Human Development by Maggie Black & Arunabha Ghosh & Richard Ponzio

Author:Maggie Black & Arunabha Ghosh & Richard Ponzio [Black, Maggie & Ghosh, Arunabha & Ponzio, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: International Relations, Political Science, General, History & Theory
ISBN: 9780415483605
Google: hUtvOwAACAAJ
Goodreads: 13710678
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2012-11-12T00:00:00+00:00

5 Human development in international policy-making, Part II

Democratic governance, human rights, and peacebuilding

• Democratic governance and human rights

• Peacebuilding

• Conclusion

Similar to human development’s critical relationship with trade, water, energy, and the environment, introduced in Chapter 4, democratic governance, human rights, and peacebuilding are each fundamental to both the evolution and continued policy relevance of human development. Together, their diagnosis in connection with multiple global, regional, national, and sub-national Human Development Reports (HDRs) have steered the human development discourse from beyond its traditional moorings and comfort zone in the disciplines of development economics, sociology, and women’s studies. This chapter considers human development’s contribution to: a paradigmatic intellectual shift; an influential international policy agenda-setting role; and innovative reforms to the changing nature of democracy, human rights, and peacebuilding in global and national governance. In doing so, it seeks to demonstrate how human development has benefited from the analytical tools of political scientists, lawyers, and philosophers, thereby enriching the concept of human development and its policy relevance in global institutions.

Democratic governance and human rights

Despite successive waves of democratic development in recent decades—beginning with southern Europe in the 1970s, Latin America in the 1980s, and Eastern Europe and large parts of Asia in the 1990s—the period since 2000 has witnessed a retreat in influential policy circles about the effectiveness of democratic governance to deliver and sustain economic and social progress.1 Still, multilateral institutions, from the United Nations to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and the Organization of American States (OAS), continue to assume growing responsibilities and resources for the promotion of democracy, particularly in fragile and conflict-affected states.

Meanwhile, the UN Human Rights Commission was transformed into a new Human Rights Council in 2005, with a new set of tools and procedures to safeguard human rights internationally. However, the forces of globalization and inherent weakness in the present system of global governance introduced in Chapter 1 raise doubts about the future of democratic governance and human rights—two concepts central to the rise of human development since 1990 as a chief international policy concern.

Whereas human development involves the enlarging of people’s choices to improve the human condition, democracy involves expanding people’s choices about how and by whom they are governed. In doing so, democracy brings participation, accountability, and other principles to the process of human development. Similarly, human rights intersect with and enrich human development by safeguarding people’s political, civil, economic, social, and cultural rights. Without democratic forms of governance and the promotion of human rights, human development is more than impaired; it lacks an essential core. And without a clear embrace and progress in advancing broad human development policy priorities in both global and national governance, democratic governance and human rights cannot be sustained.

Paradigm shift?

Democracy is associated with the idea of “the will of the people,” which derives from the centuries long transition from “absolute sovereignty”—examined in Thomas Hobbes’ classic study Leviathan—to “popular sovereignty,” where the people rule themselves. State authority regulated by institutional checks and balances (constitutional authority) and democratic

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