Linking Community Development and Human Rights

Professor Jim Ife

Centre for Human Rights Education
Curtin University of Technology
j.ife@curtin.edu.au

Community Development, Human Rights and the Grassroots Conference

Deakin University
April 2004

This paper is concerned with the two ideas of human rights and community
development. In it I will seek to describe each in terms of the other, to make a case
that each requires the other, and to establish some commonalities in theorising in
both areas.

Let us begin with human rights. One of the important aspects of human rights is that
they are linked to human responsibilities. This has been a link that many have sought
to deny or at least to minimise. For those on the political right, the idea of rights is
regarded with some suspicion if not downright hostility, unless understood within very
narrow liberal confines of individual freedom rights and property rights; anything
beyond that, such as the right to education, health, housing, employment, job
security, working conditions, income security and a clean environment sounds
dangerously like socialism. For such people, responsibilities are much more
important, and are the key to a stable society. To those in the political left, however, it
is rights that are seen as important, while the idea of responsibility sounds like
paternalism, social control and “mutual obligation” with all its punitive overtones.

This political polarisation of rights and responsibilities has meant that many people,
because of their ideological blinkers, do not treat both seriously, and choose to
concentrate on one at the expense of the other, and this has, I believe, resulted in
something of a gap in human rights theorising. Yet the connection between rights
and responsibilities is obvious. If I have a right, then that implies a responsibility on
the part of some other person, group or institution to (i) allow me the freedom to
exercise that right, (ii) provide the mechanisms to protect that right, and/or (iii) make
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positive provision so that my right can be realised. The responsibilities associated

with rights may lie with other individuals, with groups, with communities, or with
governments. For example, the right to education requires some level of state action
or policy to provide adequate educational institutions and structures, either by itself,
or to ensure that others do it. The right to freedom of expression requires not only
tolerance of diverse views in the general society, but it also imposes a responsibility
on national, state and local governments to provide the space, the forums and the
technology to ensure that the right of free expression is realised. Rights can also
impose responsibilities on the person claiming the right: the responsibility to exercise
that right, and the responsibility to do so in a responsible way. In exercising our rights
we need to do so in a way that does not violate the rights of others.

The responsibilities associated with human rights are often the most contentious part
of rights discourse. We may readily agree on statements of rights, for example as
described in the Universal Declaration, but when it comes to deciding whose
responsibility it is to ensure the protection and realisation of those rights there can be
major disagreement, for example, who should be responsible for ensuring our rights
to health care are met: the Federal Government, the State Government, the private
market, employers, the community, the family, or the individual her/himself? In reality
the answer will usually be some combination of most or all of these, but then the
question becomes what is the appropriate combination, and how much should each
contribute? Responsibilities are usually more contentious than rights, and it is
interesting to note that we seem to find it easier to draw up charters of rights than we
do charters of responsibilities. Perhaps it is more appropriate to call human rights
workers human responsibilities workers, as it is more often the responsibilities that
are in question, and that need to be established.

The necessary link between rights and responsibilities is the first indication that
community might be important in human rights. The strict individualist notion of rights
– “my rights” – makes no sense. A sole individual on a desert island has no rights –
because there is nobody to recognise them and to accept the responsibilities that
flow from them. Rights require some sort of group, community, collective or society,
which is held together by a series of interlocking and reciprocal rights and
responsibilities. For this reason it is better to talk about “our rights” rather than the
more traditional western liberal notion of “my rights”.
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There is another way in which human rights imply community. One of the
responsibilities that attaches to a right is the responsibility to exercise that right.
There is no point in having the right to freedom of expression, or the right to
education, or the right to vote, or the right to join a trade union, if nobody bothers to
exercise that right. Indeed, every time we choose not to exercise a right we betray
those in previous generations who have fought (and sometimes died) in order to
establish that right. Sometimes it may be appropriate to do so, for example the
decision not to join a trade union that is corrupt and exploitative, or the decision to
vote informal when presented with a choice between corrupt candidates. But these
are deliberate informed choices not to exercise a right, rather than the apathetic
response of those who couldn’t be bothered. A society that respects and values
human rights is one where people are encouraged to exercise their rights, and
accept a responsibility to do so where they can. This is an active participatory
society, that requires citizens to be active contributors rather than passive
consumers; and the promotion of such a participatory society has long been the
agenda of community development.

