logic of the welfarist approach to poverty alleviation.
THE SOCIAL CONTRACT AND THE RIGHT TO DEVELOPMENT
We next need to examine the implications Jochnicks broader, integrated definition of human rights has on development thinking. Approaching human rights as inherent and indivisible and centering our development work on the pursuit of social, economic, and cultural rights, we are in effect arguing for development itself as a human right, and one, moreover, that is integral to the social contract. Arjun Senguptas (2000) excellent paper, The Right to Development as a Human Right, provided insight on the implications of this argument. Sengupta first reminded us of the intimate connection between human rights and social contract theory. Social contract theory was, in effect, a secular rendering of the ancient biblical concept of a contract between God and Abraham, with the people choosing their governors rather than God. Natural rights theorists in the Western traditionHobbes, Locke, and Rousseauwere proponents of the contract concept (Barker, 1969). Locke claimed that certain rights, such as life, liberty, and property, belonged to individuals and not to society as a whole because these rights existed before entering civil society. Entering civil society meant agreeing to a social contract, but this contract only surrendered to the state the right to enforce these natural rights, not the rights themselves. The French Revolution of 1789 was supported by natural rights theorists under the premise that the sovereign had broken the terms of the social
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contract by not securing these rights for his people. The French Declaration of the Right of Man and Citizen stated that the rights of life, liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression were natural, inalienable and sacred. Sengupta acknowledged that there are very few contemporary proponents of natural rights but suggested a powerful argument for deriving economic, social, and cultural rights from emerging global norms. The basic ideas behind the social contract still exist and are codified within national constitutions around the world. These legal documents provide the procedures and rules, which national governments are expected to uphold, for protecting and promoting individual and collective rights. The very existence of a regime of rights is linked to the willingness of citizens to cede power and authority to the state in exchange for certain protections of their human dignity under the terms of a social contract. For such social contracts, what is important is the acceptance by all parties of a set of human rights that the state parties are obliged to fulfill. In the ultimate analysis, human rights are those rights that are given by people to themselves. They are not granted by any authority, nor are they derived from some overriding natural or divine principles. They are human rights because they are recognized as such by a community of peoples, flowing from their own conception of human dignity, in which these rights are supposed to be inherent. Once they are accepted, through a process of consensus building, they become binding at least on those who are party to that process of acceptance. Taking this argument a step further, Sengupta reminded us that the international community undertook just such a process of consensus building at the Vienna Conference of 1993, which agreed that the right to development was a human right. The Declaration of the Vienna Conference, as established in the Declaration on the Right to Development, reaffirmed the right as universal, inalienable, and an integral part of fundamental human rights.4 This declaration, which was supported by the United States, stated that, Human rights and fundamental freedoms are the birthright of all human beings; their protection and promotion is the first responsibility of government (Sengupta, 2000, pp. 1-2). It also committed the international community to the obligation of cooperation in actualizing these rights. In the final analysis, development emerged as a human right that reintegrated economic, social, and cultural with civil and political rights in the manner envisaged at the beginning of the postWorld War II human rights movement. The world was returning to the mainstream of human rights activism from which it had been deflected for so many years by Cold War international politics. Although the international community may have endorsed the right to development through the Vienna declaration, debate and controversy still surround the approval of this bold initiative (Katrougalos, N.D.). Moreover, on a more practical level, one might note that because of the declarations approval, the foreign aid budgets for most of the G-7 nations have seen a precipitous decline. The evidence suggests that the political leaderships of these countries have invested little in selling this concept to their electorates and
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instead have concentrated on managing their nations participation in global markets.5 Sengupta (2000) identified three major challenges to the notion of development as a human right. The first objection is that human rights adhere only to individuals and therefore are based only on negative freedoms, such as the freedom to life, liberty, and free speech, which the state must merely guarantee. In contrast, economic and social rights are associated with positive freedoms that the state must secure, protect, and finance through active promotion. As such, they are not seen as natural rights, and they have budget implications. A second objection posits that economic and social rights must be coherent, that is, each right-holder must have some corresponding duty-holder responsible for delivering the right. Finally, some argue that a right exists only if it is enforceable through law and adjudication. Because economic and social rights are not legally adjudicative, the argument continues, they cannot be human rights. The next section responds by examining the role civil society plays in negotiating terms of the social contract with government. The third section amplifies that response in its discussion of rights-based program implementation.
LINKING RIGHTS WITH FIELD-BASED REALITIES
Development professionals need a practical conceptual base to orient their work in making the major shift to a rights-based approach. To translate the essence of this new vision into a guide for practice, Oxfam America has developed a series of simple models to capture the most strategically critical dimensions of the rights-based approach. These diagrams grossly oversimplify many social and political complexities, but they have proved useful in assisting staff to comprehend the core dynamics of this new approach. Figure 1 illustrates the rights-based model at the national level. Its foundation is civil society. The model presumes that in every nation, civil society is the primordial soup that shapes social affairs, the state, and the economy. The exact nature of civil society, its density and diversity, its inclusiveness, its racial profile, its political cleavages, and its internal culture and dynamics, are presumed to vary widely across national boundaries. The next prominent feature of the model is the states relationship to the economy, which can range across a gradient from central planning to an unfettered private market. The diagram presumes that the particular shape and scale of the relationship is determined based on a social contract established between the citizens and civil society leaders of a country and its political leadership. The social contract is not a written document, but rather the conferral of public trust to those leaders who demonstrate their willingness to govern under the rule of law. The social contract assumes rights and obligations on the part of the ruler and the governed. The social contract is grounded in the notion of legitimacy, the belief that government power ultimately rests not on
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Social contract Debate on rights and how state manages public goods
Constitution
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Economy
Exclusion of segments of society
Civil/Political Environmental Social/Econ
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Civil society actors
Figure 1. Rights-Based Development Model (National Level)
force but on the consent of the governed. This unwritten understanding is the glue that holds a society and a nation together. Our diagram presumes that the social contract defines the relationship between the state and the economy. Figure 1 shows a somewhat limited intersection, depicting a state that retains regulatory control over some important functions of the market and its various actors. One can also imagine other patterns, for example, a socialist state in which the overlap or intersection between state and economy would be almost complete (see Figure 1A). At the other extreme, the free market model might push the economy apart from state control toward minimal or no regulation. It might also shrink the power of the state, so one could imagine a diagram in which the economy dwarfs the state in terms of resources, power, and extraterritorial relationships. Each nation is theoretically capable of setting the terms of this state/economy relationship based on the nature of its political process and the substance of its social contract. In reality, there are both external and internal constraints. Pressures to abandon traditional social-service functions to reduce budget deficits can come externally from multilateral financial institutions and capital markets or internally from export promotion or privatization policies. Even basic public services like health and education may be affected. A national
