Access to Productive Assets: Human Rights-Based Approaches and the SDGs

• In Event: Protecting Human Rights and Promoting Democracy: Challenges and Opportunities

Abstract

Development as a field of international cooperation has been shaped by fashions and trends throughout the postwar decades. Attention since the 1990s to human rights-based approaches (RBAs) to development is among the latest examples, and has contributed to shaping some aspects of the global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted by world leaders in 2015. This paper argues that while human rights’ impact on the SDGs has been constrained, one important effect is a refocus on poor people’s access to productive assets – land, capital, and decent work.

Scholarship on RBAs has focused largely on clarifying their meaning and tracking how their principles and rhetoric translate into concrete changes in agencies’ operations (Schmitz 2012; Gauri and Gloppen 2012; Gready 2014; Nelson and Dorsey 2018; Mitlin and Hickey 2009; Vandenhole and Gready 2014). This paper instead explores how the interest in human rights in development is influencing the SDGs.

Control of productive assets such as land, capital, labor rights and energy is a key factor in addressing inequality and promoting sustainability. But the major bilateral and multilateral donors have focused more attention and funding on other strategies, reinforced in the first decade of the 2000’s by the Millennium Development Goals’ attention to rapid progress on health and education indicators (Fukuda-Parr and Yamin, 2015). The SDGs, unlike the MDGs, provide incentives for national and sub-national policy initiatives and a source of political leverage for movements promoting labor, land, and energy access rights. While there is considerable scholarly interest in the SDGs’ goal that targets income inequality (Oestereich 2018, for example), this study calls attention to the potentially important refocusing of the development agenda on access to productive assets.

I examine changes in land tenure and labor policies in low- and middle-income countries that reduced income inequality during the MDG period, to identify policy tools and political drivers of changes that advance access to productive assets. I show that effective policy tools are available, including land tenure reforms, stronger women’s property and inheritance rights, minimum wages, improved labor rights, and protections for informal economy workers have important impacts on poverty and inequality. I also find evidence that the growing engagement of women’s, labor, and human rights organizations is important to advancing egalitarian policies, and to monitoring the SDGs.

Approaching the SDGs and human rights in these terms has important implications. First, changes in access to land and labor rights are less driven by external aid and more often by national or sub-national governments and movements. This means that prospects of advancing these goals are less a function of the international ability to finance change than of the ability to build national political support for new policies, and of the capacities of governments to implement them. This in turn means that while international finance for sustainability goals remains very important, greater attention should be paid to the civil and political freedoms that allow workers’, farmers’, and women’s movements to operate effectively.

Second, attention to land and labor rights can help to refocus development policy on strengthening broad-based, productive economies. Paired with social policy measures that increase income security and extend health coverage, they offer a menu of policies – not a one-size-fits-all formula – that can re-invigorate broad-based egalitarian development strategies.

References
-Fukuda-Parr, S., Yamin A. E., eds. (2015). The MDGs, Capabilities and Human Rights: The power of numbers to shape agendas. New York: Routledge.
-Gauri, V. and S. Gloppen (2012). Human Rights-Based Approaches to Development: Concepts, Evidence, and Policy. Polity 44:4, October 2012, 485-503.
-Gready, P. (2014). ActionAid’s Human Rights-based Approach and its impact on organizational and operational change,” in Gready and Vandenhole, eds., 2014, 177-191.
-Mitlin, D. and Hickey, S. (2009). Rights-based Approaches to Development: Exploring the Potential and Pitfall. Kumarian Press.
-Oestreich, J. (2014). The United Nations and the Rights-based Approach to Development in India. Global Governance, vol. 20, pp. 77-94.
-Oestreich, J. (2018). SDG 10: Reduce inequality in and among countries
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-Schmitz, H. P. (2012). A Human Rights-Based Approach (HRBA) in Practice: Evaluating NGO Development Efforts, Polity 44:4, 523-41.
-Vandenhole, W. and Gready, P. (2014). Failures and Successes of Human Rights-Based Approaches to Development: Towards a Change Perspective. Nordic Journal of Human Rights, 32:4, 291-311.

Author

• Paul J. Nelson, University of Pittsburgh