Human rights, in my view, are constructed rather than naturally occurring in some
positivist sense. They are constantly being constructed and reconstructed, and do
not remain static. Inevitably constructions of human rights will vary according to the
standpoint of the constructor, and will be affected by culture, class, gender, race and
personal experience. I will discuss the construction of human rights in more detail
later, but for the present the important point is that if human rights are constructed,
we must ask who does the constructing? Whose definitions of human rights
predominate?

One of the problems with conventional human rights discourse is that human rights
are typically defined by the powerful on behalf of the powerless. The long-standing
criticism has been that human rights were largely defined by white western males,
however while this is still to some extent the case, is now being assiduously
addressed in the literature and the broader human rights discourse. Women’s voices,
and voices from a variety of cultural backgrounds, are now present in the human
rights literature, and that literature is richer as a consequence. But this has blinded us
to a more insidious form of domination of the human rights discourse. The voices that
define human rights are still the voices of relative privilege: for the most part it is
lawyers, politicians and academics, with a few key activists (e.g. from Amnesty
International) and journalists, who have the power to define and institutionalise
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human rights. Those voices are no longer exclusively male or western, but they do
not reflect the general population even of the developed world, let alone the poor of
the “less developed” world. We may be addressing issues of gender and race, but we
have not really begun to address issues of class. Human rights thus remains a
discourse of the powerful about the powerless, and in that sense it itself constitutes a
human rights abuse. It represents a privileged view of human rights, and however
well-intentioned that may be, it will not reflect the views of the majority world. Johan
Galtung has pointed out, for example, the absence in any of the UN human rights
documents of the right of access to a toilet; something so taken for granted by the
people who write human rights treaties that they do not bother to include it, and do
not stop to realise that for millions of people in the “less developed” world the lack of
this basic right is demeaning and a source of shame – there are stories, for example,
of women in India having to wait until nightfall so they can perform bodily functions
with at least some degree of modesty and dignity. This, and other basic rights, will
continue to be omitted from human rights discourse until a greater range of the
world’s population have the opportunity to access and affect that discourse.

This points to the need for a more bottom-up participatory and developmental
approach to the construction of what constitute our basic human rights, and this is
surely a community development agenda. It is another example of how human rights
implies and needs a community development approach. The idea of “human rights
from below” is completely foreign for the majority of lawyers, journalists, politicians
and academics who write and talk about human rights; for them it remains
exclusively a top-down perspective. This is beginning to change, and voices “from
below” are starting to make themselves heard, not just in demanding their own rights
(this has a long history, of course) but in defining what those rights ought to be and
how they should be expressed. But there is a long way to go. The human rights field,
in my view, desperately needs the wisdom and expertise of community development
workers.

So much for the ways in which human rights need community development. The
other side, how community development needs human rights, is probably more
familiar territory. It is derived from the potential danger of community development
that is undertaken in a moral vacuum, and that sees its role as helping a community
to articulate where it wants to go, and then helping it to get there; even though where
the community wants to go may be racist, exclusive or violent. Similarly, valuing a
community’s heritage – another traditional and important aspect of community
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development – may be valuing a heritage of bigotry, domestic violence or

homophobia. Perhaps the most extreme form of community development that does
not take human rights into account is seen in the Hitler Youth, a highly “successful”
program in terms of getting young people involved and giving them a sense of
direction and purpose; all the key performance indicators of participation could surely
be ticked off. But it was also part of one of the most hideous regimes in the world’s
recent history. This single example – there are many others – serves to emphasise
how important a human rights framework is for community development. Community
development must respect, protect and realise human rights, and so it needs to be
understood from a human rights perspective, just as human rights need to be
understood from a community development perspective.

