This report explores the links between risk management, rights and collective action through a set of case studies. Risk is defined here as the possibility of loss. Case studies involving elements of social mobilisation across Ecuador; Bangladesh; Brazil; South Africa and Zimbabwe demonstrate ways in which the language and practice of human rights can support better conditions for poor people to manage risks. In none of the examples is there a direct, simple link from rights to collective action. Instead, this relationship seems to be a two-way street, where, under certain conditions, rights encourage collective action and where collective action encourages governments to deliver rights.
Rights encourage collective action in two basic ways depending on whether the rights are human rights with international sanction, or if the rights are embedded in national or local rights regimes. In the first case, the institutions of the international human rights regime lack the authority of the state to enforce the fulfillment of rights. However, they are able to provide a normative framework for social movements to tap into to leverage their demands and pressure duty-bearers into respecting rights. States can use these frameworks as well to help promote a discursive shift in public opinion in relation to their own objectives.
In the second case, social, civil and political rights at the national and local level increase the incentives for individuals to mobilise to take collective action. This is particularly true for the form of collective action termed “social action” – defined as collective action at a broad scale directed towards achieving durable social change through changes in power relations and fundamental social norms. Rights like freedom of association, speech, information and non-discrimination are important enablers to encourage people to take social action.
Key Findings:
- International human rights frameworks can provide a reference point for social movements to leverage demands for public action to reduce exposure to risk (movements for reproductive rights and against domestic violence are two examples).
- At the national level a clear and consistent system of economic, social, civil and political rights is an important enabling condition for individuals to engage in collective action to manage risk. Stable frameworks of rights encourage confidence that social gains from collective action are likely to be durable, and that the process of collective action itself (particularly in the political sphere) will not place actors at risk.
- Other common dynamics in the cases studied that support a positive relationship between human rights and better policies for helping poor people manage risk include: leaders within government who adopt a language of rights to create the conditions for social and political change; and political movements, seeking electoral gains, that promote or adopt rights-based approaches to improve social policies to tap into the energy of local level collective action.
