Assessing the rights-development link

My initial interest in Human Rights and Development came from the idea of measurement: how do we measure the effectiveness of a rights-based approach to development? This was, I thought and still think, the "holy grail" of development studies: if one can really show a link between rights, civil liberties, democracy, and development, in a mathematically rigorous way, this would give a lot of impetus to the movement for RBA and the promotion of human rights across cultures. Indeed, the book manuscript I now have under review came back with a reviewer's comment that I don't consider enough the possibility that rights do NOT promote development; the reviewer clearly had China and other fast-growing Asian economies (eg Singapore, Vietnam) where there are not real civil liberties yet fast growth and good distribution of income. Its still an open question.

When I started this project, I visited the assessment people at UNDP and other agencies to look for data I could use. To some extent, I realize now, I was being naive, and getting a lot of looks that implied they thought I was a little crazy. The big problem was that I was trying to look at whether rights led to greater GDP growth; that's what I mean when I asked "does it work?" On the other hand, a lot of the UNDP and UNICEF people weren't all that concerned about economic growth; they were, following Amartya Sen I suppose, defining development as rights promotion; thus the question "does it work" related to "are we really helping people achieve their rights?" rather than is there a growth in economic activity. It might be refined a bit -- are women's incomes growing, are the incomes of marginalized groups growing? -- but the general idea was still to look beyond these measures. Yet there's an obvious problem, for wouldn't the growth of, say, women's incomes be a good indicator that women's rights were being recognized? It might or might not be that rights make people more economically successful, but surely they give people more access to the economy, and surely that has to show up in standards economic figures? So, in retrospect, I think I was probably closer to something accurate than I had at first realized.

In my manuscript I point out that this problem still bedevils UN agencies and others. One report after another about RBA, commissioned to rate project effectiveness, starts off by stating how hard it is to come up with any real figures on effectiveness. Its just too hard to say that, say, working for the rights of lower-caste people in India through legal empowerment or access to information actually leads to real results in people's lives. What do you measure, if not economic activity? And even if you show that its growing, how can you draw a clear line of causation? You can't. It would be nice to find a methodology to do so, and perhaps some sort of social controlled quasi-experimentation would work some time, but I fear I don't have the statistical skills to pull something like that off. Still, the lack of really good assessment tools would be concerning, except for the fact that no one seems that concerned. Rights are a good thing in and of themselves, of course, and you don't have to "prove" that in any traditional way. But it would be nice if you could.