Development Dimension Integrating Human Rights Into Development: Donor Approaches, Experiences and Challenges

In recent years, human rights and development have been converging. Growing recognition that there are crucial links between rights violations, poverty, exclusion, environmental degradation, vulnerability and conflict has led many OECD member countries and multilateral donors to look at human rights more thoroughly as a means for improving the quality of development co-operation. Some have adopted human rights-based approaches to development, while others have preferred to integrate human rights explicitly or implicitly into various dimensions of their development work, especially into their governance agendas. This book, which is the most comprehensive and up-to-date of its kind, seeks to enhance understanding and consensus on why and how we need to work more strategically and coherently on the integration of human rights and development. It reviews the approaches of different donor agencies and their rationales for working on human rights, and identifies the current practice in this field. It illustrates how aid agencies are working on human rights issues at the programming level, and it draws together lessons that form the core of the current evidence around the added value of human rights for development. Lastly, it addresses both new opportunities and conceptual and practical challenges to human rights within the evolving development partnerships between donors and partner countries, as well as in relation to the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness as a new reference point of the international aid system. By giving numerous examples of practical approaches, this publication shows that there are various ways for donor agencies to take human rights more systematically into account - in accordance with their respective mandates, modes of engagement and comparative advantage