ABSTRACT
For a long time human rights and international development ‘lived in splendid isolation’ (Uvin 2004: 1), remaining within the respective academic domains of lawyers and development studies specialists, notably economists. In the mid to late 1990s, however, a convergence of human rights norms and strategic thinking about development occurred, and human rights-based approaches to development emerged in which the objective of development became the realization of human rights (Uvin 2004, ch. 6; Gready and Ensor 2005). Often referred to simply as rights-based approaches, the ‘rise of rights’ within international development has been well documented (Eyben 2003; Molyneux and Lazar 2003, ch. 1; Uvin 2004), inclusive of the historical and contextual factors that accounted for the emergence of ‘rights-based development’ (Cornwall and NyamuMusembi 2005: 11-14; Gready and Ensor 2005: 14-28; Mitlin and Hickey 2009: 3-8). By the late 1990s and early 2000s, human rights-based approaches were being adopted enthusiastically by many international development NGOs, notably ActionAid, Save the Children, Oxfam and Care International, as well as by a number of official governmental and intergovernmental development agencies, for instance the UK Department for International Development (DFID), Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA), United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF ) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) (Cornwall and Nyamu-Musembi 2004: 1425-1430; Piron 2005; Darrow and Tomas 2005: 480-481). In addition, human rights-based approaches have been adopted by local NGOs and social movements (Miller 2010: 916).
