Human rights: Food for a subversive thought  ‘HR and development’

Human Rights Reader 546

DEVELOPMENT OUGHT TO ACTUALLY BE A PROCESS OF SUBVERSION OF OLD WAYS SO THAT NEW WAYS CAN REPLACE THEM.

[TLDR (too long didn’t read): This Reader is about what we have to do when moving towards a new path to development using the human rights framework. For a quick overview, just read the bolded text].

-Development must actually ask what we do want to have today and in the future. So, for development to become sustainable today and in the future: what does this compel us to do now on the human rights (HR) front?

1. In the case of front line development professionals, the need is for moral and political frames/frameworks that allow them to structure their choices moving forward, avoiding doubt and guilt. Such frameworks do exist; one just has to look for them. For instance, sustainable solutions can be found in the way things are already being done by people, as much as in (or more than) what experts come-up with. This is why we say development is a set of options, not a single pathway. (Elisabeth Gaffy)

More than ever before in development work, we need to engage with an explicit human rights-based political framework

2. Related to what Development with a capital D ought to be, have you noticed that no actual Development Strategies are announced anymore? Only ‘goals’!* But goals without corresponding realistic implementation policies are of no interest. Goals are not strategies! They are statistical objectives …leaving HR where?. You can only achieve a goal if the path to it is described… Therefore, I contend that the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are primarily a rhetorical device. You disagree? Then, consider for a moment that --for the specific poverty reduction SDG-- even those who pass the $1.9/day mark by 2030 may/will still stay between 2 and 2.5 dollars a day …forever.

*: Consider the chain of broken promises, embedded in past goals, that have already been made to those rendered poor, hungry and displaced the world over. (Fulfilling basic human needs mostly brought about promises; conversely, HR are inseparably associated with duties …and are justiciable under international HR law).

3. And then, with a bunch of (just) goals, the ever-present army of subcontractors (‘the lords of poverty’) mushrooms, especially because there is no strategy that identifies the non-negotiable, must-have (in our case HR-based) tasks of a sustainable master contract. Without such, Alas!, using outside experts depoliticizes issues (Des Gasper) --and guess what…-- then HR priorities fall through the cracks. [I ask: Is it that we just need performance contracting, i.e., “deliver a certain performance and we will hire you”? (George Kent)]. The task ahead thus is to participatorily prepare such a HR-based master plan/social contract. We do not need the technical details upfront. We can leave that for later.

Has the time come for a ‘politics of testimony’? (Eric Sadin)

4. In development work, it is as if words, just by their supposed good intentions, take the form of a testimony. But this is not the case. What we actually need is more people narrating situations lived from their experiences in everyday life, in the places where the problems are so painfully felt: hospitals, factories, schools, households rendered poor, the unemployed, abandoned suburbs…This kind of testimonies is what we have lacked in the past decades --narratives that would have denied development approaches that have really hidden the reality of the dire facts of life of claim holders, because such narratives respond to certain interests.

5. True testimonies are about putting in front of people what the majority does not really know, but that badly needs to be brought to the public’s attention. This being said, we ought to be infinitely more attentive to these testimonial reports coming from the grassroots of every-day life and so much more valuable than reports by ‘experts’. Testimonies can and should be front line instruments for HR action. We ought to distance ourselves more from top-down development schemes since they are often based on a-priori and out-of-place assumptions. This will help us to heal the wounds of a good half a century of devastation caused by the application of entrenched wrong economic dogmas. (E. Sadin)

The other side of the coin

6. Countries in the North are anxious to improve the lot of ‘the poor countries’, not for altruistic reasons, but because they see these countries as the last unexplored undeveloped market for Northern industrial and soft goods, as well as for assorted services like banking, insurance, health…. (Hobart Rowen) This goes to show that the right to development is threatened by liberalization and globalization reigning supreme the world over. (Yash Tandon)

