- Surrey Research Insight Open Access
A Comparative Study of Representations of the Deployment of Human Rights by NGOs in West Bengal and London: a focus on agency and women’s human rights by
Nicole Boyce
Submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Department of Sociology
Faculty of Arts and Human Sciences
Supervisors: Christine Hine and Roberta Guerrina
©Nicole Boyce 2014
Declaration
This thesis and the work to which it refers are the results of my own efforts. Any ideas, data, images or text resulting from the work of others (whether published or unpublished) are fully identified as such within the work and attributed to their originator in the text, bibliography or in footnotes. This thesis has not been submitted in whole or in part for any other academic degree or professional qualification. I agree that the University has the right to submit my work to the plagiarism detection service TurnitinUK for originality checks. Whether or not drafts have been so-assessed, the University reserves the right to require an electronic version of the final document (as submitted) for assessment as above.
Nicole Boyce
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Abstract
This thesis explores the operationalisation of Human Rights at a grassroots level by
NGOs. Specifically, it presents a comparative study of how activists in samples of
NGOs in West Bengal and London framed their experiences of implementing human rights and development principles, focusing on characterisations of the deployment of human rights in programmes targeted at women beneficiaries.
This thesis contributes to a growing literature on tensions between human rights as a universal ethical framework and situated experiences of social activism. It advances knowledge in the burgeoning field of cross-cultural feminism within the wider debate of social inequalities. It draws in Fricker’s work on epistemic injustice to enrich our understanding of this conversation. It examines activists’ accounts of how this abstract framework is implemented on the ground. The thesis explores how NGOs’ perceptions of local economic, cultural and social forces have influenced characterisations of their deployment of the human rights framework.
This thesis analyses two linked datasets. The first is drawn from publicly accessible websites of a sample of NGOs in West Bengal and London, and was analysed using a text-mining application. The second dataset comprises interviews with activists from subsamples of NGOs in both countries. An analysis of the research materials identified commonalities underlying the activists’ accounts of their work.
In this study, two taxonomies were developed through an iterative process of grounded analysis and comparison with the literature to capture the similarities and contrasts within the research materials.
The first taxonomy was constructed to describe social activists ’ perceptions of their ability to deploy the human rights framework. A second taxonomy was developed to describe different orientations towards the deployment of women’s human rights.
These taxonomies formed analytic frameworks framed by activists’ different perceptions of the ability to engage with human rights and women’s human rights frameworks.
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Acknowledgements
During my years researching the deployment of human rights I have learnt that the thesis is just one outcome of the learning process. The PhD becomes an intellectual journey characterised by episodes of enlightenment. I have benefitted enormously from the support, guidance and insight from Dr Christine
Hine, my principle supervisor. In addition, I received invaluable feedback from
Dr Ann Cronin and Dr Roberta Guerrina who acted as supervisors at various times during my course of study.
I am also very grateful to my husband, Dr Raymond Boyce, who provided unstinting and patient moral support during each stage of the thesis. I am indebted to the activists in the NGOs in my case studies who generously gave their time to speak to me about the work of their organisations. I am also grateful to the Government Department at LSE for allowing me to attend supervisory sessions as part of my personal development plan.
I would like to express appreciation of the advice, encouragement and support I received from colleagues in the Government Department, LSE, at various stages of my research, especially Mansoor Mirza, Dr David Rampton, Professor
John Sidel and Dr Jill Stuart.
