What does a ‘rights-based approach’ look like in practice? A new Oxfam guide

Sometimes it seems like the devil has all the best tunes, while the angels struggle to get their message across. In development, some of the most interesting and important concepts are rendered impenetrable to non-specialists by a morass of jargon.

Take human rights for example. Today is International Human Rights Day, but I for one, find that the dry, legalistic and jargon-filled language of the ‘human rights community’ often seems depressingly, well, inhuman. One example is, alas, Oxfam’s new ‘Learning Companion to the Right to be Heard Framework’, published today to coincide with this year’s International Human Rights Day’s focus on ‘voice’.

But please read it, because under all the jargon-laden sentences about ‘governance components as mechanisms to ensure transparency and accountability in delivery of quality essential services’ there is some real and useful substance. Trust me.

What the document is really about is how to render power visible – sprinkling magic dust over a community or a process to reveal their underlying power relations – the alliances and coalitions the keep the haves in the driving seat, and keep the have nots in their place; the hidden and invisible forms of power as well as the more obvious kinds; the discontinuities and moments of opportunity for rapid change (whether good or bad). Only when you can ‘see’ power can you really start thinking about how to help poor people redistribute it in their favour.

Oxfam’s framework for doing so is summed up in a simple diagram, (above) covering accountability’s supply (strengthening institutions), demand (strengthening people’s organizations) and supporting people’s movements to demand accountability from the state.

The learning companion then spells out just how to go about that, with lots of case studies from on-the-ground accountability work around the world, plus guidance on how to conduct a power analysis and signposts to the best sources of further info (even if – shock – they’re written by other NGOs).

The companion is part of a welcome move to publish more of Oxfam’s internal thinking (stylistic warts and all). We’ve done the same thing with our internal research guidelines, which are proving a minor download hit. If you’re interested in how Oxfam goes about its work , or in making human rights a human reality, take a look.

More background from Oxfam governance guru Jo Rowlands here.

How can aid agencies promote local governance and accountability? Lessons from five countries.

This post also appeared on the World Bank’s ‘People, Spaces. Deliberation‘ blog

Oxfam is publishing a fascinating new series of papers today, drawing together lessons from our programme work on local governance and community action. There are case studies from Nepal (women’s rights, see photo), Malawi (access to medicines), Kenya (tracking public spending), Viet Nam (community participation) and Tanzania (the ubiquitous Chukua Hatua project), and a very wise (and mercifully brief) overview from power and governance guru Jo Rowlands. Here are some highlights:

“Governance is about the formal or informal rules, systems and structures under which human societies are organised, and how they are (or are not) implemented. It affects all aspects of human society – politics, economics and business, culture, social interaction, religion, and security – at all levels, from the most global to the very local.

Most people experience the most immediate impacts, fair or unfair, of governance at a very local level. It is where women experience gender inequalities most keenly, for example in the way that issues that particularly concern them tend to get de-prioritised and their participation obstructed. In most political systems, it is also the place where ordinary people should, in theory, be best placed to participate in governance, for example by voting for their local councillors, taking part in local committees or protesting against laws or actions that they don’t think are fair.

Local people may face barriers of language, ethnicity, gender, class, poverty, access to information, or simply lack the confidence to speak out. They face the visible formal and informal structures of power, such as village or neighbourhood committees, service user groups, tribal councils, dominant families or castes, and formal structures of local government. They also face power dynamics such as business interests or patronage relationships based on debt and obligation.

It is essential for anyone working on governance to make a thorough analysis of local power relations, drawing on history and culture, specific economic realities and the interests of different groups of people. This analysis can then shape the options and approaches that a development programme uses, informed by how change has happened in the past and might happen in the future.

Oxfam differentiates between three key aspects [see diagram, below]: people claiming rights, institutions willing and capable of delivering rights, and people in positions of power with the will to make it happen.