7. It is not unusual at all for Southern countries rendered poor** to be asked to do what the now privileged countries were never able to do or never accepted to do themselves in any condition comparable with poor countries’ current conditions. We recall the price in human suffering, in environmental degradation, in repression and in discrimination… that was paid for much of the development and wealth of the now affluent countries. That price is still being paid… (Donald O. Mills)

**: As you know, what we call the South, does not refer to a geographic space. It refers to a social, political and cultural space-time. Taken together, this social collective corresponds to the majority of the world’s population. (Boaventura de Sousa Santos)

8. Not only in the South, but also in the North, government or state powers are by nature disempowering. How can that machinery basically made for the disempowerment of citizens be committed to an empowering sustainable development*** --and to HR? (Saroj Dhital)

***: Sustainable development is not a measurable state; it rather is a modus vivendi that enables imperfect human beings to achieve a rewarding and not-too-painful existence. The outcome will be more sustainable if they set out to transform what is an imperfect world. This definition sees sustainable development as an empowerment issue. (S. Dhital)

And who holds the power in the global governance of development?

9. After an orgy of neoliberalism, the prevailing system succeeded in reducing the action power of the UN to the level of a powerful NGO --something like a Super Red Cross of the Nations (Roberto Savio) The UN agencies have acquired the sorry reputation of pursuing minimum common denominators while what is needed is the pursuit of maximum common denominators; UN agencies lost their power to make independent political decisions and, instead, were put in charge of the more technical issues in childhood, in poverty alleviation, in health and in education.

10. The G20 has then given itself the right of being the global instrument of governance and the Davos Forum has become the annual Mecca of the financial, corporate and political elite where earth shattering decisions are made with no one ever having elected them to do that. Absent in their deliberations are the need to retake a political vision based on universally shared values such as HR, solidarity, participation, cooperation and non-discrimination. This omission is totally revealing of the intentions of most attendees. I ask myself, what will have to happen for us to get rid of the Washington Consensus (and the Davos clique) and instead place human beings and their habitat at the center of the system --against the insistence of supporters of neoliberalism? (R. Savio)

Insert in this scenario how the external funding game (deceivingly called foreign aid) is played

11. Does any of this sound familiar to you? (in no particular order)

• Among the world’s wealthiest nations’ public opinion, foreign aid programs generally rank the least popular.
• External funding agencies are either value- or market-based according to their specific ideological orientation.
• One of the not respected ‘commandments’ of foreign aid has been “thou shall not intrude into the national local policy making of host nations”.
• The fallacy is giving the close-to-the-same advice to everyone when there is no simple universal recipe that promotes the benefits of globalization to all people (think IMF). The transnational liberal order is the ruling development philosophy and its new paradigm is trade, not aid. As for the much touted ‘replicability’ of stale recipes, there is no such a thing as a blueprint…
• The technical assistance being given turns issues of substance into technical matters. The underlying social and political issues get obfuscated. (Yash Tandon)
• Foreign funding agencies are simply unwilling to respond politically to political situations. They tend to summarize rather than to synthesize.

12. Accept here, to end, another set of my iron laws, this time applied to development

• All progress has resulted from those who took unpopular positions. Or: The inertia in the history of development has always worked against visionaries.
• Bureaucracy is a spider web; your ability consists in being the spider and not the fly. So, when pushing development initiatives, it will help you to keep in mind that there is a difference between an office and a grassroots leader.
• Consensus only advances at the pace of the most reluctant mover. (an oldie)
• One who stands at the edge of the cliff, is wise to define progress as a step backwards. (another oldie)
• Revolving funds set up to pay fees for services invariably stop revolving.
• …and on the more facetious front: Beware of six project stages: wild enthusiasm, disillusionment, total confusion, search for the guilty; punishment of the innocent and promotion of the non-participants.

Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City

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Postscript/Marginalia

-Development planning is to guarantee a certain level of predictability with a minimum of uncertainty.

-What should we think of the recent praise of ‘the welfare state’ and its public services coming from different voices among the ruling classes in the world? Their late conversion (or reconversion?) is as sudden as miraculous… (Dimitris Fasfalis)