International Organizations and Human Rights: Realizing, Resisting or Repackaging the Right to Water?

Abstract

International (or intergovernmental) organizations involved in development cooperation have not historically engaged with the international human rights community. However, since the mid-1990s, a rights-based approach to development has been increasingly promoted in an attempt to integrate human rights into the activities of various international organizations. Using the right to water as a case study, this paper examines how international human rights are understood by intergovernmental organizations involved in development cooperation. Based on empirical evidence (including elite interviews), the right to water, international human rights, and international law were generally not seen by practitioners to be relevant to on-the-ground development activities. “Rights” was seen to constitute untouchable technical, legal, and often political language, which the international organizations lacked the mandate in which to engage. Alternatively, or sometimes simultaneously, human rights were seen to be simply a development outcome. Rights-based approaches appeared to have little influence on programming activities with practitioners explaining it was not clear what such an approach meant in practice. Despite the clarification intended by the United Nations (UN) Common Understanding, the term “rights-based approaches” was used loosely and variably, and typically associated with vague procedural principles, such as participation, nondiscrimination, and access to information, that were often explained to come within existing approaches to development. With little association of rights-based approaches with the international human rights framework, particularly the treaty body system, this paper calls for a reinjection of such a framework, particularly increased reference to applicable legal obligations and normative standards, into development cooperation.