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State
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Economy
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2. Free market model
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3. Economy dwarfs state power model
Figure 1A. Relationships Between the State and the National Economy
government may also feel constrained by the wishes of other states or by nonstate actors with their own agendas and the power to challenge the states authority and even its sovereignty. Internally, a state may lack the capacity to deliver on its social contract obligations to citizens, or its ability may be compromised by corruption. Although some reorganization of state functions is often needed for greater efficiency, the elimination of social investments in education and health has had dire consequences for millions of children in Africa and Asia. Several generations of young people have grown up lacking a basic education. In addition, their governments have been powerless to deliver on a social contract for basic social rights. Ideally, the voice of citizens and civil society actors finds expression in a nations constitution. The constitution can be a living document that spells out the basic terms of an evolving social contract, capturing the social aspirations of a society as well as the terms for the relations between citizens and the state. Most important, the constitution establishes the rights of citizens. Citizens and the civil society institutions that represent their interests negotiate with the state on the exact nature and quality of rights. For explanatory purposes in Figure 1, we single out distinct bodies of rights. Although the UN Charter of Human Rights treats civil, political, social, economic, and cultural rights as
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indivisible, in practice civil and political rights are usually enshrined in a national constitution and highlighted in a bill of rightsas is the case with the U.S. Constitution. Meanwhile, social, economic, and cultural rights must be fought for politically and either added to a bill of rights or legitimated through legislation, administrative law, judicial action, or changes in the informal consensus underlying the social contract. It is precisely at the interface between the state and economy where civil society plays its most crucial role. This interface occurs in the legislative process where laws are passed and budgets approved and where the states management of public goods should be debated. It is also found in the executive process where policies are formulated and leadership can be exercised. In this crucible, civil society organizations hold the state accountable for delivering on the promised social contract. Viewed in this fashion, development might be seen as a process of deal making between a government and its citizenry over how state resources, revenues, and services are shared among citizens and how the national economy will or will not be required to serve the public good. The final element of the national model shows the barrier or barriers that exclude certain people or civil society organizations from full participation in the negotiating process to allocate state resources and set criteria for economic performance. These barriers may exclude based on race, ethnicity, religion, caste, gender, or class. They may be obvious and harsh like apartheid, or subtle like voter registration procedures or standards of creditworthiness. They might curtail the simple exercise of ones civil and political rights or be arcane protocols in assembling certain public-sector budgets. An ostensibly democratic nation should show high degrees of inclusion. The United States has made significant progress in advancing civil rights for all citizens at the national level. However, at the local and regional levels, institutional, economic, and social racism still maintains a strong hold. The key to advancing a rights-based agenda is identifying the precise nature of local as well as national barriers. In thinking about its role within this universe, Oxfam America intends to focus its scarce resources on programs that support partners in negotiating this interface with the state on social and economic rights. It is conceding that the mainstream human rights organizations should lead the way in the pursuit of civil and political rights and environmental groups should continue to provide leadership in the pursuit of environmental rights. Oxfam America aspires to play the kind of leadership role for economic and social rights in the United States and in its overseas relations with partners that these other rights organizations have played in their arenas of concern. The model in Figure 1 has proved flexible enough for staff to adapt it to national contexts and manipulate its internal elements to fit a particular social and political reality. The model can also be adapted to analyze a regional, or even the global, level.
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Figure 2 offers a rudimentary diagram for the emerging system of global governance. In this configuration, we see three institutional actors with interlocking mandates: the UN, international financial institutions (IFIs), and the World Trade Organization (WTO). Beyond this triad is a fourth elementthe global economywhich is relatively loosely linked to the governing agents, is still evolving, and is gathering force that makes it critical to future global security. In theory, a state negotiates the interests (rights) of its citizens in the global institutions. In practice, states that represent powerful actors in the global economy tend to have the largest voice, whereas those that do not are relatively powerless. Nonetheless, a countervailing force has begun to emerge. The model portrays a small, but growing number of transnational civil society actors who seek to shape and influence these global institutions. Not surprising, barriers limit the access of transnational civil society actors to the process of agenda setting and decision making by global institutions. Representatives of private capital generally enjoy unfettered access to the decision-making table, for example in WTO deliberations on the terms of global trade. Few mechanisms allow the voices of civil society to be heard. This diagram seeks to capture the essential problem of global governance, which the Seattle protests spotlighted by calling into question the authority of the WTO, the IFIs, and their patrons. Because there is no clear social contract giving them a mandate, these global institutions lack the legitimacy of national governments. This sense of disparity has been growing. Although national governments participate in the governance of these institutions, their representation reflects GDP more than population; and because globalization has extended the reach and mission of these institutions, their decisions increasingly affect citizens around the world. There are differences in vision and ideology among leaders within these institutions, but by and large, the globalized market model of development is shared and shapes the way development goals are framed and policies implemented. This obviously has enormous effect on the developing world, but it affects everyone. Decisions taken by these global institutions are seen increasingly as undermining, if not abrogating, the social contracts between citizens and states. The perceptible shift in power from the national to the global is experienced as disenfranchisement because at the global level citizens have little direct voice and reliable representation. Meanwhile, private capital, which has been the big winner in the globalization sweepstakes, is well represented through a variety of institutional connections, corporate-sponsored events, consultancies, policy analysis, and lobbying.6 This gives rise to the kind of challenges to the legitimacy and accountability of private capital suggested in Figure 3. With no social contract to guide global governance, diverse sectors compete for voice and influence in shaping the global agenda. States represented in these institutions express their national interests. Corporations and business alliances promote their interests directly
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Social Contract?
IFIs
UN System
WTO
Exclusion of segments of society
Civil Society
Transnational Civil Society actors
Figure 2.
The Emerging System of Global Governance
at the global level, and indirectly through their influence on state representatives. The media aggressively promote their agendas. Finally, global networks of national and international NGOs struggle even to get a seat at the table. To translate many of the underlying assumptions of this model into a simple planning tool for staff, the Oxfams agreed to adopt a set of five basic program aims (Oxfam International, 2000):

the right to a sustainable livelihood the right to basic social services the right to life and security the right to be heard (social and political citizenship) the right to an identity (gender and diversity)
Each Oxfam has taken these core aims, which reflect the core elements of the UN Human Rights Charter, and attempted to incorporate them into its institutional strategy. In essence, the idea is to turn the right to development into a set of succinct planning goals.