When you deliberately address these relationships and processes, i.e. the arrows in the diagram, interesting things happen to the way issues are tackled in practice. For example, in Kenya, very high levels of mistrust existed between local community members, local councillors and local authority officials. Although there were institutional structures of decentralisation for local decision making, neither community members nor local authority officers knew enough about them to successfully implement them. The tools of social auditing provided a mechanism to address the knowledge gaps and rebuild damaged relationships.

All the case studies show how it is essential to work with both citizens and people in authority in order to achieve positive change in local governance. This might be about finding or creating spaces for constructive engagement between people and authorities, as in the ward meetings organised by women in Nepal. It could involve working with citizens to raise awareness and knowledge about their rights and about how local governance works, so that they can make relevant demands and monitor effectively how resources are used and accounted for, as in Malawi and Kenya. It may require working with officials and elected representatives to increase understanding about how to work accountably and transparently and to understand the benefits of actively involving citizens in planning and monitoring, as in the Tanzania example. Or it might be about working with officials to understand how particular legislation or regulation should work, as in Kenya.

A recurring theme across the individual stories is the importance of focusing action about local governance on the real, tangible interests of local people – health, education, livelihoods, water and sanitation. Women in Nepal moved into participation and leadership in committees and user groups on these issues; in Tanzania, communities became organised around setting up new market spaces for local women to sell produce, or around land rights.

Anyone working on local governance needs to be aware that in many contexts where there is not a culture of speaking out, individuals may be putting themselves at risk if they confront authority.  It is vital to ensure first that individuals who want to take that risk are supported, both from inside and outside the community, and that ideally the demands come from a group that has built the strength, skills and confidence to demand the changes they want to see. In Nepal, women did take a number of risks – facing opposition from husbands, and senior community members – but the support they received allowed them to prove themselves and to join with others in becoming change-makers within their villages.

Accountability and transparency are proving useful entry points for engaging the various actors and processes to help navigate the minefields of power relations. It is also clear that people who take on official responsibilities do not necessarily have the competency to carry out those roles. Therefore, well-targeted support and training for office-holders can go a long way in building better governance relationships.”

Jo identifies some particular ‘issues and challenges’, including:

Culture change: Making change in local governance often requires culture change as much as a change in structures, processes and representation. (particularly true on gender rights and women’s voice).

Access to information: As Maimuna says in the Tanzania case study, “Ignorance is a killing machine”.

Things can take time: Some changes can happen quickly, but the changes in culture and in deeper attitudes required to ensure system and process changes stick can take much longer (decades).

Risk management: Local and national governance are both about political processes, and carry significant levels of risk. This risk can include violence, fear, crack-downs on individuals or groups and a closing of space to operate for particular actors.

Areas where we need to do more thinking? How to deal with patronage systems, corruption and decentralization; improving our understanding of urban governance (the examples are all rural).

Final (very sensible) voice of experience:

“As well as being informed by good analysis, [future governance work] will also be informed by serendipity – watching for the chance combinations of the right person/people, the right moment, the right focus, the right alignment with other events – requiring good judgement and probably inevitably, whatever the expectation about how change will happen, a certain amount of sheer luck.”

What outsiders can (and can’t) do about Syria

Update: Please support Oxfam’s Syria action

This guest post, by Phil Bloomer, Oxfam GB’s director of campaigns and policy, is a bit unusual for this blog. No new research or (supposedly) clever ideas. Instead, he reflects on what outsiders can (and can’t) do about the terrible situation in Syria

“This morning, as on every recent morning, the news is dominated by civilians being killed in Syria. 100 a day may be dying, the UN said last Tuesday; the 13 killed in saving a Sunday Times photographer were just a fraction of that number – a shocking reminder of how many human rights activists have already died. Yesterday, one told Oxfam: ‘The situation is hell. In areas under attack, people do not have enough food.’ It is the bravery of people like that which challenges the rest of us to do something. But what?

