Test of Our Progress: The Translation of Economic and Social Rights Norms Into Practice

Abstract

The application of the language of "rights" to the economic and social conditions of the world's impoverished populations has gained a great deal of momentum in recent years. Yet, given the continuing pervasiveness of basic deprivations for the world's poor, there is a pressing need to examine precisely how economic and social rights norms (as reflected in international treaties and other multilateral documents) are translated into practices. This article seeks to synthesize the theoretical literature on economic and social rights (ESR) and to examine the variety of legal, institutional, and political mechanisms that facilitate their realization. We utilize legal, anthropological, and sociological theory to identify institutional and cultural factors that affect norm translation, as well as adaptive, processual, and emergent dynamics that may alter outcomes. In moving from theory to method, we conceptualize a number of factors that contribute to rights realization, operationalize them by describing how translation mechanisms of each might manifest in real-world settings where rights are at stake and compile a list of questions and indicators that can be used to measure them. We hope this overview will assist in expanding and enriching human rights theory, facilitate the empirical study of economic justice and thereby contribute to efforts for making economic and social rights a reality.

Human Rights Pathways to Just Sustainabilities

“…Comparative analysis allows for systematic, contextualized comparisons that create a dialogue between theory and evidence, illuminating how causal effects vary (or not) by context [69]. Use of multiple data sources permits triangulation of information and the identification of coherent patterns [70] and pathways [4,71] by which rights are realized. This is not a hypothesis-testing methodology, but a comparative search for meaningful patterns [72].…”

“…However, the SDG framework based in human rights has potential, considering its broad political legitimacy, for "nudging [development] pathways into the equitable sustainability space" [12]. Human rights, after all, are never realized simply by passing lofty declarations [4,5]. Just like the "social pillar," high-minded human rights discourses need teeth to bite.…”

“…However, law can also be contradictory, rigid, sluggish, and fragmented, and thus must be accompanied by other kinds of mechanisms to have a transformational effect. The "MAPs (mechanisms, actors and pathways) framework" [4,5] provides a means for situating human rights within the broader pursuit of transformational change (see Figure 1). In this model, change is constituted through three "moments of social transformation"-the first "in which extant social structures and macro-level processes shape actors' desires or beliefs and constrain or enable their actions;" the second, comprising "translation of desires and beliefs into action," and the third, where "actions and interactions …generate (or not) broader social change" [5] (p. 9).…”

“…Evidence from research on law and human rights in multiple countries, as well as from secondary literature, demonstrates the utility of human rights-civil, political, economic, social, and cultural rights; "solidarity rights;" intergenerational rights; and collective and "diffuse" rights-for sharpening our awareness of destructive social relations that mirror our destructive relationship with nature. Though human rights discourses and practices can be potentially conservative, as "mechanisms of social transformation" [4,5] they provide a range of critical possibilities for conceptualizing, measuring, and addressing systemic sociopolitical dimensions of sustainability. When mobilized and applied to ask penetrating questions about the ontology of social and environmental injustice, they can lay the groundwork for challenging exploitative systems and power imbalances and championing transformative scientific and socioecological priorities.…”

Water governance and social justice in São Paulo, Brazil

“…But despite the fact that law is not a panacea, one reality is inescapable for judges in the Special Environmental Chamber, "everything involves human rights… There's nothing we hear that doesn't." What that means for justice norms is that, though they have been "institutionalized" (embodied in the constitution, law, and courts), further instrumental, strategic, and discursive interventions are often necessary for them to become practices (Haglund & Aggarwal, 2011). In São Paulo, the range of instruments, both formal and informal, employed by rights-holders and advocates to hold duty-bearers to account has shifted in recent years (McAllister, 2008).…”