The argument thus far has made a fairly simple and obvious point: human rights and
community development are closely related, and each needs to incorporate the
perspective of the other. This can be illustrated further by a linguistic similarity.
Community development sees its goal as the establishment of human community,
while human rights emphasises the goal of achieving a common humanity. The two
terms are both linguistically and semantically similar, if not synonymous.

This raises some important questions for both theory and practice. I will not dwell too
much on practice, as this was the topic of a paper I gave recently at another
conference in Melbourne, and as some of the same people may be here today I do
not want to waste their time by covering the same ground, and I do not want to be
accused of making one paper serve two purposes. I will make some comments at the
end of the paper about practice, but these will be brief and rather different from the
paper I gave at RMIT. But prior to that I want to consider some questions of theory.

The traditional view of human rights divides the field into three so-called
“generations”, civil and political rights, economic social and cultural rights, and
collective rights. The first two are reflected in the UN International Covenants, and
are essentially a legacy of cold war thinking. The west (especially the USA) was
happy to emphasise a rather narrow view of civil and political rights but was never
too enthusiastic about economic social and cultural rights, as these sounded
dangerously collectivist and socialist. By contrast, the Soviet bloc emphasised
economic social and cultural rights for all, but was highly suspicious of the
individualism and western liberalism inherent in civil and political rights. However the
political imperative in the aftermath of the horrors of World War 2 was strong enough
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to require both sides to reach some sort of consensus on human rights, so this dual
classification was established, and remains enshrined in UN documents to this day.
Later, this classification was criticised, particularly by Asian leaders (especially East
Asian and South-East Asian), who claimed that the conventional view of human
rights was, because of its Western Enlightenment origins, too individualistic, and
denied the legitimacy of other cultures which had a more collective tradition. While
some of this was no more than blatant political self-justification by repressive leaders,
using the West’s readiness to feel guilt about being “culturally insensitive” as a way of
blunting criticism, there was also some legitimacy to the claim, and it forced western
human rights advocates to admit their cultural bias and to add a third category, or
generation, of so-called “collective rights”. Thus the three “generations” of human
rights roughly equate to human rights as defined by the “first world”, the “second
world” and the “third world”. This division of the world may once have approximated
reality, but does not bear much relevance to the contemporary world, whish is more
complex and fluid. The three generations of human rights may have been fine when
the world, like Caesar’s Gaul, could be divided into three parts, but in the world of
postmodernity, where the contemporary Roman Empire, the USA, has effectively
conquered Gaul rendering the three parts redundant, perhaps we also need a more
sophisticated understanding of human rights as well as of international relations.

The creation of a separate category of collective rights, the “third generation”

designed to include more collective cultural traditions, is both misleading and
inconsistent. It implies that those rights in the first two categories, civil and political
rights, and economic social and cultural rights, are all individual rights which need to
be juxtaposed with a third category of collective rights. However I would argue that
there are collective and individual dimensions to all rights, and that the first two
“generations” of rights can be understood both individually and collectively. The right
of freedom of expression, for example, has a collective aspect when we consider the
right of Indigenous People to be heard. As another example, the right to education
applies to groups as well as individuals, as in the historical struggle for women to
achieve the right to an equal education with men. The right to health care is
understood collectively when we think of the scandalous state of Indigenous health,
and the right of Indigenous People to adequate health care at all levels. Rights
understood only at an individual level tell only part of the story, and of course they
depoliticise the problem by locating the right with the individual and thereby placing
the onus on the individual to claim that right. Collective understandings of rights,
however, can open up more uncomfortable political questions, as they can locate the
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responsibility elsewhere. This is not to say that individual understandings of rights are
invalid – on the contrary, they are very important. But they are only one side of
human rights. And to think that collective understandings only apply to the so-called
“third generation” rights, or that they only apply in countries with more Confucian
cultural traditions, is misleading. So I have suggested that we do away with the third
generation, which separates apparently “collective” rights into a separate category
implying that other rights are only individual, and instead that we insist that all human
rights have both individual and collective dimensions, and then think about what that
means.