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CONTENTS
................................................................... 27
CHAPTER THREE: WOMEN’S HUMAN RIGHTS: THEORETICAL DEBATES ................................. 71
CHAPTER FIVE – ANALYSIS OF VISION AND MISSION STATEMENTS .................................... 124
1) .......................................... 129
........................................... 132
................................... 141
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CHAPTER SEVEN: DEPLOYMENT OF WOMEN’S HUMAN RIGHTS ........................................ 212
C OMPONENT 1: G OVERNMENTS ’ F AILURE IN THEIR D UTY TO P ROTECT W OMEN AGAINST V IOLATIONS . 214
C OMPONENT 3: G ENDER R ESPONSIBILITIES AND R IGHTS : F OCUS ON E CONOMIC E MPOWERMENT ........ 231
............................................................................ 243
............................. 246
............................................... 246
CHAPTER EIGHT: CONCLUSIONS AND AREAS FOR FURTHER STUDY .................................... 254
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LIST OF TABLES
Table 1-2: Summary of the Taxonomy of the Deployment of Human Rights ....................... 18
Table 1-3: Summary of the Taxonomy of the Deployment of Women’s Human Rights ...... 18
Table 4-1: To Show the Major UN Development Programme Indices ................................ 105
Table 6-1: A Taxonomy of the Deployment of Human Rights and Agency ......................... 206
Table 7-1: A Taxonomy of the Deployment of Women’s Human Rights Agency ............... 248
Table 8-2: Taxonomy of the Deployment of Women’s Human Rights Outline .................. 256
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 5-3: To Show Relative Size of classes (London) (from the Alceste Report) ............. 145
LIST OF ACRONYMS
Alceste Analyse des Lexèmes Co-occurents dans les Énnoncés Simples d’un Texte
CEDAW Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women
ECU Elementary Context Unit (in Alceste)
ICU Initial Context Unit (in Alceste)
IMF International Monetary Fund
INGO International Non-Governmental Organisation
MDGs Millennium Development Goals
NGO Non-Governmental Organisation
UN United Nations
UNDR Universal Declaration of Human Rights
WHO World Health Organisation
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1. Chapter One: Introduction
This thesis examines the role of NGOs in promoting the implementation of the human rights and women’s human rights agendas in local settings. The thesis contributes to the growing body of multidisciplinary work on gender, human rights and civil society. It informs specific discourses in the global literature focused on the sociology of human rights and cross-cultural feminism. Using a case study approach, this thesis will develop taxonomies of the different ways in which social activists drawn from a sample of NGOs in West Bengal and London describe the relevance of human rights and women ’s human rights to the work of their organisations. The thesis explores a relatively undeveloped area regarding the operationalisation of the human rights and women’s human rights frameworks in local contexts. It does so by examining activists’ representations of how these frameworks are deployed in different situated local contexts and their perceptions of the challenges to desired action.
1.1. Research Question
The main question this project seeks to answer is: how do social activists working in
NGOs characterise their operationalisation of abstract human rights principles at the grassroots level? This thesis focuses on comparing activists’ accounts of their orga nisations’ deployment of human rights in two countries at different stages of development. The objective is to examine commonalities and differences in depicted approaches to the implementation of these principles. A supplementary objective is to explore whether these commonalities and differences can be classified according to underlying perceptions of the socio-economic context of local environments. The research question also seeks to explore how activists describe their organisations’ implementation of women’s human rights. This thesis uses women’s human rights as a lens to bring to life the cultural complexities involved in the implementation of a political struggle. The Office for the High
Commissioner for Human Rights suggests that The Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) is considered to be the international bill of rights with women.
1 CEDAW reflects the fact that women and girls often face specific forms of gender-based inequalities. The focus on women’s human rights
1 See, for example, the Office for the High Commissioner’s site at: http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/Women/WRGS/Pages/WRGSIndex.aspx
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allows the research question to be addressed more fully by incorporating a deeper understanding of the relationship between activists’ representations of perceptions of agency and desired action.
The thesis builds on qualitative data to form a picture of the operationalisation of human rights and women’s human rights. There were two taxonomies that emerged from the analysis of the empirical data. The first taxonomy describes the relationship between activists’ perceptions of local socio-economic contexts and their representations of the function of human rights in their work. The second taxonomy describes the same relationship in relation to the function of women’s human rights in their work. The components within each of the taxonomies expand the body of knowledge about agency in contexts depicted as oppressive. The thesis achieves this by delineating different responses to situated challenges portrayed in activists’ accounts. The objective of the project is not to produce statistically significant empiric al results but rather to map a territory of activists’ accounts of the deployment of human rights by building on qualitative data. In addition to the academic contribution offered by the analysis, policy-makers, working in the area of human rights and wome n’s human rights could potentially also be informed by the conclusions of the analysis. The thesis demonstrates how situated experiences of socio-economic structures are represented as shaping activists’ perceptions of the ability to operationalise the human rights framework. The major research question focuses around accounts of the deployment of human rights and women’s human rights. It is important to be clear what features in situated experiences were perceived to be significant in relation to NGOs’ ability to operationalise these frameworks. The next section of this chapter will therefore explore the precise methodology used to explore the accounts of the deployment of the frameworks showing what features were identified as being significant before moving on to demonstrate that these were perceived as influencing activists’ accounts of organisations’ ability to operationalise the frameworks human rights and women’s human rights principles.