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Global Governance system
States
Non-state actors Media
Civil Society
Elected officials
Other civil society groups

Public monitor
Private Sector
Figure 3.
Legitimacy, Accountability, and the Challenge of Global Governance
Staff are asked to work with colleagues from their sister Oxfams to develop regional and country plans that benefit one, two, perhaps even three of these aims. For each aim, staff is expected to develop context-specific strategic change objectives and outcome indicators to guide programming. Effectiveness is to be measured by the effect of programs on specific policy and practice changes that address critical barriers to opportunity. Meanwhile, on a global level, staff working on policy and public education is expected to use these same aims to plan global advocacy that aligns their strategic choices with critical priorities of partners at the regional level. For instance, concerns about the effect of the growing HIV/AIDS epidemic on grassroots communities in and the health budgets of many African nations in which we work has led Oxfam to the forefront of the global campaign for fairly pricing pharmaceuticals to treat the disease. During the last 4 years, the Oxfams have also carried out a campaign focusing on basic education. A major strategic feature of this campaign has been its success at linking local realities to global debates. The foundation for this campaign has been the assertion that education is a basic human right, intrinsically linked to the UN Charter, the provisions on social and economic rights, and a variety of subsequent UN summit documents. Now, broad concerns about the effect of trade
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rules on the livelihoods of low-income farmers has convinced Oxfam to align program efforts of staff from 12 affiliates, working in over 100 countries, and launch a major campaign in 2003 to reform the rules. The campaigns on HIV/AIDS pharmaceuticals and education have taught us how useful the social and economic rights construct can be in putting local faces on global issues to inform the media, the public, and their representatives of what is at stake. It has also proved to be a powerful tool to help us align our work across multiple program levels and across regions. It has proved equally powerful in providing an ethical basis for challenging the overly simplistic logic of the champions of the globalization paradigm. It enables Oxfam to provide powerfully incisive normative critiques that cut through the turgid language and technocratic rationales of the major global power brokers and their minions, and show the human costs. This has proved to be surprisingly appealing to the global media who often report on the downsides of globalization from the field but find little in the way of persuasive counterarguments to link the evidence to the big picture highlighting who is responsible and how the damage can be repaired and further damage avoided. Previously, development work was most often seen as disconnected interventions in very specific local and national contexts. The human rights focus of our work today is unifying these diverse experiences, enabling us to see from multiple perspectives much more clearly the kinds of power relations that drive and the systemic impediments that perpetuate poverty. Our early experience has shown the power of this conceptual framework. Now we face the challenges of implementing it as an operational reality.
CONFRONTING THE CHALLENGES OF IMPLEMENTATION In addition to Oxfam, many Northern NGOsSave the Children, World Vision, and CARE, for exampleare moving toward a rights-based framework for building a global movement for development and change. This framework reunites economic and social with political and civil rights, preparing the way for a comprehensive vision of a new, just, and viable social contract. Yet few Northern development NGOs have deep experience with the new paradigm, making implementation of it a learning challenge. Effective implementation answers Senguptas (2000) three critiques of the notion of development as a human right. As noted earlier, Sengupta argued first that human rights adhere only to individuals and therefore are based only on negative freedoms, such as freedom to life, liberty, and free speech. The state has the role of guarantor. Because economic rights are positive freedoms that the state must promote and finance, they are not considered natural rights. Second, to be coherent, economic and social rights require that some duty-holder be responsible for delivering those rights to individual rights-holders. Third, if rights exist only when they are enforceable through law, economic and social rights cannot be human rights because they are not
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legally adjudicative. As the next paragraphs suggest, these objections reinforce a welfarist perspective. By drawing narrow boundaries where only states grant rights, they imply a paternalistic, top-down perspective. We take a broader view of the actors and visualize the enjoyment of rights as a spiraling rather than a linear process. People give meaning to rights by exercising them. The exercise of rightseconomic, social, and political and civilis synergistic. It creates capacity to protect and extend rights. Jochnick (1999) addressed the question of boundary drawing and transgression, suggesting that one must look beyond the duties and prerogatives of the state to resolve systemic violations of human rights, particularly in the economic and social spheres. States, as we have seen, have been woefully inadequate in redressing inequalities. This is not just a question of resources but of responsibility. Nonstate entitiescorporations, financial institutions, and global institutionsmay act in ways that help create or sustain poverty. They may impinge on rights (cash out the commons, if you will) without taking responsibility for assuring rights (investing to sustain the commons). A broader view of human rights looks beyond state responsibilities and a legalistic approach and grounds itself in the concept of human dignity. Individuals are seen as actors with knowledge, skills, and the capacity to organize. Citizens and their civil society organizations, operating at the interface between the state and the economy, become key to making the rights-based model work. A rights-based approach to development bridges theoretical gaps between political, civil, social, and economic rights by understanding how they are interconnected in practice. During the past half-century, specialized civil society organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have effectively spotlighted violations of political and civil rights, using the stick of adverse publicity to halt violations, case by case. Civil society has yet to focus on the carrots needed to build social, cultural, and institutional capacity and to create a positive environment that makes honoring rights our new norm. To take a preventive rather than a corrective approach to violations of political and civil rights, development organizations also need to focus on building the economic and social rights that enable people to effectively exercise and defend their citizenship. NGOs taking on this challenge must create their own road maps. More than 20 international agreements on universal human rights were reached during the 20th century. Establishment of fundamental principles and standards was a necessary first step, but these conventions provided no guidelines for navigating local realities and few provisions for reporting compliance, much less enforcing it. Furthermore, this approach has been essentially top-down, based on an unstated assumption that rights can be given to individuals and groups. This unidirectional focus is fundamentally flawed because it fails to recognize that rights originate with the people who exercise them.
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Working to empower marginalized citizens within states and to build a global civil society to rein in transnational institutions, Northern NGOs are positioned to play a pivotal role, but the new opportunities are fraught with hazards. Becoming an active CSO in a rights-based framework exposes potential contradictions in legitimacy and accountability. Symptoms of this can be seen in the tensions that arise with Southern partners as a result of economic and other inequalities. This problem is not new, but it was easier to ignore when welfarism was the dominant ethos. Another problem, however, is new. How does one achieve conceptual clarity to heighten public perception of a new social contract whose terms are not prewritten but must evolve through ongoing civic engagement?
