Human rights and development: civic engagement, approaches and outcomes

Abstract

While critical voices are claiming that that there is too little evidence of positive impact of human rights in development work, human rights-based approaches to social change have gained wide-spread support in development work, and have widely influenced development reports, programming, project evaluations and academic studies over the past 25 years. It is likely that human rights-based thinking and practice will continue to deepen and expand in the development discourse in years to come. This chapter addresses how human rights and development have been linked over the past decades, and how human rights is part of the sustainable development goals agenda. The chapter also makes a critical appraisal of the evolution of human rights-based approaches to development, with a particular emphasis on the concepts of human development and Amartya Sen’s capability approach. Finally, the chapter asks about the practical consequences of adopting a human rights approach to development and discusses how human rights may be adopted in development programming and implementation of project.