The long-delayed UN resolution was welcome but far from enough. Like everyone else, I feel horror and frustration at the world’s inability to stop the killing. Oxfam was founded to support the poor and vulnerable in such crises, yet we can do nothing in Syria without access to those people under fire. In Turkey and Jordan, my colleagues urgently prepare for the escalating crisis they expect – for what Oxfam may do as the humanitarian fallout worsens, and more refugees flee. Where will Oxfam’s water and sanitation and other humanitarian  expertise be needed? What must we do now to make that happen? My Middle East colleagues work up scenarios, plan and negotiate our response with neighbouring governments and civil society.

But right now Oxfam is not working in Syria. So what do I do, as Campaigns and Policy Director of an NGO that passionately believes the answer to humanitarian crises is more than just aid (however vital)? The answer involves also challenging those with the power to resolve such crises and address their causes, principally the Government of Syria and its supporters (or at least defenders) in the UN and elsewhere. Whether it is in Homs, Helmand or Mogadishu, the killing has to stop, and Syria must start on the long road to sustainable peace. That is what our humanitarian campaigning tries to do, as well as upholding the rights of those affected by conflict and disasters. But what do we do when thousands are being killed in Syria, where Oxfam, unusually, has never worked, and so does not have the years of experience that underpin our advocacy in other crises? Do we denounce the killings and gang rapes the UN  reports?

Do we ask every neighbouring land to open its borders to Syrians fleeing violence? Do we use the channels in the region and around the world that we have nurtured in other crises to help get the humanitarian message across? Of course, but without grassroots knowledge, our voice is just another external voice and may not have much impact. And so I can only justify few precious resources – when our better-grounded campaigning on the Horn, West Africa and the DRC is so vital as well.

Until Oxfam starts to work on the ground in neighbouring countries such as Turkey – which looks ever more likely – we praise the ICRC for its work on the ground and extraordinary public calls for a ceasefire to help bombarded civilians reach aid. Such a cessation is the barest priority, the very first step towards removing every obstacle civilians in Homs are facing.

Right now, we don’t have sufficient information from the ground in Syria to develop detailed policy suggestions, weighing up pros, cons and uncertainties of different possible courses of action. We should be honest about that. But civilians struggling in crises value something else from international NGOs. They welcome a solidarity that reinforces their sense that they ‘are not alone’. That’s been my experience in every other crisis where Oxfam works all over the world. And in that sense, I doubt Homs is different. And it’s true even more now when social networking and the web allows people, even in the direst conflicts, to hear the world’s support louder than ever before.

Nothing is more important than stopping the killing on all sides. Unlike many crises we face, with a tangled mix of political and ‘natural’ causes, Syria is a political crisis caused by a government refusing its people’s right to be heard. Easy to solve? Of course not. But its direct political cause does mean it’s amenable to international political pressure – if the world had the will to exert it.

So far, that pressure has been fatally undermined. Last Thursday’s Security Council resolution was welcome but limited. Will it improve humanitarian access? We earnestly hope so. Will it stop the killing? That is very unlikely.

But there is a level of international outrage that can persuade the Syrian government’s international defenders that they must act to stop the killing now. While we plan what we might do on the ground, NGOs like Oxfam must be part of that global tide of outrage, joining the call for an end to the killings, the arms supplies that fuel them, and immediate access for humanitarian aid.”

Book Review: Small Acts of Resistance

Writing a blog is a mixed blessing when it comes to freebies. You get sent some real turkeys in the shape of papers and books to review. But every now and then an unexpected treat drops into your pigeon hole. One such is ‘Small Acts of Resistance: How Courage, Tenacity and Ingenuity Can Change the World’, by Steve Crawshaw and John Jackson. It’s an unashamed paean to activism, bringing together 80 examples from across geography and the last 100 years.

