Understanding a Rights-Based Approach to Social Policy Analysis

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This chapter makes the case for why we need a rights-based strategy to social policy analysis and presents an overview of how to conduct social policy analyses using a human rights-based approach. The rights-based approach incorporates some of the steps of traditional social policy analyses but goes beyond this to analyze social policies from the perspective of how policies and programs effect or are expected to effect the realization of rights. Rights-based social policies are contextualized within international strategies and instruments in this chapter. Using four cross-cutting human rights principle-based dimensions, participation in the decision-making process, accountability, nondiscrimination, and equality (P.A.N.E.), a guideline is introduced to be used in a rights-based policy analysis approach to identify rights, legal obligations, responsibilities, and roles and ultimately whether policies further or block the realization of human rights. An exercise on health as a human right is suggested at the end of the chapter to help readers reframe social issues from a rights-based perspective, understand the conflicts that may occur in implementing the realization of rights, and provides an example of how to begin to analyze social policies from the rights-based guideline presented in the chapter.