THE ROLE OF NORTHERN NGOS IN AN AGE OF GLOBALIZATION
Conceptual clarity requires moving beyond abstract declarations to gain an operational understanding of the circumstances under which rights can be freely exercised. If international conventions have set benchmarks for the states role in human rights, there is no consensus yet about the responsibilities of nonstate actors. Citizens and the groups they form need to be able to hold states and nonstate actors accountable for respecting rights. Rights-based Northern CSOs thus face a dual task. They seek to play a bottom-up role supporting marginalized groups in their efforts to attain and exercise their rights within nations, while also fostering nascent global movements to promote accountability across national borders. Operating at multiple levels to link local with national and global concerns requires nimbleness and a fundamental change in traditional operating assumptions. If marginalized groups are to have the capability to exercise rights, they must have independence and agency. They can no longer be viewed as passive recipients of welfarist support from Northern NGOs but must be seen as actors in their own destinies and partners in our common destiny. Most Northern NGOs (and even government and multilateral aid agencies) now routinely talk of partnership with organizations and people in the South. Northern CSOs need to be honest and recognize that funding inequities have too often reduced partnership to a patron-client relationship. A rights-based partnership assumes that actors in the South bring irreplaceable assets to the effort to secure economic and social justice. The funding, information, and links that Northern agencies bring are essential but not sufficient. Putting these assumptions about real partnership into action challenges Northern agencies to rethink their agenda setting, funding, and accountability processes. Previously the donor set the agenda and sometimes changed it frequently without consulting beneficiaries about the effect. Donors measured project and program effectiveness by quantifiable short-term outcomes. The new model requires negotiating a shared agenda. It may mean providing funding for the longer term and asking the Southern partner to be accountable
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for process-oriented as well as concrete results. Because lasting success depends on organization building, Northern NGOs need the courage to stick with Southern partners who show the ability to learn from failure and cope with reverses. Because Northern CSOs do not operate in a vacuum, they have to engage their own donors in a dialogue about the changing priorities and demands of these new relationships. Rights-based CSOs in the North and South need to rethink the meaning of program and implementation to encompass activities once thought of as peripheral or overhead. The new model requires more activities like research, advocacy, evaluation, public education, and organizational development. Because resources are limited, some funding will likely be shifted from direct services to the poor toward efforts that target the underlying causes of poverty. This shift complicates accountability and relationships with key stakeholders, raising questions of legitimacy.
BUILDING LEGITIMACY THROUGH A CHAIN OF VALUE
As Northern rights-based agencies seek genuinely new partnerships to develop new models of implementing change, questions of legitimacy arise. Playing a service delivery role gives clarity to what an agency does, and legitimacy is derived from the competence of the work. Agencies negotiating for economic and social change or pressing for policy change have long-term agendas that are not easy to quantify. They are accountable to multiple constituencies, including donors, boards, and partner organizations in the South and the excluded groups with whom they work. Legitimacy in this model is dynamic and is created when a Northern CSO connects a range of stakeholdersNorth and Southseeking to expand the opportunity and ability to exercise economic and social rights. Legitimacy comes from the value chain linking donors, publics, the board, and staff with Southern CSOs and excluded people in a common agenda. Connecting the stakeholders in Tambogrande, Peru. Around the world, the economic and social rights of poor people are often overridden where wealth is found in their natural resources. The only lasting remedy is to empower local communities to assert their rights and acquire influence over important decisions affecting their lives. In Tambogrande, Peru, a Canadian mining company acquired a license from the Peruvian government to establish a massive surface mine that would displace one half the towns population. It would probably severely damage the water and air quality essential to their health and traditional farming culture. For years, Oxfam America has supported an indigenous rights group in Peru called Coordinara Nacional de Comunidades Afectadas por la Mineria (CONACAMI). This group helps communities to organize, conduct research on environmental effects, and inform and mobilize local citizens about the
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dangerous and negative effects of mining. In Tambogrande, CONACAMI helped local leaders organize a referendum that rejected establishing the mine. Oxfam America brought further pressure to bear on the mining company through an online alert that brought 5,000 emails to the president of the company urging him to honor the results of this referendum. The government is now for the first time negotiating with Oxfam and community leaders. From the local to international levels, Oxfam has supported the efforts of this small rural community to strengthen their voices in demanding their rights to control the environment in which they live. With scientific information, community organization, media effect, and the use of technology to enlist public support, Oxfam has helped this community finally command the attention of the government. In helping to forge this chain, a Northern CSOs accountability begins with the need for clarity in adding value. Its area of comparative advantage may rest in advocacy for policy and practice changes in Northern-based institutions. It may, for example, be more valuable and more legitimate to pressure the World Bank or IMF to change structural adjustment policies that exacerbate poverty and starve domestic education budgets than to fund a sprinkling of new village schools. As a shift to advocacy and policy work grows, the reality and perception of what the Northern CSO is and does may blur. To maintain legitimacy in its value chain, Northern CSOs will need to find better ways of explaining to donors and publics why advocacy may have greater effect than traditional contributions of pigs and shovels. Northern CSOs will also need to respect boundaries and not engage in advocacy in the primary political space of Southern partners. This is practical and an issue of principle. Just as Northern CSOs have a comparative advantage in advocacy with their own governments, so their partners are better placed to exploit the opportunities and avoid the dangers of advocacy in their own arenas. More fundamental, a rights-based agenda will be meaningless if Southern partners and marginalized communities cannot speak in their own voice and act in their own behalf. Amplifying and respecting partners voices in Zimbabwe. The legitimacy challenge is constant and requires skilled political analysis, sensitivity, and judgment. For example, Oxfam America funded womens organizations in Zimbabwe to conduct a national education campaign on how proposed constitutional changes would give primacy to traditional law that awards a dead husbands property to his brother, not his wife. It also supported womens organizations in educating women voters, particularly in rural areas, on the issues at stake in a parliamentary election. In doing so, Oxfam had to carefully analyze the environment and tactfully avoid moving into Zimbabwean political space so as not to endanger its partners and its staff. This kind of judgment requires investment by Oxfam in sensitive leadership on the ground.