There’s a passing attempt to cluster these (e.g. sport, the law, women, digital), but not much in the way of analysis – this is definitely a dip-into-for-fun-and-inspiration feelgood book, rather than a serious piece of political science. There is no discussion of why some protests succeed and some fail, the importance of coalitions with progressives or reformists in positions of power, the impact of shocks, or the differences between movements aiming to overthrow repressive regimes and those seeking reforms within the given system. And there are some very overblown claims for the actual impact of these ’small acts’ that should be taken with a very large pinch of salt.

My favourites? The Solidarity activists in Communist Poland who, to demonstrate publicly both that they didn’t believe the state TV news and were boycotting it, took their disconnected sets out for a walk in baby buggies (strollers); one of the acts covered is even the one that gave rise to the word ‘boycott’ – the unfortunate Captain Charles Cunningham Boycott, a much-disliked land agent in British-ruled Ireland whose name became a byword for protest when his servants walked out on him, in protest against unjust rents and evictions. Local shopkeepers joined in, refusing to serve the captain and his family; the post office stopped delivering mail, and in the end the Captain eventually gave up and returned to England.

Then there are the Peruvians who protested against the Fujimori regime by washing the national flag in public every Friday in the centre of Lima. And the Turkish dissidents who clogged and eventually defeated the courts by getting hundreds of people to sign up as co-authors to dissident texts. But my favourite is another story from Poland– the Solidarity activists who dumbfounded the authorities by organizing ironic demonstrations in support of the regime, demanding an eight hour day for secret police and showering police cars with flowers. The government could hardly jail them, and the Polish public loved it.

Some common themes jump out in these more modern, urban versions of what James C Scott famously termed the ‘weapons of the weak’. Humour and irony usually baffle dictators; using repressive regime’s rhetoric and symbols against them often confounds the bad guys (I remember how the Argentine junta, with all its rhetoric about the sacredness of the family, did not know how to deal with the Mothers of the Disappeared – how could they jail mothers?). Protesting en masse, without identifiable leaders, can bring safety (the protesters banging pots and pans at night in Latin America’s cacerolazo protests are invisible and untouchable).

Targeting the most absurd aspects of a repressive regime – as when Gandhi marched to the ocean and made salt, a practice banned by the British, can be particularly effective. Bad guys seldom have a grasp of youth culture – under Slobodan Milosevic one Serbian radio station fought back against a media crackdown by broadcasting rock music with lyrics that implicitly criticised the regime (the Clash’s ‘White Riot’; Public Enemy’s ‘Fight the Power’)

But often, cleverness is not enough – plenty of the small acts described in the book involve straightforward courage – people taking huge personal risks to ‘speak truth to power’.

Looking for a Christmas present for an activist friend? This might be the answer. Check out the book website for photos, videos etc, plus you can add your own stories of small acts. And here are the authors hyping their book in a short promo video:  Small Acts of Resistance Final.

Population: why it’s a dangerous distraction on climate change (and makes us feel uncomfortable)

Trust the military to give it to me straight. Population comes up at virtually every talk I give – on climate change, development or just about anything else. But usually my questioners are a bit more circumspect than the man from the armed forces who recently asked what could be done about ‘women popping them out’ in poor countries.

People cause climate change, therefore cut the number of people. Right? Not really. A closer look shows that the conventional view is wrong, or at least a gross over-simplification.

Malthus goes to the beach

First, the numbers. The global population is about 6.8 billion and rising, but the rate of growth is slowing and the world population is expected to peak at about 9 billion in 2050. The growth rate is slowing fast, verging on collapse in some countries (South Korea is in a national panic about falling fertility rates and shrinking populations and is likely to look to immigration to fill the gap). The drivers for a far faster demographic transition than that seen in previous centuries in Europe or America are a combination of urbanization, women’s education, access to contraception and (one hopes) the spread of notion’s of women’s rights and control over their own fertility.