There were two empirical phases to the research. In the first phase, a sample of publicly accessible websites of NGOs in West Bengal and London was selected.
This produced a set of relatively well-rehearsed vision and mission statements. A text-mining package was used to analyse these statements through an identification
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of clusters of statements which showed a statistically significant degree of similarity at the lexical level. It was concluded that the analysis report produced a classification structure which was meaningful in terms of different approaches to human rights themes. In the second stage, activists from a sample of organisations derived from the first stage participated in semi-structured interviews. The interviews were conducted to explore the results of the analysis report for each of the main themes within the classifications in more depth. The empirical analysis was conducted in two phases using a mixed methods approach. Table 1-1 below provides a summary of the key stages of the results in terms of case studies, research materials and the analysis used in the two empirical phases.
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Table 1-1: To Show the Two Empirical Phases of the Research
Phase NGOs
First
Material
Two case studies of publicly accessible
NGOs:
Text of vision and mission statements extracted from
NGOs’ websites.
100 based in West
Bengal
100 London based.
Analysis
Text-mining application was used to analyse corpora comprising vision and mission statements from each case study.
Analysis methodology was based on cocorrespondence.
Second Two case studies each drawn from a subset of NGOs from the first phase.
30 transcripts of interviews with activists. 2 emailed responses and interview transcripts with interview and a further two emailed responses only.
Coded transcripts using a qualitative data analysis computer software package. The analysis methodology was based on grounded theory.
This section has provided a summary of the research question and the next section of this chapter will flesh out these themes in more detail by situating them in terms of key tensions in four current scholarly conversations.
1.2. The Research Question in Relation to Key Theoretical and
Substantive Literature
This project is a sociological study which explores how activists in two NGO case studies represented their ability to engage with human rights and women’s human rights frameworks. This thesis is situated in the intersection between the sociology of human rights and discourses on gender inequalities. It contributes to the understanding of activists’ and beneficiaries’ agency within this intersection. It does so from a sociological perspective. The thesis therefore engages with substantive issues related to a theoretical understanding of what Dflam and Chicoine suggest is the “newly emerging speciality of the sociology of human rights” (2011: 102). The thesis provides evidence of how the human rights and women’s human rights framework are operationalised on the ground by NGOs. The empirical work was initially inspired by and then drew upon conversations within the scholarly literature in the areas of universalism, feminist social and political theory and the associations between knowledge and power, economic and social justice, international feminist politics and post-colonial studies. While this literature offers a rich set of resources for exploring the sociology of human rights, in this thesis two taxonomies of the
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deployment of human rights and women ’s human rights described in later chapters will be presented.
The two taxonomies developed from the empirical material collected in the two
NGO case studies provide analytical frameworks for understanding the implementation of human rights and women’s human rights portrayed by activists.
Both the taxonomies comprise four components. Each of these elements identifies a particular manifestation of the relationship between perceived situated structures and perceptions of ability to deploy the human rights and women’s human rights frameworks. These manifestations are fleshed out in detail in later chapters in the thesis and the thesis uses a conceptualisation of Haugaard’s (2010) family resemblance perspective of power to describe the relationship between the taxonomies and their constituent elements. This approach maps features in the deployment of human rights and women’s human rights frameworks which were significant to activists themselves. These significant features focus on situated experiences of local socio-economic contexts and are identified within the components. These components map onto aspects of four scholarly debates and the thesis both informs and is informed by these conversations. The first of which, is the body of literature which discusses the extent to which the human rights principles can be considered as a universal framework. The concept of universalism 2 is used in the thesis to explore activists’ perceptions of the relevance of the human rights and women’s human rights to the work of their organisations.
Here, debates in human rights have traditionally centred on the dichotomy between the universal and the particular. Donnelly (1984, 1989) proposed a continuum of radical cultural relativism and radical universalism. He suggested that the implications of weak or strong cultural relativism were held in tension in relation to an individual’s right to opt out of traditional cultural practices. This thesis does not take a position on the philosophical debates about universalism and relativism.
3 In comparison with Donnelly (1984, 1989), for example, the research presented in this
2 Universalism is the belief that there are human rights, values, norms, and ethics that exist across time and space. Relativism is the idea that rights, values, norms, and ethics are the product of particular cultures and contingent historical forces.
