Food for thought for friend and foe
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THE ROLE OF HUMAN RIGHTS IN POLITICIZING DEVELOPMENT ETHICS,
DEVELOPMENT ASSISTANCE AND DEVELOPMENT PRAXIS:
The vast majority of humanity just has the right to see, to hear and
to remain silent. (Eduardo Galeano)
Part (1)
A touch of history:
1. The newly emerging Human Rights framework in development work
comes as a revindication to old time radicals who have been advocat-
ing and fighting for a more political approach to the 'maldevelop-
ment' the second half of the 20th century has witnessed.
2. Gone are the heydays of Latinamerican revolutionary fervor and of
African Socialism, of President Allende's Unidad Popular and of
President Nyerere's Arusha Declaration and Ujamaa. But the role of an
avant-garde remains the same: to cause fermentation. (1)
3. Historically, countries in the South first saw the arrival of
Northern-led infrastructure/public works builders who attempted to
set up the backbone of Third World economies. Then, in the 1970's,
came basic human needs backers who attempted to provide people with
their bare-bones necessities for survival. Now, we have the greens
reminding us of the environmental limits of development. But, so far,
these approaches only weakly touched the political dimension, failing
to tackle it as the principal stumbling block to genuine people's de-
velopment.
4. I have personally been a witness to this snail-paced process of
politicization of development work; I have seen it evolve in slow,
incremental steps over a period of roughly 25 years. My experience
has mostly been in the field of nutrition.
5. My journey started with the rise and fall of the 'Food and Nutri-
tion Planning' era from 1974 on. At the time, many of us critiqued
that newfound panacea to solve the problems of malnutrition in the
world. (2) It eventually died a quiet death. Systems analysis tech-
niques and models, devoid of a political vision/perspective, simply
led to a dead end alley. It took us years to figure that out.
6. Furthering the fight for a more genuine grassroots development, a
second breakthrough, to me, came in 1984. At that time, the first
steps were taken in coming up with what later became the 'Conceptual
Framework of the Causes of Malnutrition' with its different levels of
causality. (3) The accompanying AAA approach (assess-
ment/analysis/action) came as a consequent companion to such a causal
analysis. It called for the entire AAA process to be carried out by
the beneficiaries themselves. [The AAA approach contended that only
when those living in poverty are understood to be the most effective
analysts of their own problems and agents of their own solutions, is
it possible to formulate effective and sustainable interventions.
(4)].
7. As is now well known, the Conceptual Framework's basic causes fo-
cus more proactively on the people's access-to and control-over the
resources they need to develop and on the structural underpinnings of
underdevelopment. The Conceptual Framework/AAA approach thus repre-
sents the acceptance of a dialectical approach that looks at the ma-
jor and minor contradictions in society that result in worldwide ill-
health and malnutrition of women and children as an outcome. The
adoption of this approach was, therefore, a step towards further
politicization of the development paradigm. It called for a dialecti-
cal unity of knowledge and action. (5)
8. In 1990, the Conceptual Framework/AAA approach actually became
UNICEF's flagship approach to solving the problems of malnutrition
the world over. For a long period thereafter, the international pub-
lic nutrition community got side-tracked and concentrated mostly on
acting on the underlying causes of malnutrition insisting though that
each of them (food, health and care) was necessary, but not suffi-
cient. Not surprisingly, such a shortcut approach ended up being "too
timid and too narrow". (4) Again, it took us years to figure that
out. In a way, this was a comparable phenomenon to that which, a dec-
ade earlier chose reductionistic approaches to PHC such as GOBI or
GOBI/FF (growth monitoring, oral rehydration salts, breastfeeding,
immunizations, food security and family planning) that led us only
half-way to 'Health For All 2000'. [Moreover, a sizable portion of
the world's nutrition community got more heavily involved in the
micronutrients field -and away from the Protein-Energy Malnutrition
field-- which also de-emphasized the political aspects of combating
malnutrition. (6)].
9. Roughly ten years after the Conceptual Framework/AAA approach was
launched, came the (complementary) 'Human Rights Approach' encompass-
ing: - A revival of the role of the Civil, Political, Economic, So-
cial and Cultural Rights in development work, - A drive to explicit
'poverty redressal objectives' in development work making it para-
mount that we need to work with the poor as protagonists, and - A
further bid to more concretely operationalize the newly approved
rights such as those enshrined in the Convention on the Elimination
of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), the Convention
on the Right of the Child (CRC), the Right to Food, and the (upcom-
ing) Right to Development.
Claudio Schuftan
Hanoi, Vietnam
mailto:aviva@netnam.vn
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