We also need to apply the same reasoning to the other side of the equation, namely
responsibilities, and to insist that there should be both individual and collective
understandings of responsibilities, duties or obligations. Responsibilities do not lie
only with individuals, but to say this does not invalidate any notion of individual
responsibility. Across both the rights and responsibilities dimensions, therefore, we
can consider the relative place of individual and collective understandings. Here we
are inevitably affected in our analysis by ideological factors, and different ideologies
or value systems will suggest that the balance between individual and collective
rights and responsibilities be understood in different ways. This can be seen, perhaps
simplistically, in the following diagram, using a simple 2 by 2 matrix to identify four
traditions of the relationship of individual and collective rights and responsibilities:

Figure 1: Rights and Responsibilities: Individual and Collective

Rights

Individual Collective

Individual LIBERAL CONFUCIAN

Responsibilities/
Duties
Collective SOCIALIST COMMUNITARIAN

The dominant human rights discourse in western societies such as Australia has of
course been that of liberalism, emphasising individual rights and individual
responsibilities, in the process devaluing both collective rights and collective
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responsibilities. But it is only one cell of the matrix, and the other three also have
legitimate claims on our practice: the socialist tradition which seeks to articulate the
collective responsibility for the meeting of individual need, the Confucian tradition
where the individual has duties to contribute and it is the collective whole that has the
right and is seen to benefit, and the communitarian tradition seeking to understand
both rights and responsibilities collectively. The dominance of the liberal discourse
has given the west a somewhat limited view of human rights, which has limited both
theory and practice, and this suggests that an important task is to emphasise the
collective aspects of both rights and responsibilities, to move beyond traditional
conservative western formulations, and understand human rights and responsibilities
across all four of the cells of the matrix, recognising the importance of both the
individual and the collective, and the relationships between them. Community
development, of course, stands for just such a project, as it seeks to emphasise our
common experiences in community, and to emphasise that it is only through an
enriched experience of community that we can hope to achieve our full humanity.

In this way, we can see that community development has an important role to play
across the whole spectrum of human rights, and not merely with the so-called “third
generation” rights. Indeed, if it is true that it is only in community that we can realise
our human rights, as I have suggested above, then community development workers
are also human rights workers. This places community development in a far more
central position in the human rights field, a place traditionally occupied by lawyers.
The role that lawyers have played, and continue to play, in human rights activism is
obviously important, indeed essential. But the dominance of the law in human rights
discourse has led to a narrow view of human rights, has emphasised those rights that
can be most readily protected or realised through legal structures and processes,
and has led us to believe that it is primarily through the law that human rights work
can take place. Human rights, in my view, involve all aspects of our humanity, and
involve everything we do in interaction with other human beings. No single discipline
or profession can hope to cover this vast field, and clearly a multidisciplinary
approach is required, including, but not privileging, the law. But if we take the view of
human rights that I have been suggesting, community development must, by
definition, play a central role.

The view of human rights I have discussed so far is much broader than the idea of
human rights portrayed by the dominant discourse, namely civil and political rights,
understood largely individually. To emphasise this, I believe it is useful not only to
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eliminate the idea of collective rights as a separate category, but also to look further
at the other two generations, in particular the so-called “second generation”,
economic social and cultural rights. I see no particular reason why these three should
be grouped together, as social rights, economic rights and cultural rights are distinct
categories, each with different characteristics and raising different questions. To
group them together like this devalues their significance and their distinct differences.
In addition, the dominant discourse of economic rationalism can lead to an
assumption that economic rights are the most important, and social and cultural
rights are thereby devalued if they are included in the same category. In my own
reworking of human rights, therefore, I separated economic rights, social rights and
cultural rights, and I further drew a distinction between survival rights (shelter, food,
health, etc), which are commonly classed within “social rights” and the other social
rights, such as the rights to have children, form relationships, choice of family,
recreation, etc. To these I then added yet another category, namely spiritual rights,
as I considered that for many people it is inadequate to cover them solely within the
framework of cultural rights, as many understandings of the spiritual extend well
beyond the cultural. Finally, I added environmental rights, traditionally understood as
within the third generation of collective rights, but needing a category of their own.

