Rights, power and civic action: Comparative analyses of human rights-based approaches and civic struggle in development contexts

The purpose of this research is to improve our understanding of the interrelationships between human rights-based development and poverty reduction, on the one hand, and the forms and uses of power in developing societies on the other. It has a particular focus on how the empowerment of community organisations may lead to the securing of human rights and poverty reduction. Yet, although human rights-based approaches to development have been increasingly adopted in the past decade, the centrality of power dynamics to processes of securing rights has only recently been put on the research agenda. Hence, there is a need for empirical research on the detailed interaction between human rights and power in specific contexts at local and national levels and this project will to provide such empirically grounded studies. The project aims to examine and compare struggles for human rights by non-governmental actors in Cambodia, Ghana, Kenya, Nepal and Zimbabwe. It will examine the structures of power responsible f or the negation and denial of human rights, as well as how human rights-promoting organisations challenge such structures. The methodological approach is primarily qualitative, entailing in-depth studies of selected rights-promoting organisations within d istinct country contexts. Case-study countries have been selected on the basis of their differing political contexts with regard to degrees of the differential 'opportunity structures' for successful civic action. Within each country case, we focus on me mber-based social movements and non-member based advocacy NGOs, and examine their interactions with different forms of power at local and national levels in their rights-promoting efforts. The research draws on a four-fold model of power - 'power over', ' power to', 'power with' and 'power within' - which incorporates power as domination (negative power) and power as increased capacity for social and political agency (positive power).