I'm finishing an article now on "Headwinds and Tailwinds for the Rights-Based Approach for Development." I'm trying to summarize some of the factors in favor of RBA and some against. In favor are the normative argument that a rights-development link is the "right thing to do"; the still-shaky argument that RBA is more effective than other approaches; the support of the UN and its agencies; and a few other things. Against are institutional inertia (as agencies want to continue "business as usual"; state pressure, from states that don't like being lectured to about human rights; lack of evidence of effectiveness; and traditional sovereignty rules.
One thing this has me thinking about is norm "evasion", as my colleague Zoltan Buzas likes to put it: states that pretend to adhere to letter of international norms, but also try to avoid the spirit of the norm. I think there is a lot of that here: no one wants to say "we oppose a rights-based approach," but there are ways to avoid its spirit. Primarily this means repackaging traditional development approaches as RBA; for example, to continue to emphasize growth in export sectors and repackage this as empowering workers; or to keep with traditional health initiatives and repackage them as guaranteeing "a right to health".
This raises an interesting IR theory question: is it a "norm" if states don't adhere to it? I'm sorting through that, too, right now. How many states have to accept it before its a norm? I realize this isn't a new question, but I do think its one that is getting ignored too much. Most of what I've read is on the systemic level: how do we know the system has accepted a norm? But it rarely asks how many individual states need to adhere...its always about collective data. Keep an eye out for the article, hopefully I'll have some answers by the time I submit it!
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