Ignoring rights is wrong: re-politicizing gender equality and development with the rights-based approach

ABSTRACT

Corporate sponsors and humanitarian organizations have joined popular authors and international institutions in bringing attention to gender inequality though “smart economics” and “investing in women.” These social marketing messages and donor strategies mimic arguments for gender equality from the 1970s and 1980s. Rather than building on the rights-based development and best practices of the 1990s, they ignore the critical roles of political capacity and participation that the past forty years and feminist analysis of development achievements and failures have taught us are essential to taking on gender and economic inequality. Certain trends in foreign aid accountability share this silence on the importance of political capacity. In contrast, the rights-based approach to gender equality and development (RBA) is a political approach to development. We reconcile the need for aid accountability with the need for a focus on politics by outlining key political processes of the rights-based approach. The RBA is a way of doing development that is attentive to process and power. We can use the RBA not just as a guide for how to do development, but also as a way to think about processes as outcome measures. The processes that the RBA requires are processes that build capacity for marginalized women and people.

KEYWORDS:

• Women
• gender
• human rights
• rights-based approach
• foreign aid

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the reviewers and the Global Feminisms Collaborative who all gave us wonderful feedback along the way.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Anna Carella is a graduate student at Vanderbilt University. Her research interests include development theory, feminist methodologies, feminist activism and social justice. Her dissertation research focuses on the rights-based approach to development.

Brooke Ackerly’s research interests include democratic theory, feminist methodologies, human rights and social and environmental justice. She integrates her theoretical work into empirical research on activism. Her publications include Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism (Cambridge 2000), Universal Human Rights in a World of Difference (Cambridge 2008) and Doing Feminist Research with Jacqui True (Palgrave Macmillan 2010, second edition forthcoming). Just Responsibility: A Human Rights Theory of Global Justice is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. She is currently working on responsibility and climate change.

Notes

1. Feminist critics of microcredit are numerous (Ackerly 1995; Brigg 2001; D’Espallier, Guérin, and Mersland 2011). The role of microfinance in meeting the needs of the unbanked is more complicated.

2. There is often a conflation of human rights as identified in international law and the rights-based approach to development. The former are formal legal privileges. The latter is a way of doing development that is based in struggle and focused on social justice. Advocacy throughout the 1990s demonstrated the interdependence of these approaches. See also Ackerly (2001).

3. On the antiglobalization movement of the 1990s, see Eschle and Maiguashca (2010), and Tarrow (2005).

4. See Pogge (2002), Offenheiser and Holcombe (2003), Cornwall and Nyamu-Musembi (2004), Uvin (2004), Blackburn et al. (2005), Clark, Reilly, and Wheeler (2005), Cornwall and Nyamu-Musembi (2005), Nyamu-Musembi (2005), and Miller, VeneKlasen, and Clark (2005b).

5. See also Ackerly (2011), and Nash (2002).

6. See also Ackerly (2016).

7. There is some precedent for this in the literature on process evaluation, mostly in healthcare (Butterfoss 2006). The concept of “procedural utility” also captures the value of measuring process and not simply outcome, or even measuring process as outcome (Frey, Benz, and Stutzer 2004).

8. For an illustration of this approach in an evaluation, see Ackerly (2012).