Of course such categorisation has its problems, as the boundaries between them
may seem to be rigid and impermeable, when of course we need to understand it in a
much more fluid way. Let’s not make the mistake of simply dividing Gaul into seven
parts rather than three; we need to look also at how the seven interact, overlap and
reinforce each other.However such categories can be useful for extending our
thinking, and giving us a new construction that in turn invites further deconstruction
and reconstruction. I have used this taxonomy with groups as a framework for
workshops on understanding human rights, and have found it very successful. But
the point for our present purposes is the discovery that the list of rights categories I
had come up with was, with the exception of survival rights, identical to the list I had
come up with some years earlier in seeking to conceptualise community
development, namely social, economic, political, cultural, environmental, and
personal/spiritual. Starting at a very different point I had, quite unintentionally, ended
up with an almost identical framework for understanding human rights. This further
suggests that the commonalities between human rights and community development
are worth exploration. Examination of both human rights and community
development in these different domains, and an analysis of how they relate to each
other, could represent a powerful framework for theoretical development.
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There is another way in which community development and human rights can come
together at a theoretical level. This can be seen by identifying two dimensions which
are important both for community development theory and for human rights theory.
One of these dimensions is the one familiar to all community workers, namely the
contrast between working “from above” and “from below”, alternatively known as “top
down” and “bottom up” development. It also relates to our assumptions about social
class, and emphasises the importance of class analysis in community work, as
community development is all too often imposed on the less privileged and the
powerless by the privileged and the powerful. Similarly, it can emphasise the
importance of a gender analysis, as “top down” work is characteristically patriarchal,
while a more feminist approach is likely to be more “bottom up”. In this form,
community development simply reinforces class and/or gender oppression, and is all
the more insidious because it appears so benign. Progressive community
development theory naturally favours the approach from below, although as we know
many government programs assume the a top-down formula, with ideas of expertise,
planning, specified objectives, and accountability upwards, causing a major dilemma
for community workers.

The other dimension is that of working “from outside” or “from inside”, or external and
internal community work. This is often equated with “from above” and “from below”,
but for analytical purposes it is important to separate these. Community development
that is from within the community itself can still be from above, where that
development is initiated and controlled by community elites, potentially working in the
interests of those elites rather than the community as a whole, as is the case with
some Local Government community work, for example. And, similarly, community
development may be initiated externally, but can be “from below”, examples being
the programs of international NGOs such as Oxfam/Community Aid Abroad, or
community workers coming from outside the community but using a specifically
Gandhian perspective of working with the poorest of the poor. The two dimensions
are therefore different. Working from above risks reinforcing class oppression, while
working from outside risks colonialist practice.

The two dimensions can be combined in a table, classifying different approaches to

community development, as follows:
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Figure 2: Dimensions of Community Development

External Internal
Colonial Indigenous

Traditional
From development models Community elites
above

From NGOs e.g. Local

below Oxfam/CAA grassroots

Community development literature tends to criticise the top left model, and seeks to
move the discourse of practice into one of the other cells of the diagram. While the
ideal may well be seen as the bottom right cell, this may often be unrealistic given
various constraints, and the hope is often to move to it via either the top right or
bottom left cells, depending on the nature of the power analysis that we might
undertake. Sometimes there are simply not the resources or community resilience or
confidence to start working immediately in the bottom-right cell, and other
approaches are required, at least initially. This table, however, can assist in
identifying the potential dangers of class or gender oppression, and of colonialist
practice.

