Doing the Rights Thing: Rights-Based Development and Latin American NGOs

What is 'rights-based development'? How is it being put into practice in different contexts? What is its potential to achieve more equitable and effective development outcomes? Governments, development agencies and NGOs concerned with poverty alleviation have increasingly sought to integrate rights into their work. The term 'rights-based development' has been coined to describe these efforts but there is limited understanding of how such approaches are being worked out in practice. The authors examine the ways in which rights-based strategies have been understood in development practice in Latin America. They stress the political and personal nature of development especially the importance of enabling people to make their own demands of the state and other institutions. Rights-based development work has involved combining ideas of citizenship, democracy, participation and empowerment in novel ways. This book contributes to the creation of a fuller understanding of this approach to development and reveals the potential that it offers in ongoing efforts to secure more equitable as well as more effective and inclusive development outcomes.

Maxine Molyneux has written extensively in the fields of political sociology, gender and development studies. She is Professor of Sociology at the Institute of Latin American Studies, University of London where she teaches courses in Development and Gender Politics.

Sian Lazar has just completed her Anthropology PhD, an ethnography of Bolivian rural-urban migrants' citizenship, at Goldsmiths College, University of London. She has a Masters in Latin American Studies from ILAS, London, and has worked as a researcher for the human rights NGO, Rights and Humanity. In January 2003, she joined the Centre of Latin American Studies at Cambridge University as a researcher.