The Ambivalent Status of Socio-Economic Rights in Human Rights-Based Approaches to Development

Most development objectives overlap with socio-economic rights. It might therefore be assumed that human rights-based approaches to development would imply the strict application of socioeconomic rights principles derived from Article 2(1) of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). Twenty years of rights-based development reveal a more ambivalent practice. Accountability is understood primarily in democratic terms associated with participation and empowerment, as opposed to legal terms implying a violations-based framework familiar from the doctrinal development of the ICESCR. Rather than stemming from scepticism about socioeconomic rights as rights, this reflects a discrepancy between the normative and operational levels of rights-based development that in turn follows from a reluctance to inscribe clear legal principles relating to all categories of rights into practice. Socioeconomic rights principles find their greatest application in their programmatic role, integrated loosely as standards in donor, multilateral organisation, and NGO development policies. This is indicative of the reality that socio-economic rights are generally employed not as something to be enforced primarily in a court of law, but as morally serious and politically compelling criteria with which to modify the state's traditional development aspirations of moving numbers of undifferentiated individuals beyond a threshold of service provision.