Paul Nelson

The Millennium Development Goals created incentives for donors and governments to favor quick impact over addressing complex social systems. As a result, the MDG period saw little sustained effort to open up access to those productive assets, and that presents a challenge for the SDGs. This paper argues (1) that this failing of the MDGs weakened their impact; (2) that the SDGs significantly improve on this record by including goals and targets that focus on these productive assets, in both land and labor; (3) that human rights approaches have driven important efforts in some societies to improve land and labor rights; and (4) that human rights organizations and human rights methods are shaping the SDGs and their monitoring and implementation. Examining national experiences with land reform, women’s property and inheritance rights, and improved labor rights and opportunities, the paper shows that these measures have important, long-term impacts on poverty and that they are driven by ...

How do faith-based NGOs educate and mobilize their US
constituencies, beyond appealing for donations? I examine ten diverse faith-based NGOs’ presentation of advocacy on their websites, along with budget and staffing data, finding great variation in the extent of advocacy and its prominence and urgency in agencies’ websites. Some of the most extensive mobilization is
done by small Christian sects with historic commitment to social justice, non-Christian minority faiths in the US, and independent NGOs that specialize in advocacy. The religious voice on these matters is modest, with faith-based NGOs giving priority to securing financial support for material aid.

Human rights-based approaches to development have attracted practitioners' support and scholarly interest for at least 20 years. After two decades of interest, how are they being implemented? This paper is an update and re-assessment of the record of development and human rights agencies' involvement in human rights-based work on development policy. We find that some development agencies have adopted rights-based approaches and made systematic changes in practice, but the rhetoric has far exceeded substantive changes. Drawing on documentary evidence and the extensive literature, we analyze the factors constraining implementation in development agencies (political, conceptual and organizational), and document broader, more transformative changes among human rights NGOs. Their expanded work on development policy issues has featured new research and advocacy agendas, the embrace of new skill sets, significant new methodologies, and the formation of many new, specialized agencies that provide much of the dynamism in the human rights-development interactions. The findings suggest that we need a careful assessment of the extent of ''rights-based" work among development fun-ders and NGOs, and its impact; and they highlight the increasingly influential role that human rights NGOs play in framing and influencing important social, economic and environmental policies.

In this column, we argue that one crucial reason why the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have not delivered their promise is that they have not integrated the human rights approach to development that both ensures the most marginalised are incorporated into any measure of success and that governments are held accountable for their failures to make progress.

This paper examines the distinct approaches to poverty contained in the human rights movement and the Millennium Development Goals (MDG).  MDG advocates and many in the human rights community assert that the goals are consistent with, and indeed a means of operationalizing, human rights standards and principles.  This paper finds fundamental differences in the two initiatives’ conceptual approaches to poverty reduction, in the policy recommendations they support on key social policy issues, and in the social actors they have been able to mobilize.  The research is based on documentary research, and on an examination of 40 development NGOs and social movements.

A growing set of social and economic policy decisions are being taken in a global public domain in which national/transnational boundaries are blurred, and the ‘public’ domain includes a variety of non-state actors.  We argue that a new rights advocacy, advancing economic and social human rights as well as civil and political, is essential to understanding rulemaking in the global public domain.  New rights advocacy involves  traditional human rights and development NGOs as well as social movement organizations and new “hybrid” organizations in using human rights standards and methods to influence states, international organizations, and corporations; the new patterns of NGO engagement are studied here through case studies of advocacy on HIV/AIDS and on the right to water.  New rights advocacy constitutes a direct challenge to neo-liberal development orthodoxy, suggests a new, human rights interpretation of the social movements protesting globalization, and manifests a more complex relationship between NGOs and poor country governments, in which NGOs often advocate on behalf of these governments’ sovereign rights to set economic and social policy.

The growing interaction of development and human rights, especially in the work of NGOs, has important implications for NGOs, donor agencies and governments.  Three trends -- a rights-based approach to development, joint advocacy by human rights and development NGOs, and expanded attention to economic and social rights human rights groups -- are the substance of the growing interaction.  Human rights offer internationally recognized standards as benchmarks and bases for accountability of NGOs, governments, and corporations; a new source of influence for NGOs’ advocacy; and the first fundamental challenge to a market-dominated view of development that has prevailed since the 1980s.  NGOs’ efforts to link human rights and development are examined to reveal both potential and limitations.

The multilateral development banks (MDB) recognise and promote transparency as a principle of good governance. Public
release of information about policies and projects is a central aspect of this transparency, and the five MDBs studied here each adopted new policies during the 1990s to increase the accessibility of such information. The flow of information to local communities is important to the effectiveness of MDBs' social and environmental safeguards and to securing public support. But MDBs also embrace a second strategy, which sometimes conflicts with transparency: each MDB (or an affiliate) lends to private corporations as well as to member states and each bank modifies its information disclosure rules, giving corporate clients greater discretion than member governments. Environmental and social safeguards apply to corporate borrowers as well as to govemments and there is a relatively high level of controversy over corporate projects' environmental and social impact. When subjected to a qualitative review of their disclosure standards, emphasising fullness of disclosure, accessibility of information,
timeliness of information and availability of recourse, the disclosure policies of all five MDBs are clearly found to accommodate corporate confidentiality while compromising public demands for information.

The multilateral development banks (MDBs) adopted information disclosure policies in the 1990s, and four created mechanisms providing recourse for citizens affected by their activities.  This paper proposes a set of four characteristics by which information disclosure policies may be compared and assessed, emphasizing the fullness and timeliness of disclosure, accessibility of information to citizens, and existence of recourse.  The transparency and disclosure policies of the World Bank and regional development banks are found to vary in important details.  Their policies have advanced the status of transparency in development discourse and practice, and redefined relationships among MDBs, states and citizens.  At the same time they set limits that constrain transparency's significance and practice.

This paper proposes a conceptual and methodological understanding of the nature
and extent of NGO integration into state and donor systems that is based on a dynamic view of
NGOs as multidimensional organisations with financial, political, interpersonal, legal, values a
technical dimensions that vary across organisations, and produce a wide variety of interactions
with the aid industry. NGOs’ engagement with the World Bank is interpreted as a function of
the interaction of these six dimensions. Through cooperation in projects, critical advocacy and
the rapidly growing consultations on policy issues, NGOs’ engagement with the World Bank
grew rapidly in the 1980s and 1990s. After identifying some of the factors that appear to affect
whether and how an NGO is drawn into the aid system, the paper offers a set of research
questions and priorities for scholars exploring the varied and conditional ways that NGOs are
integrated into the aid system.