So one response is that the ‘problem’ is self-correcting, and indeed, if the transition gets any faster, the world could be faced by a serious shortage of working age people to look after the rising numbers of elderly. If their arguments were based on logic alone, the population control lobby would probably be advocating compulsory euthanasia rather than birth control, but its preponderance of elderly white male members makes that pretty unlikely.

In what sense is population growth a ‘problem’ (or ‘challenge’, as the management-speak people like to say….)?  Certainly not on climate change mitigation – as The Guardian’s George Monbiot argued in a great recent polemic, over the last 30 years, the countries with fastest population growth rates have the slowest emissions growth rate, and vice versa. But that hasn’t stopped a bit of blatant opportunism by the Optimum Population Trust, launching an offset scheme where you can offset your carbon emissions by funding birth control programmes in developing countries. Guys, the problem is consumption, not population. A cull of rich Americans or Australians might have an impact; population growth in Africa is largely irrelevant.

Adapting to climate change is more of an issue. In dozens of developing countries, Oxfam has witnessed the hammering that poor communities are already taking from climate change. Overcrowding in rural areas can increase their vulnerability. But the OPT doesn’t seem too bothered about that (wonder why?). Population is undoubtedly one among many contributory factors t0 hunger and local environmental degradation, although often there is enough food, it’s the distribution that goes wrong.

So if population growth is (sometimes) important, what is to be done? Listen to women, stupid.

the best contraceptive

No coercion is required, just access to education and family planning services (not just contraception, but also proper abortion facilities to reduce the horrendous death toll from backstreet butchers). (And to be fair, the OPT would agree with this). Amartya Sen famously showed that a combination of girl’s education and access to contraception prompted a demographic transition in Kerala every bit as fast as China’s coerceive one child policy.

I’m talking evidence and arguments thus far, but the choice of language also matters. As soon as the issue is framed as ‘population control’, the problem becomes ‘them’ – those women ‘popping them out’. That, along with population control programmes’ chequered history of coercing and tricking people into being sterilized in several notorious cases, is why many people in developing countries find the term so offensive.  Start with ‘women’s rights’ and the discussion becomes about ‘us’, our shared rights and the solidarity to achieve them. Talk about the problem of over-consumption, and the debate revolves around equity, redistribution and low carbon development, not fewer babies.

That discomfort on language is, I think, why so many NGOs tend to avoid the subject altogether. But in doing so, we unwittingly abdicate the ground to the bad guys. Time to go on the offensive?

The population debate matters, especially in these Copenhagen weeks, because it risks becoming a massive distraction. We need to focus on curbing consumption and emissions, not babies and women’s rights. Otherwise we risk blaming the victims and letting the climate villains off the hook.

Want some more ammunition? Enjoy these spectacularly wrong assertions from Paul Ehrlich’s bestseller ‘The Population Bomb’, published in 1968 and I would guess a major, if subliminal, influence on the current crop of population controllers:

‘The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.

‘”India couldn’t possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980,”

‘”One general prediction can be made with confidence: the cost of feeding yourself and your family will continue to increase. There may be minor fluctuations in food prices, but the overall trend will be up”.

‘The United States would see its life expectancy drop to 42 years by 1980 because of pesticide usage, and the nation’s population would drop to 22.6 million by 1999′

Oh, and here’s a video of me giving a grumpy interview on the Optimum Population Trust nonsense – it was late and I wanted my dinner…..

A condensed version of this blog was published yesterday by the New Statesman

Can the law advance education and healthcare in poor countries?

I recently spent two weeks doing jury service in an inner London court – a grim experience of leaking municipal toilets, undrinkable coffee, frequently incompetent barristers and Dickensian judges, overseeing a squalid litany of petty crime. In between the alleged threats and beatings, I read Courting Social Justice, a new book on the use of the courts to enforce social and economic rights (in particular healthcare and education) in Brazil, India, Indonesia, South Africa and Nigeria. It left me feeling a bit more optimistic about the role of the law.

