Development, human rights, and the rights-based approach: evolving global governance

Promoting international development, and promoting human rights, would seem to be intimately connected: rights promote development, and development would seem necessary for full implementation of rights. They should be self-reinforcing. Yet for much of its history the United Nations has struggled with bringing these two priorities together. Recently, the rights-based approach (RBA) to development has begun to overcome this problem. Starting in the 1980s with the idea of governance reform, the development agencies have begun to incorporate more overtly political reforms into their mandates; this has ultimately allowed them to approach rights issues. Similarly, the rights agencies have recognized that development itself is a rights issue, and ought to be considered as such. This process has begun to solve the “wicked problem” of combining these two areas, as well as making both rights and development agencies more effective.