3 “It is useful to see the distance between sociology and mainstream work on human rights as a product of the tensions between philosophical debates over universalism and relativism. Sociology is firmly grounded in relativism, as is anthropology. It was in anthropology, however, that a sharp tension between universalism and relativism emerged in the mid twentieth century, and many of the intellectual lessons learned from this tension remain relevant to understanding sociology's position in relation to human rights” (“Human Rights”, 2006).
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thesis suggests that it is not possible just to take up a philosophical position about the universalism of human rights. The point is not just to understand the world but the debate needs to be realised in situated experiences. In other words, this thesis contends that the challenge to the universality of human rights is not focused on the acceptance of the principles themselves but the way in which they are implemented. There is, for example, discussion in the thesis about the extent to which activists represented tensions between rights and cultural values in situated contexts. That is, activists’ accounts in the research provide an understanding of the interweaving of human rights with other local value frameworks. The thesis explores the implications of the hybridisation of the human rights with other hegemonic frameworks. It applies Nadarajah and Rampton’s (2014) ideas on forms of hybridity in the field of international relations and peace studies. It also develops
Walby’s (2011) discussion of the hybridisation of global progress projects which include human rights and feminism. The thesis contends that activists operationalised the human rights and women’s human rights frameworks in a hybridised fashion. It can be argued that this hybridity challenges the traditional dichotomy between the universal and the particular as hegemonic frameworks change in response to each other.
The thesis informs a conversation within a second scholarly debate by providing a bridge between accounts of women’s agency in oppressive contexts and specific forms of prejudicial injustice. The thesis argues that Spivak’s (1988) concept of epistemic violence within the field of postcolonial studies can be expanded by incorporating aspects of Fricker’s (2003, 2006 and 2007) theory of epistemic injustice and Madhok’s (2007, 2013) and Madhok and Rai’s (2012) examination of speech practices in response to oppressive contexts. This thesis contends that an expanded idea of epistemic violence can link together women’s agency, knowledge and human rights language to inform the scholarly literature in the area of women’s empowerment, particularly in marginalised contexts.
The concept of agency acts as a leitmotif within the thesis and undergirds the relationships between the components within each of the two taxonomies which arose from the empirical analysis. In respect of the more traditional Western understandings of agency, Scott and Marshall (2012: 9) suggest that “[t]he term agency is often juxtaposed to structure and is often no more than a synonym for
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action, emphasising implicitly the undetermined nature of human action, as opposed t o the alleged determinism of structural theories”. This thesis considers forms of non-Western conceptions of agency in coercive contexts. Madhok identifies a lack of freedom as being “where motives or desires are put through a reflective process, and a preferred desire is identified but that identification or preferred desire is not effected into action or if it is, it is only partially so ” (Madhok,
2007: 345). Madhok’s (2007) concept of agency is less action-based than in traditional Western understandings. This thesis proposes that her non-Western concept of agency can be applied to activists’ accounts of local contexts in both the
West Bengal and London case studies.
The thesis positions itself in a third conversation which is centred on the core primary values underlying the human rights and women’s human rights frameworks.
Group rights, also known as collective rights, began to emerge in the 1960s as a critique of classical conceptions of human rights in documents such as the
UNDHR 4 , which were primarily concerned with the rights of abstract individuals situated in ahistorical and outside collective contexts. Individual rights ignore individuals’ existence as part cultural, social class, ethnic and other categories which shape individuals’ ability to enjoy human rights. Group rights recognise membership of different categories. These are rights held by a group rather than by individuals in that group as individuals (“Human Rights”, 2006). The thesis discusses a disjunction revealed in activists’ accounts about these values. The activists described a disconnection between the promotion of individual rights within the human rights framework and the grassroots cultural infrastructure which placed more value on collective rights. The thesis argues that the discussion in the scholarly literature on primary human rights values would be strengthened by examining how concepts of individu al capabilities in Sen’s (1999) work can be broadened to encompass a more comprehensive understanding of community development.
4 United Nations Declaration of Human Rights (UNDHR).
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The thesis feeds into a fourth global discourse focused on contemporary gender essentialism.
5 Phillips (2013) and Arendt (1989) consider the human in human rights. Arendt’s assessment of an essentialist view of the human rights framework is identified as “[t}he world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human” (Arendt, 1989: 299). Phillips (2013) is sceptical of whether it is possible to throw off the shackles of learning to strip down to just a physiological being. She suggests that the human in human rights cannot be reduced to an abstract concept lacking in content. An examin ation of activists’ accounts in this thesis reveal themes about the extent to which women and men were perceived in local contexts as essentially different. These essentialised representations feed into two threads within specific scholarly conversations and the thesis develops a bridge between them.
