Development Ethics and Human Rights as the Basis for Global Poverty Reduction

The aim of the study is to link the ‘why?’ and the ‘how?’ of aid; to critically analyze how ethics and human rights is being, and may be, used to articulate the responsibilities of development agencies and their staff so as to guide and motivate their kno wledge and policies. We take the view that development assistance should be driven by moral concerns, grounded not in charity but in justice; and that much severe poverty today may be viewed as a violation of human rights, traceable to national and global institutions which the non-poor both support and benefit from. Such an approach requires that one address questions of duties and responsibilities. Rather than taking a specific moral theory as the basis for formulating a normative distribution of respon sibilities, our aim is to examine what practices are already occurring in a selected group of development agencies and among their staff. We propose to investigate actual practices of responsibility: how moral agency, blame for harms, and ascriptions of o bligations are being distributed, hindered, or avoided. In theoretical terms, we will build in part on our earlier ('CANDID') research. (See Project Description). We will undertake this investigation in four different multilateral development agencies – World Bank, the United Nations Development Programme, the Inter-American Development Bank and the United Nations Education, Science and Culture Organisation. Our empirical research will reveal how have they sought to incorporate ethics and human rights i nto development policy and practice and what are the views in this regard of relevant individuals in diverse positions and different backgrounds within these organisations. Thus we aim to provide a geography of practices of responsibility: discursive, ins titutional and individual. This may be seen as a necessary first step for the formulation of a prescriptive division of moral labour for the eradication of poverty.