The book asks if resort to the legal system makes governments more accountable (because they are forced to fulfil their promises) or less (because courts are often the preserve of the rich). The trade-offs can be complicated: in Costa Rica, a single decision by the Supreme Court led to an 80% reduction in mortality rates among AIDS patients, but on the other hand just after the court review, the health system needed to spend 8% of its medicines budget to treat just 0.012% of its patients.

The book’s key concept is ‘legalization’, which goes well beyond litigation to include monitoring compliance with judicial decisions, turning court decisions into new legislation, threatening to return to court, lobbying public officials and organizing public campaigns. Reality is very far from the myth of impartial judges delivering verdicts without any regard to the political or social context, as I saw in South Africa, where women’s organizations have found that singing and dancing outside courts trying cases of domestic violence greatly increases the chances of success.

So what were the book’s main findings?

The use of the courts is on the rise – ‘the language of rights and the cumbersome tools of the law have become a permanent and prominent part of policy-making.’ Overall, the volume of health litigation far outweighs that on education.

While activists are invariably disappointed at what courts can achieve, ‘from a historical perspective, the achievements seem downright impressive…. [In the countries studied] legalizing demand for rights might well have averted tens of thousands of deaths and enriched the lives of millions of others.’

What circumstances are most propitious for the use of the legal system to enforce rights?
- Laws and constitutions that promise far more than governments are currently delivering (frequently the case given the growing reference to social and economic rights in new constitutions around the world).
- But where governments have the capacity to respond (judges are remarkably cautious in keeping within the limits imposed by the real spending possibilities of states).
- and there is Legal capacity and substantial support for enforcement of rights, by the government, the public or civil society organizations (often the courts help the national government enforce policies on local governments, for example)

In general the researchers found it was far harder to secure collective rulings than individual ones (eg an individual demanding state provision of a particular new medicine – a Brazilian speciality), but the collective cases had much wider impacts, changing government policies that affect millions of

South Africa's Treatment Action Campaign has expertly combined litigation with campaigning

people – e.g. access to medicines (South Africa), free school meals or environmental regulation (India).

Some states and judicial systems are much more open to legalization of policy making (eg Brazil, South Africa, India) while others are much more hostile (the ordinary courts in Indonesia, Nigeria).

What the research reveals is that the courts do not go off on their own and start trying to force governments to do things they can’t afford (or if they do, they have very little success). Instead, they have become a part of an iterative policy-making process in which ‘litigation upsets the status quo, creating the context for a joint search for new solutions’ in areas such as access to medicines for new diseases, or shifts in public opinion on issues such as the right to food or work.

And it ends on an upbeat note: ‘the courts have become an additional place for deliberation and debate. When the courts work in congress with other branches of the state, legalization is democracy by another means.’
 
Development NGOs tend to leave the legal stuff up to the human rights organizations and their lawyers. Courting Social Justice suggests that we may be missing an important arena for action.

Reasons to be Cheerful: progress on international justice, arms control, economic and social rights and democracy in Africa

After Monday’s fairly depressing post, I thought I’d add some good news, from an unlikely source. Perhaps because it can break free from its heavy ideological baggage of laissez faire, the further the Economist strays from economics, the better it gets. This week’s issue has some really nuanced reporting on the impact of the International Criminal Court (ICC), on the cluster bomb treaty, and some good news (so far) on Ghana’s elections. Read More …

Climate Wrongs, Human Rights and Female Condoms

A belated plug for a couple of top notch recent Oxfam policy papers. My colleague Kate Raworth has written an important paper on the relationship between human rights and climate change. By exploring the impact of climate change on a number of rights within international law (eg to food, life and security, subsistence and health), the paper links two important, but often separate disciplines. In public policy as in science, this kind of cross-fertilisation between disciplines often leads to innovation and progress. In this case, a human rights perspective highlights the obligations governments have already signed up to under international law, and raises the long-term possibility of tobacco-style litigation if they fail to uphold them. Read More …