290 STRENGTHENING LEGITIMACY THROUGH TRANSPARENCY
Public transparency to hold powerbrokers accountable for their actions has been a rallying cry for CSOs. The outcry has forced public officials and nonstate institutions to be more accountable to citizens, but these successes have led governments and others to turn the spotlight around and scrutinize the operations of CSOs. Some governments and publics once assumed that CSOs were efficient because they worked close to the problems being tackled. Now the honeymoon is over. More than ever, CSOs are being challenged to be more transparent about their own operations, and be accountable to performance standards measuring their effectiveness. Some challenges come from donor governments demanding better evidence of the value of their diminishing foreign aid; others come from recipient governments eager to undermine donor support to Northern CSOs; and still others come from an increasingly skeptical citizenry that wants to know more about how their donations will directly benefit poor people. The challenge faces all NGOs but is greatest for rights-based CSOs because their efforts to change structures and systems by redistributing power to allow greater equity in accessing a decent livelihood, basic social services, security, and other economic and social rights is much harder to measure. The outputs of service delivery agencies are concrete; it is easier to quantify the efficiency of their work. Indeed much of the international language for measuring performance, including development assistance committee (DAC) indicators or those of the International Standards Organization (ISO), is designed to capture tangible results (such as numerical increases in schools or childrens vaccinations) within specific intervals.7 The critical work of economic and social rights-based organizations is often missed by using these short-term indicators. Is an advocacy effort a failure because it did not transform a policy overnight? How does one measure the pay-offs from capacity building? That is, when and how do advocacy and investments in organizational capacity make a difference in the lives of poor people? Donor pressures for evaluation systems based on narrow indicators of accountability can be counterproductive. They may force CSOs back into the role of being state subcontractors for service delivery, leading them to abandon their core missions of advocating and instituting economic and social change. Short-term quantitative indicators devalue the long-term contribution CSOs make in policy formulation and program development. This does not mean that rights-based Northern NGOs should not be held accountable. It means that more accurate standards need to be developed. CSOs can contribute by investing resources in defining their work and setting benchmarks of progress toward systemic changes that can be communicated to stakeholders. This is easier said than done. First, the mission is
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political and therefore likely to spark controversy. By asserting rights for livelihoods, basic services, security, and participation, a commitment is made to changing the rules of the game, thus creating a new balance of power or social contract. This process is Burkian rather than revolutionary. It seeks to transform rather than overturn the system, to support incremental reforms that may yield mixed results over the short and medium terms, but create an irresistible momentum for long-term democratic change. Keeping a steady course will not be easy because rights-based CSOs have multiple stakeholders with overlapping, but not always convergent, interests. Unlike private-sector firms accountable to boards and stockholders for return on investment, or welfare/service delivery organizations accountable to donors and recipients for efficient provision of services, economic and social rights CSOs are accountable to donors, partner organizations, and allies for results that may be differently perceived in the short run and that are not easily described much less quantified. Donors understandably want to see concrete results in the lives of poor people now. Investing to change the rules of the game may appear quixotic or even radical to citizens and governments in the North that view the struggle for economic and social rights through the Cold War prism of the New International Economic Order or the now defunct socialist model. Engaging private and public donors in the dialogue about a new social contract is therefore essential to the transformative mission and vision of an economic and social rights organization. Dealing with tensions among diverse stakeholders requires careful listening to identify within the noise the area where interests converge and bringing that to the fore. There is an essential synergy between the ability to communicate the common purpose and the ability of strategic leadership to build cross-functional focus on specific outcomes that fit into a rights-based vision. Specific changes in rules, structures, and systems must be linked to an evolving social contract and demonstrably generate sustainable improvements in peoples lives. One must also show that such changes are not a zero-sum game, but cumulatively beneficial for all segments of global society. For example, tariff protections for fledgling industries, real land reform, or protections and living wages for workers in Mexico and Central America might be a better long-term investment for North Americans than fortifying the Mexico-U.S. border. Communicating complexities requires more than the nanoseconds of sound bites available in todays world. Expanding the audience and its attention span starts with an investment in staff who combine communication skills with a sophisticated understanding of the issues and players. Accessible digests must be developed to show how long-term structural changes or adjustments to the social contract result in win-win benefits. Benchmark indicators and stories that make them personal must be captured at the local, national, and global levels to show how changes have affected or failed to affect the lives of individuals and communities. Will donors be willing to
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support the shift in budget allocations required to pay for improved advocacy? They will if they understand how the new priorities are not designed to replace good fieldwork but extend it.
BUILDING CREDIBILITY TO SPEAK TRUTH TO POWER
Rights-based Northern CSOs may be small compared to the task before them and relatively powerless compared to government and the private sector in defining terms of the social contract, but when they are able to articulate their message skillfully their voice can resonate powerfully. This power stems from their credibility. The recent, effective campaign for World Bank debt forgiveness demonstrates its effectiveness. The credibility of Northern CSOs is grounded in their connections to marginalized peoples and communities, giving them a front-row view of what causes poverty and what sustains it. Northern CSOs documenting how debt repayment burdens constrict government funding of basic education in Mozambique or Uganda have persuaded members and committees of the U.S. Congress and other legislative bodies to sit up and take notice. By bringing representatives of Southern CSOs to talk to World Bank governors, Northern CSOs shrink the distance between statistics and conscience, providing a face and a story and bearing witness to the human costs of heavy indebtedness that are missing from official reports. The credibility of the Northern CSO derives from its relationship with Southern partners. The need for a new global policy agenda was not dreamed up in an office building in Europe or the United States. It arose in response to the very real damage being done to the people with whom Oxfam works in the field. This agenda is not intended to replace the economic development efforts of our partners but to remove institutional barriers blocking their way. Inputs from leaders of partner organizations around the world not only help us identify the barriers but also help us keep our work in perspective. Although debt forgiveness and rules changes that further economic and social rights are important, they say, development work in the field begins with sound small enterprise, credit, or training programs that help the poor keep their heads above water. Once they begin to do that, the structural issues holding them down become apparent. Credibility with the World Bank and those who make the rules, however, depends on more than an honest brokerage with the voices of the deprived. It derives from the capacity of Northern CSOs to do sound research and to propose practical policy alternatives. One must identify the way out of problems, such as heavy indebtedness, and suggest how to keep them from recurring. This implies investment up front in research, analysis, and policy formation, which obviously puts pressure on CSO budgets that are already stretched thin.