The first thread focuses on understanding the processes that involve gendered violence towards women and girls. Walby (2013), for example, focuses on how understanding the interplay of social processes and institutions informs these violations of human rights. Hearn (2013) explores the sociological significance of domestic violence but states that, despite its continued global prevalence, the issues underlying this form of gender coercion have rarely been at the core of mainstream sociology. The second thread focuses on critiques of economic empowerment programmes , such as Chant’s (2007) work on the feminisation of poverty. The thesis considers the extent to which activists represented conflicts between the objectives of enhancing women’s wellbeing and the implications for gendered responsibilities.
The thesis provides a bridge between the way in which activists framed beneficiaries of programmes targeted at supporting female victims of domestic violence and women’s economic empowerment projects. It does so by combining
Phillips’s (2013) view that what is human is political with the contention that activists’ gendered framing of these beneficiaries was as much a political representation as it was a cultural one. The thesis argues that the framing of women’s empowerment within both types of programme will need to reflect this
5 Essentialism is the view that a set of attributes is necessary to an entity’s identity. Meaning is, therefore, derived from essential qualities of an entity. Constructivism is the natural opposite of essentialism. This holds that interactions between experiences and ideas are sources of meaning.
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political element. The thesis argues that the function of human rights will need to address and be influenced by the interaction of the feminist political struggle and the underlying essentialist representations of the role of women in local contexts.
These four debates are drawn together in the thesis which examines activists’ accounts of how the human rights and women’s human rights frameworks are implemented at the grassroots level. The thesis explores how NGOs’ perceptions of economic, cultural and social forces encountered in local environments influenced characterisations of their deployment of the human rights and women’s human rights frameworks. One of the key conclusions of this thesis is that the crosscultural debate about the implementation of human rights would benefit from an enriched understanding of the processes involved in shaping activists’ senses of agency in situated experiences.
This section has so far presented the academic context of the thesis and what it seeks to achieve during the development of the analysis. The thesis is set within my own academic journey. Early in the development of my research ideas I attended a talk by Gillian Youngs (2007) entitled “Gender, Multiculturalism and the War on
Terror: Connection s and Misconnections” at the LSE Government Department’s annual residential weekend. She stated that her vision was that women’s voices would increasingly be heard across cultural and physical boundaries. She suggested that the prevailing divide between the public and private would be increasingly breached leading to a possible transformation of w omen’s identities as citizens. The internet would contribute to women’s empowerment as well as facilitating the erosion of gender inequalities. This presentation inspired me to attend Anne Philli ps’s MSc course at the LSE, “Feminist Political Theory”, the following academic year so that I could gain a deeper understanding of the theory underlying some of the issues that Gillian Youngs had raised. Attendance at the course also contributed to my understanding of the multifarious nature of the relationship between equality, justice and women’s citizenship.
As a result of this insight, I was driven to want to understand the complexities involved when NGOs translate, fashion and implement abstract human rights concepts at the grassroots level. I was inspired to explore how this process interacts with the cultural, social and economic forces in their environments and
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how this has an impact on their practices. I was curious about what human rights meant in practical terms to those in other cultures and how the visions of NGOs incorporated conceptualisations of gender equality and w omen’s empowerment, if at all. I wondered about the implications of programmes targeted at women beneficiaries in terms of gender relations in the communities in which they were working. The research question was, therefore, inspired by themes within the presentation and seminars in the first instance and further enriched by my attendance on the “Understanding Women’s Human Rights” short course run by the
LSE’s Centre for the Study of Human Rights in 2009.
This personal academic journey provided the foundation for the empirical research in the thesis. Research materials were gathered in accordance with the objective of ex ploring the complexities of the deployment of human rights and women’s human rights in local contexts. The empirical analysis of these materials resulted in the development of two taxonomies which are outlined in Tables 1-2 and 1-3 below.
These taxonomies summarise findings from the analysis of the research materials about NGOs’ operationalisation of human rights and women’s human rights. They do so by outlining representations of situated contexts and how activists perceived these as influencing their or ganisations’ desired action.
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Table 1-2: Summary of the Taxonomy of the Deployment of Human
Rights
Component
Activists’ Perception of Local
Socio-Economic Contexts
Represented NGO Activity and
Function of Human Rights
Component
One
Local infrastructure too deprived to enable human rights to gain purchase.