These two dimensions are also important when we consider human rights. Top-down
approaches are where human rights are defined by opinion leaders, politicians,
media, laws, UN declarations or other dominant discourses, whereas bottom-up
approaches are where people are involved in constructing ideas of human rights for
themselves. I have termed these the discursive and reflexive approaches to human
rights, and they are analogous to community development practised from above or
from below. The other dimension, which might be called the colonial/indigenous
dimension, has long been important in human rights, and expresses the debate and
conflict over cultural relativism and the imposition of human right standards from
outside, usually from Western Enlightenment perspectives which do not always
resonate with other cultural and intellectual traditions. Here a similar table can be
drawn:
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Figure 3: Dimensions of Human Rights

External Internal
Colonial Indigenous

From Traditional HR Traditional

above declarations, laws, etc structures

From
below NGOs e.g. Amnesty Local
International grassroots

These dimensions, then, can be shown to have a relevance for both human rights
and community development, and represent another convergence between the two
at a theoretical level. A further point of convergence is around globalisation.
Community development has not only been affected by globalisation, as in the
attempts to develop some form of community practice involving globalisation from
below, but it also has become a point of resistance to the forces of globalisation,
given the reaction of localisation and the renewed interest in developing local
community-based structures as people feel increasingly by-passed by the global
economy and the global culture. Similarly, human rights also stands against the
current form of globalisation. Though it is by its very nature a global discourse, the
idea of human rights has been central to the arguments of the anti-globalisation
protesters, who claim with justification that globalisation violates human rights.
Indeed, human rights represent one of the few legitimate discourses of opposition to
the dominant discourse of economic rationalism and global capitalism; the idea
resonates strongly with many people, suggesting a perspective that privileges human
values over economic values, and the interests of a wider humanity over the interests
of powerful elites; for this reason if for no other, human rights is a critically important
discourse for our times.

However this convergence between community development and human rights is not
always evident in the reality of practice. Those who call themselves human rights
workers or human rights activists overwhelmingly use an advocacy model, to the
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extent that some people even seem to equate human rights work with advocacy. This
is, perhaps, a legacy of the legal domination of human rights discourse. Advocacy, of
course, is important, but if human rights are to be about reaching our full human
potential, and respecting each other’s rights by fulfilling our responsibilities, more
than advocacy is required. Indeed, advocacy alone represents a somewhat
conservative and top-down view of human rights, as it assumes that the rights are
protected and provided by the powerful, and advocacy directed towards the powerful
is what is required if our rights are to be realised. This does not take into account
ideas of human rights from below, as being constructed not merely by dominant
discourses of power, but also as being reflexively constructed in our daily human
interactions with each other. Human rights work requires the range of roles and skills
that community workers have developed, of which advocacy is only one, and not
always the most appropriate for helping people, groups, communities and institutions
to identify and enact their mutual rights and responsibilities. Other community work
roles and skills include facilitation, education, communication, consciousness raising,
organising, building solidarity, inclusiveness, and activism. Here community
development has quite a bit to teach human rights. Similarly, there are some
principles of human rights practice that are important for community development.
These include an analysis of rights and responsibilities, non-violence, the use of legal
conventions, processes and institutions.

Community development can be a basis for human rights work, and human rights
can be a basis for community development, and as each is explored in relation to the
other, the boundaries between them become blurred. Whether they are actually the
same thing, or closely related ideas that are part of some larger project, is a question
we could debate. It may be that a human rights base for community development
blinds us to other important community development dimensions, and it may be that
a community development approach to human rights similarly limits human rights
work. I do not want to pursue the analysis any further, because that is really the task
of this important conference, and it can only be achieved by sharing the extensive
knowledge, wisdom and experience represented among the participants. I have tried
to draw some parallels between the two, as I have myself become increasingly aware
of many points of commonality, but it is up to all of us in the coming days to work out
together what it all might mean.