MANAGING TENSIONS FROM MULTIPLE ROLES
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Rights-based Northern CSOs must learn to navigate the tensions that arise in playing multiple roles. Contradictions need to be managed externally with partners in the value chain, and internally with how work is compartmentalized and prioritized. An institution that funds, links, and learns to facilitate the work of Southern CSOs is also an advocate in its own political space. Because the competencies for being a facilitator and an actor differas do the time frames for each kind of worka Northern CSO must build internal bridges between two skill sets and temporal perspectives to help everyone pull together rather than pulling the value chain apart. Advocacy staff will normally choose to focus on policy and practice changes that are achievable in the medium term. Staff working with Southern partners are centered on capacity building for the long haul and, in solidarity with their partners, may demand advocacy that is long term, off the Northern CSOs agenda, or unachievable. Special attention must be paid to shared political arenas, such as advocacy with international institutions, where unequal financial and information resources may keep the views of Southern partners from being fully aired. The differing demands of funding programs in the South and fund-raising in the North can create separate cultures inside the organization, a problem faced by all nonprofits but more acutely by Northern rights-based CSOs. As resources move into capacity building and advocacy, results may become less quantifiable and predictable. The grant-making staff, particularly those based in the South, understand this. Knowing the realities that partner organizations and their constituencies face, program staff is reluctant to commit to measurable short-term goals given the complexity of achieving socioeconomic change. For example, if a countrys legislation creates barriers to savings and credit services for small entrepreneurs, program staff may want to support partners advocacy for legislative change rather than more microfinance, even though the return on advocacy investment is unlikely to arrive for years. Meanwhile fund-raisers in the CSO focus their efforts on donorsthe lifeblood of any nonprofit. Professionally, they are accustomed to measuring performance because fund-raising results are readily quantified periodically. Their work also makes them impatient for results from the field because of the need to explain to donors how money is getting to the people who need it. This internal tension between grant makers and fund-raisers mirrors tensions between Northern and Southern stakeholders over accountability. Managing this tension thus becomes integral to the mission of creating a value chain for real effect. Budgets are concrete expressions of agency priorities, and they will reflect the new vision. Allocations for direct investment in grassroots efforts that get to the people who need it will remain important because they are the bedrock of institutional credibility. As more funds are funneled to advocacy and to research, it will be the task of leadership and management to
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make sure that the advocacy is achieving policy and practice changes that make a difference at the local level. Multiple roles bring reinforced results in Cambodia. Local laws that discriminate against particular groups of people generally bring wealth to others in power. In Cambodia, Oxfam America has long worked with fishermen in poor communities, supporting organizations that teach them how to protect their environment and fishing resources. However, the old parable about teaching a man to fish and he will eat forever only works if the man has access to the pond. In Cambodia, laws entitle powerful individuals to charge community members to fish in their traditional waters. Exhausted fish stocks, insufficient food for poor families, and a climate of violence have been the result, and the situation is getting worse. Real progress is impossible without a change in the law itself. As a result, Oxfam supports local organizations working to reduce the power of the fishing lot owners and to agitate for the enforcement of existing laws that protect fishermens rights. This effort has seen some very tangible results, with new rules that cut back on the acreage granted to fishing lot owners. Oxfam will continue to spend funds to support work that is getting to the people who need it, whether that work teaches how to fish (better) or makes the pond available, stops its pollution, or protects it from other environmental hazards. Fund-raising will also need to be revisited. Nonprofits have tried to hold down fund-raising and purely administrative costs, usually below 25% of budget outlays. Peter Frumkin and Mark Kim (2001) at the Kennedy School have noted, however, that U.S. nonprofits that spend more marketing themselves to the donating public do better at raising contributed income than organizations focused on leaner, more efficient operations (p. 192). The point here is that marketing the organization means getting the word out. A fund-raising campaign is not just a vehicle for raising resources; it is an opportunity to educate the public about the structural origins of poverty and the new paradigm for remediating it.
TARGETING PUBLIC PERCEPTIONS ON WHAT NEEDS TO BE CHANGED
For most Northern CSOs, the shift in brand toward a more rights- or justice-based identity involves a major revision in how the agencys various publics and stakeholders think of it. Oxfam Americas brand in the United States, for example, has been identified very narrowly with seeds, tools, and hunger relief. Oxfam America now faces the challenge of broadening its public image beyond this welfare model and linking it more directly to concerns about equity and justice. Condensing the complexities of globalization and development into a concise, compelling message that embodies the new brand identity is daunting. Changing deeply rooted perceptions of traditional stakeholders takes time. The key is making sure that communications outreacheven when it
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concerns seeds and toolsaddresses the nature and causes of poverty and what the organization is doing about it. The message can be expected to sharpen as the new paradigm is implemented in the field and results are shared and digested within the organization. The balance between rights campaigning and development practice is dynamic; each ideally should feed the other. In an era of globalization, work exclusively at the community level soon hits a glass ceiling. Yet action at the community level must continue if the marginalized are to have a seat at the table in negotiating a new social contract. This fundamental work organizes the poor and informs the rest of us about what is happening to them and what needs to be done to help them. Leveraging effective change requires us to see the structural linkages between the local and global drivers of poverty and to work with local and national partners to highlight and combat them. Such an effort will not be sustainable unless stakeholders are persuaded that increased investment of Oxfam staff and financial resources in issue-based advocacy is essential for real and lasting effect on the lives and prospects of poor people.
MANAGING THE ORGANIZATION FOR CHANGE Meeting the key challenges facing rights-based organizations as they implement their vision requires moving leadership and management styles beyond those found in a welfare or service delivery agency. Some differences are matters of degree. Others represent new competencies.
ARTICULATING VISION DURING A PARADIGM SHIFT
Leadership in any organization must understand the landscape in which the institution exists, find its bearings to set the right course forward, and steer to keep efforts on track. All of these tasks are complicated by a fundamental shift in landscape. Globalization has forced the leaders of CSOs to explain the new circumstances in which they operate and to devise a new strategy for moving forward. Because we are in the middle of a paradigm shift that is still poorly understood, leaders of rights-based organizations need to invest significant time and intellectual capital in articulating the rights vision and building consensus among staff, board, and other stakeholders about what must be done and how to do it. The ability to communicate enabled transformational leaders like Franklin Roosevelt and Martin Luther King to overcome great odds in assembling coalitions to restructure the American social contract around economic distribution and race. Leaders of rights-based CSOs now need to develop similar competencies in energizing deeper understanding of poverty and exclusion on a global scale. Americans have instinctively and generously responded to human privation and suffering abroad, from drought in Ethiopia in the 1980s to recent hurricanes and earthquakes in Central America and floods in
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Mozambique. Private donors, small and large, also contribute to development beyond disaster relief, seeking to end the suffering and poverty in the lives of individual people. Helen Epsteins (2001) recent review of health, published in the New York Review of Books, begins to capture what leaders need to communicate about a new kind of disaster that endangers all of the progress so many communities and individuals have worked so hard for years to make. She cited evidence of growing inequities in health care and the real decline in health status among populations increasingly marginalized by and from the global economy. She sees a breakdown of the collective conscience that should regulate human affairs: The powerful institutions that increasingly govern all our lives have thrown the lives of the poor into flux, and nothing has emerged that might soften the blows of the economic, social and personal crises which these institutions themselves increasingly cause. One could blame, as she noted, the Western neo-liberal politicians, corporate CEOs, IMF, and World Bank economists or corrupt government leaders. However, finding easy scapegoats, she seemed to say, is not the answer. We need to look at how the values of our current social contract give greater priority to protecting Western creditors than to assuring peoples right to a sustainable livelihood, security, voice, and basic health and education. Part of the problem is that our understanding of human rights has been filtered by legal discourse during the past half-century (Steiner & Alston, 2000). That is understandable given the legacy of the Human Rights Charter and efforts to incorporate its principles into national constitutions and law codes. Although activists with limited legal training have acted as shock troops for the human rights crusade, lawyers have remained its high priests. Even though the literature on political and civil rights and the constitutional and other institutional means to guarantee them is highly developed, our understanding of social and economic rights is not. Development organizations trying to apply human rights to their practice have found little precedent or research to guide them; the really innovative thinking has just begun. What seems clear at the outset is that the universalistic approach characterized by traditional human rights activism is too simplistic for the current challenge. CSOs making the transition to a rights-based approach need to take a pragmatic approach to progress on the ground while working with academics and human rights specialists to identify key conceptual challenges and develop imaginative responses that sacrifice neither the quality of the work nor the seriousness of the Human Rights Charter. The challenge is particularly acute in developing appropriate yardsticks at the national level, with targets for improvement, so that governments abrogating social contracts can be held accountable by their citizens and the international community in the same way they have been for abusing civil and political rights. Articulating this vision is a tall order for leaders of rights-based CSOs. In fact, the goal is to make the CSO itself a leader in the emerging global movement for a new social contract. That leadership begins with transforming the
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focus and skill sets of the agencys board and staff. Leadership needs a broad strategy for mobilizing board and staff around the rights framework, and a management plan to tightly focus attention on specific policy and practice changes.