Social Welfare Provision or Charitable
Activities / Human rights deployed as a recourse to rhetoric in the most marginalised contexts.
Component
Two
Socio-economic contexts challenge the operationalisation of human rights.
The Deployment of Human Rights to
Support NGO “Power To”
Empowerment Strategies.
Component
Three
Socio-economic contexts challenge the operationalisation of human rights.
The Deployment of Human Rights to
Support NGO “Power Over”
Empowerment Strategies.
Component
Four
Activists portrayed the ability to engage in large scale social improvement and growth projects. They felt empowered to operate in local contexts.
NGOs are connected to global social justice and progress projects. They are engaged in maximising individual potential.
Table 1-3: Summary of the Taxonomy of the Deployment of Women’s
Human Rights
Component
Activists’ Perception of Local
Socio-Economic Contexts
Represented NGO Activity and
Function of Human Rights and
Women’s Human Rights
Component
One
Government’s failure in its duty to protect women against violations of basic human rights.
Rescuing women beneficiaries by removing them from coercive and threatening environments.
Component
Two
Private sphere infrastructure perceived as coercive and threatening.
Component
Three
Component
Four
Distortion between gender responsibilities and wellbeing.
Activists felt empowered to operate in local contexts.
Empowering women beneficiaries to take action to remove themselves from coercion, for example, from domestic violence. Human rights as a potential political tool which underpins a policy community which reaffirms universal values.
Distortion between gender responsibilities and rights: focus on economic empowerment.
Maximising individual potential.
Hybridisation with global progress projects.
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These tables identify the key themes which emerge from the examination of the research material later in the thesis. Chapter Six develops themes within the components in the first taxonomy. These themes are then examined further in
Chapter Seven in relation to the second taxonomy which is centred on activists’ accounts of women’s empowerment programmes.
The overall goal of the thesis is to produce an analytical framework by examining qualitative data to illuminate when and how human rights and women’s human rights are experienced and practiced as applicable schema in the work of NGOs.
This thesis argues that the taxonomies outlined in Tables 1-2 and 1-3 form this analytical framework. It contends that the deployment of either human rights or women’s human rights is unlikely to be a uni-dimensional concept as evidenced by the family resemblance component models comprising the two taxonomies. The thesis argues that the deployment of human rights can be viewed as a multidimensional construct which is undergirded by dimensional concepts in scholarly debates as described earlier in this section.
1.3. The Centrality of Taxonomies to the Research Design and
Analysis of Results in this Thesis
The purpose of this section is to explain how taxonomies became central to the research design and analysis of the results in this project. These classifications were constructed from the examination of the research materials during the course of the study. It also discusses how it was possible to distil the contingent local value systems on which social accounts ’ were based despite the privilege of academic literature.
This project’s research design comprised two phases: i) in the first stage of the study a content analysis was undertaken of vision and mission statements extracted from the websites of a sample of publicly accessible NGOs in West
Bengal and London; and ii) in the second phase of the study interviews were conducted with a sample of social activists working in NGOs in West Bengal and
London. The methodology is described in more detail in Chapter Four. The analysis of the empirical research in this study resulted in the development of two taxonomies which captured social activists’ accounts of the deployment of human rights and women’s human rights. Taxonomies are used particularly in the
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biological sciences to classify lifeforms into categories and sub-clusters which reveal similarities and dissimilarities between species. In this study, two taxonomies were developed through an iterative process of grounded analysis and comparison with the literature to capture the similarities and contrasts within the research materials. The first taxonomy classifies representations of the deployment of human rights principles by NGOs in the two case studies. This taxonomy is explored in detail in Chapter Six of this thesis and the second model, as described in Chapter
Seven, captures social activists’ accounts of the deployment of women’s human rights.
An automated content analysis was used in the first phase of the research to examine the vision and mission statements extracted from the websites of publiclyfacing NGOs in West Bengal and London. The analysis revealed a classification structure underlying the material extracted from NGO websites which had similarities with positions on human rights discourse within the academic literature.
It had been unclear whether any discernible structure would be found within the raw data until the content analysis had been undertaken. The results of the content analysis are presented in Chapter Five.