ENVISIONING BOARDS AS LEADERS
Boards of economic and social rights organizations face specific challenges. The bottom-line fiduciary responsibility of CSO boards goes beyond assuring the financial integrity of the organization. They are also responsible for assuring that funds raised are spent for the purposes intended. Moreover, because board members are increasingly asked to take on fund-raising responsibilities, they need to be able to articulate what the organization is doing and what is being achieved. Board members can be effective ambassadors for spreading word about the need for structural and political changes that need to be and are being made. To do that, the board must be well informed. It needs to be supported by staff able to articulate the rights, change agenda, and to set and monitor organization-wide performance indicators. Boards may also need to be more deeply involved in the substance of agency work, without getting mired in micromanagement decisions. Formal board meetings with set agendas, limited time frames, and closed to staff input are a poor recipe for board involvement in advancing the agencys mission. Boards are voluntary, so there are limits to what members can be asked to contribute in time and effort. To maximize their contributions and effectiveness, boards can schedule meetings in the field to see results and meet partners firsthand; board members can visit the field individually or in groups to explore specific areas of interest; and periodic roundtables and briefings can be held with staff members about developing and analyzing key results and performance indicators. Some of these proposals cost money, but they offer dividends beyond enhanced fiduciary oversight. Boards, with their diverse membership, may well be a microcosm of the agencys multiple stakeholders. Some board members may represent organizations of the poor and excluded in countries from the South; others may come from the private sector, representing business leaders concerned about the consequences of economic and social inequities and who understand the need to find win-win situations out of enlightened self-interest. Representative boards can provide critical leadership to building a chain of value among the stakeholders of the CSO and to forming broader alliances in the global society beyond.
STAFFING A RIGHTS-BASED CSO
A strong board is necessary to make a rights-based CSO highly effective. A strong staff is fundamental to any organizational success. To improve the odds of success, leadership needs to shape management practices. Recruitment, orientation, and staff development can all play a part in supporting alignment
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around a rights-based vision. Senior managers can strive to build a boundaryless organization, in which core values are shared across functional units so that diverse skill sets mesh rather than clash. Recruitment and development of staff with cross-functional capacities can play a catalytic rolealong with induction, training, and reward systemsto create a culture of aligned work. The new challenges of the rights-based approach lie in networking, in the complex layering of problems and solutions, in the variety of stakeholders and allies, and in the ability to think outside and inside the box to cope with the speed of change and the ambitious and transformative nature of the work. For a rights-based organization with practical aspirations to effect change, the task is to recruit and develop staff adept at devising strategies for sharing power that eliminate inequities, and also, in the long run, make all or nearly all parties into winners. In practical terms this means, for example, working for trade rules that allow producers in poor countries to increase their incomes through greater access to developed markets, whereas richer economies will benefit from reciprocal opportunities generated by the expanded purchasing power in newly developing markets for imported goods. The following organizational competencies are required for effective rights-based work and offer a guide to staff recruitment, development, and goals:
ability to find, process, and route the right information rapidly; agility in recognizing and applying the potential of information
technologies;
capacity for rapid analysis, decision making, and action; substantive technical expertise in areas related to carrying out core
work;
ability to stay on focus for medium- and long-term strategies, to decline
most work outside the focus, and to know when to make strategic exceptions; seamless synergy among functional units in the organization, making the connections between global and local, and among the different types of work; an internal culture that rewards innovation, within the focus; broad-based ability to communicate the rationale for the rights-based approach, the core work, and institutional performance to a wide range of audiences; communication skills to market the rights-based mission, harnessing seamless synergies between program work and fund-raising and outreach to create and extend the value chain between stakeholders and excluded communities; diverse funding sources and a reliable income stream to enable the organization to take positions that may be controversial to some stakeholders.