The interpretation of the two classifications produced by the automated content analysis reports suggested that NGOs in both West Bengal and London incorporated different reflections of the human rights discourse on their websites. In other words, the content analysis generated classifications which could be interpreted as reflecting similarities and dissimilarities in the representation of the deployment of human rights principles by NGOs in the two case studies. Each of the two content analysis reports was considered in more detail using the qualitative and quantitative indicators to flesh out the interpretations of the clusters of classes that formed the classifications. The various components and indicators within the reports informed the interpretation of the themes underlying each class. Some of these themes corresponded with the deployment of human ri ghts and women’s human rights. Interviews with social activists working in NGOs were then conducted in order to enable a more in depth examination of these themes, focusing on perceptions of the relevance of human rights and women’s human rights to their organisations ’ work. The content analysis produced rankings of NGOs whose websites were most closely associated with each class in the two
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classifications. These rankings were used to identify a sub-sample of NGOs that were most closely associated with each class within the classification scheme.
Social activists working in NGOs within these sub-samples were then invited to participate in an interview.
The two taxonomies were constructed from the examination of the research materials, these being the content analysis reports in the first phase and the exploration of social a ctivists’ accounts which were generated in the interview phase of the research. This thesis contends that the taxonomies identify different aspects of a family resemblance conceptualisation of the human rights discourse.
The first captures social activists ’ representations of the deployment of the human rights framework and the second their accounts of the implementation of women’s human rights principles. The thesis proposes that both taxonomies are framed by activists’ perceptions of agency to achieve desired action in local contexts. The two taxonomies are valuable in providing an analytical framework to draw meaningful conclusions which emerged during the analysis of the research materials about the deployment of human rights and women’s human rights.
A wide-ranging literature search was undertaken which incorporated scholarship from such diverse areas as: the sociology of human rights; feminism; the history of human rights and women’s human rights; aspects of political theory particularly focusing on epistemic injustice; international development studies; and, international relations. This literature search was conducted with the purpose of identifying important research questions in the area and identifying gaps in the scholarly knowledge. By taking this literature review beyond the human rights literature narrowly conceived, it was possible to identify features in the research that would not otherwise have been observed, for example different types of epistemic injustice in relation to the deployment o f human rights and women’s human rights.
The literature research and selection of the most salient work was an iterative process as the research developed. Chapters Two and Three contain the most salient scholarly work for the purposes of helping to explain the eventual findings of the empirical research. The presentation of this work in these chapters is ordered to provide the background context for the eventual explanation of the research findings in Chapters Six and Seven. The most useful and relevant concepts selected to explain the social activists’ accounts included: agency in oppressive
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contexts; gendered essentialism; universality of human rights; hybridisation; and human development. The purpose of mapping these concepts in the literature on the accounts of social activists is to provide a scholarly context which informs the framing and the structure of the analytical frameworks. Chapter Eight describes how these concepts mapped onto the components within each of the two taxonomies which capture the deployment of human rights and women’s human rights in local value systems.
This thesis aims to achieve a balance between representing social activists’ perceptions of their local contexts in the area of human rights whilst using concepts in the academic literature to provide insight into and explanation of the findings. It is argued here that it would be expected that there would be some degree of commensurability between the value systems in local contexts in the case studies and those underlying the academic concepts which are used to help explain social activists’ representations.
The social activists who were interviewed from both case studies referred to terms such as “women”, “culture”, “action”, “gender”, “empowerment” and “human rights”.
It was possible to hold mutually understandable and meaningful conversations in
English across different local contexts about organisations’ practices across the case studies. The English language provides concepts in the public domain, however contested these may be, which have inferential implications and play a particular role within the language. It was, therefore, possible to draw inferential relationships beyond the concepts which were explicitly used. More overarching conceptual themes were built up as the analysis progressed by an iterative process of coding the research material according to these inferential relationships and comparing these emergent themes with concepts in the literature. The stable set of concepts that emerged , such as “gendered essentialism” and “agency” connected coding of transcripts with the research literature. The objective of the research was to make sense of human rights discourse and practices as a significant issue in the contemporary social world and to see how this compared with positions identified in the literature, without adopting a normative position. The research in this study focused on how human rights are understood and negotiated at the more micro level during the representation of local practices.