Challenges and Opportunities in Implementing a Rights-Based Approach GOING BACK INTO THE FUTURE
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This article has looked at why some development organizations are moving toward a rights-based perspective and the challenges inherent in making that course correction. The decade following the Cold War left us with a foreign policy bereft of focus and direction. The inability to imagine a better world has left development to the whims of markets and to those who control and prosper from the movement of capital, goods, and investment. Leaders and citizens no longer saw how support for international development meaningfully contributed to their own national interest or security. Yet like Alices wonderland, ours is a world of paradox. A cornucopia of wealth has been created by markets linking the world in unprecedented ways while further disenfranchising the unconnected. Although the global community is growing more compact and intimate, the inequalities and inequities in wealth are growing ever more significant. Despite the obvious instability being brewed by this explosive mix of intimacy and inequity, the worlds leaders have been bewitched by complacency, naively assuming (as has been their wont) that in time the market will right all wrongs, correct all disequilibria, and resolve all disruptions to its smooth and efficient functioning. The romance of globalization that markets are self-perfecting and function without distortion in the best interest of people is, unfortunately, unfounded. Those willing to look will find the truth that markets are grossly imperfect in much of the world, where benefits have been siphoned, diverted, and privatized to enrich a small minority. Even where markets work as intended, the sad truth is that they are morally neutral and are designed purposefully to optimize profit and value, not to equitably distribute public goods, protect workers or the environment, nurture the diversity of our cultural heritage, or safeguard the commonweal. In a world in which development is synonymous with markets and little else, it is increasingly imperative that development organizations formulate strong normative positions on a wide range of issues. The only antidote to the dark side of globalization is for CSOs to morally and ethically intervene on behalf of members and partners whose daily lives never let them forget the downside risks about which economists hypothesize. A rights-based approach to development offers a unique new approach to addressing the kinds of poverty issues that confront us in the new millennium. It takes us beyond the charity and welfare models that have dominated our discourse for the past 70 years and puts the questions we ask into sharper focus. It transforms needs into rights, capabilities, and responsibilities. It puts the states responsibility to its citizens under a microscope to examine what, in fact, is the national social contract. We attempted to realistically portray the strategic and organizational challenges facing development organizations that want to make a transition towards a rights-based methodology. The challenges are many and varied:
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conceptual, organizational, and tactical. Despite the risk, however, the new approach may leverage benefits for the poor far beyond what social welfarism has delivered. Perhaps the most significant advantage of the paradigm shift is to anchor the debate about equity and justice in international principles already endorsed by the international community and that have some legitimacy in international law. In an era when nations are subject to a multiplicity of external forces affecting the states capacity to address the needs of its citizens, we must begin to think boldly about how to discuss justice on a global scale. One can already glimpse the emergence of global civil society actors who question the legitimacy of pretender institutions that would appropriate for themselves substantial power over the distribution of the worlds economic assets, shaping the destiny of millions, if not billions, of people. Although the nature of and fora for debates about power relations in the future global community remain unclear, the debate has begun. We live in an exciting time when it may actually become possible to speak meaningfully about global social contracts that safeguard the environment, livelihoods, and security. To achieve such bold goals, however, we must discard 19th-century theories that mask our current realities. We must risk seeing the world and our work in development in new ways. To do so is to rediscover the unfulfilled promise of our recent past. Using the UN Human Rights Charter, in the holistic manner in which its authors intended it to be read, offers us the possibility of creating a future in which all our children would want to live.
Notes
1. The Covenant on Civil and Political Rights was also agreed to in 1966. See also the 1986 Convention on the Right to Development, against which the United States cast the only dissenting vote. 2. The emphasis on human dignity in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights in 1966 was reaffirmed by the Declaration on the Right to Development in 1986. 3. Links could be made between Jochnicks concept of dignity and Amartya Sens concept of substantive freedomsthe capabilitiesto choose a life one has reason to value (Sen, 1999, p. 74). 4. The Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action, adopted by the UN World Conference on Human Rights, 1993. 5. The UN Conference in Monterrey in March 2002 sought to reverse this trend and called for increases in international assistance to halve the number of people trapped in severe poverty. The United States proposed to increase its assistance, beginning in 2004, but at levels below their Cold War peak. It would also tie these funds to countries adopting sound economic policies, in other words to countries integrating into global markets. 6. Paradoxically, a certain still small segment of U.S. public opinion rejects and has an unnatural fear of all international institutions and governance and would simply withdraw from the game rather than widen the social contract even as global economic forces increasingly influence domestic jobs and commerce.
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7. Indicators designed by the Development Assistance Committee of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to rationalize measurement of outcomes of development projects.
References
Barker, E. (1969). Social contract: Essays by Locke, Hume and Rousseau. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Center for Economic and Social Rights. (1995, October). Developing a common framework for the promotion of economic, social and cultural rights. Workshop I Summary Report. Retrieved from http://www.cesr.org/publications.htm. Eade, D. (Ed.). (1998). Development and rights. Oxford, UK: Oxfam Great Britain. Epstein, H. (2001, April 12). Time of indifference. New York Review of Books. Frumkin, P., & Kim, M. T. (2001, May/June). Strategic positioning and the financing of non-profit organizations: Is efficiency rewarded in the contributions marketplace? Public Administration Review, 266-275. Glendon, M. A. (2001). A world made new: Eleanor Roosevelt and the universal declaration of human rights. New York: Random House. Jochnick, C. (1999, February). The human rights challenge to global poverty. Center for Economic and Social Rights, New York, NY. Retrieved from http://www.cesr.org/publications.htm Katrougalos, G. (n.d.). Social justice, economic development and human rights. Injustice Studies, 2. Retrieved from http://www3.ftss.ilstu.edu/injustice/ Korey, W. (2001). NGOs and the universal declaration of human rights: A curious grapevine. New York: Palgrave. Korten, D. (2001). When corporations rule the world. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler. Lauren, P. G. (1998). The evolution of international human rights: Visions seen. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. McMurtry, J. (1998). Unequal freedoms: The global market as an ethical system. West Hartford, CT: Kumarian Press. Sen, A. (1999). Development as freedom. New York: Knopf. Sengupta, A. (2000). The right to development as a human right (Working paper). Boston: Francois-Xavier Bagnoud Center, Harvard University. Steiner, H., & Alston, P. (2000). International human rights in context: Law, politics and morals. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Oxfam International. (2000). Towards global equity: Oxfam International strategic plan, 2001-2004. Oxford, UK: Oxfam International. World Bank. (2000). World development report 2000/2001Attacking poverty. New York: Oxford University Press.
Raymond C. Offenheiser has served as president of Oxfam America since 1995. Before joining Oxfam, he worked for the Ford Foundation in Bangladesh and South America, for the Inter-American Foundation, and for the Save the Children Federation. His experience encompasses community-based resource management, enterprise development, human rights and local governance, and international security. Susan H. Holcombe is currently visiting professor in the Sustainable International Development Program at the Heller School, Brandeis University. She was the director of Global Programs at Oxfam America from 1996 to 2000. She has served in country-based offices of UNICEF, UNFPA, and other multilateral agencies in China, Sudan, the South Pacific, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. She has a particular interest in development management and is author of Managing to Empower.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly

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Challenges and Opportunities 10.1177/0899764003251739 Offenheiser, in Implementing Holcombe a Rights-Based Approach

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Challenges and Opportunities in Implementing a Rights-Based Approach

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Offenheiser, Holcombe DEVELOPMENT MODELS AND THE HISTORY OF HUMAN RIGHTS

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Challenges and Opportunities in Implementing a Rights-Based Approach

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THE SOCIAL CONTRACT AND THE RIGHT TO DEVELOPMENT

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