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Sen argues that it is hard to view contemporary ideas of rights as traditional commitments of Western cultures only. “The view that the basic ideas underlying freedom and rights in a tolerant society are “Western” notions, and somehow alien to Asia, is hard to make any sense of, even though that view has been championed by both Asian authoritarians and Western chauvinists” (Sen, 1999: 27). Scholars have argued that discourses in rights and development are increasingly being conducted in global exchanges. Lewis (2014) for example refers to an increase in global communication which is also leading to commonalities in approaches and practices. He suggests that this increased global dialogue is leading to exchanges within the discourses in the area although different local contexts influence certain aspects of social activists’ work in various ways. Information about how local practices of human rights and women’s human rights are conducted is being shared across cultural boundaries. It could, therefore, be argued that conceptual understandings in local contexts are also being informed by this exchange. Hence, although it might be argued that my thesis has privileged academic literature to some extent, it is proposed here that the values within the scholarly work are not wholly disconnected from local value systems on which social activists’ accounts are based.
This section discussed how taxonomies became central to the research design and analysis of the results. It also explained how it was possible to distil the contingent local value systems on which social accounts ’ were based despite the privilege of academic literature.
1.4. An Overview of the Thesis
This section provides an overview of how the thesis is structured and the progression towards answering the research question.
Chapters Two and Three map discourses in the literature onto the four components within each of the two taxonomies. This review identifies areas where the thesis draws on and potentially can strengthen scholarly conversations. It will specify the contribution of the thesis to the body of knowledge and justify the research question in more detail. Chapter Four elaborates the methods used to answer the research question and provides a rationale for the use of a mixed methods design comprising the text-mining analysis and semi-structured interviews.
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Chapter Five provides an account of the results of the first phase and demonstrates how the taxonomies started to emerge from the empirical material. The empirical analyses in Chapter Six draw on the results of the first phase as well as the research materials gathered in the second phase. It provides a detailed account of the components within the taxonomy of the deployment of human rights. It discusses the significance of the findings in terms of the contribution to the scholarly literature. The analyses in Chapter Seven also are based on the research materials used in Chapter Six. This chapter, however, focuses on activists’ accounts of the deployment of women’s human rights and portrayals of gender equality and women’s economic empowerment programmes.
The results and conclusions are discussed in the final chapter, Chapter Eight, which summarises the added value of this thesis to the body of knowledge. It focuses on the limitations of the methodology and explores the implications of this for further research. The chapter argues that the aim of such further research would be to construct multidimensional models to provide a practical tool to guide policy makers in the area of the operationalisation of human rights frameworks.
This chapter has established that the main research question focuses around the representations of the deployment of human rights and women’s human rights frameworks. It is now important to situate the thesis more fully within the key scholarly debates in the area. The next two chapters explore the key relevant debates in the human rights body of literature which will inform the empirical analysis later in the thesis. This analysis will lead to the development of the taxonomies of the deployment of these frameworks.
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2. Chapter Two: Human Rights: Theoretical Debates
The taxonomy of the deployment of human rights which emerged from the empirical analysis was outlined in the previous chapter. This chapter maps salient aspects of these accounts onto different key debates in the literature. By doing so, it places the research within current human rights discourses and identifies how the thesis feeds into and strengthens conversations.
This critical review of the literature is restricted to conversations that directly inform the analysis later in the thesis. One of the central objectives of the project is to examine the operationalisation of what is arguably a Western concept in two countries at different levels of economic development. One of these is a developed
Western country and the other a non-Western democracy. The taxonomy comprises four elements, each one describing a different function of the human rights framework drawn from the activists’ accounts in both case studies. A second taxonomy was constructed to describe the deployment of women’s human rights and Chapter Three focuses on the theoretical debates and frameworks in that area.
This chapter maps the body of literature onto each component in the first taxonomy, that is, a model which describes the deployment of human rights in activists’ accounts according to perceptions of the challenges to desired action.
The project melds together different concepts of agency from a range of scholarly disciplines. The objective is to develop a concept which can be deployed to differentiate between the four elements in the taxonomy. This thesis proposes that the final element of the taxonomy differs in nature from the other three. It identifies an orientation within the activists’ accounts characterised by a sense of the ability to shape the local infrastructures which support human rights. The other three share common situated experiences of socio-economic contexts presenting significant challenges to desired action. Each of the three components represents a different form of these perceived challenges.
The first of these three components describes activists’ accounts that focus on the deployment of the human rights framework in local contexts that are represented as being marginalised in some way.
Themes in activists’ accounts identified in this
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component can be used to inform the debate about the extent to which human rights are universal. The thesis argues that the widely contested discussion over the universality of human rights can be broadened to incorporate an understanding of the interweaving of co-constituting Western, liberal hegemonic core values with national local hegemonic value frameworks. The thesis will focus on how the human rights and women’s human rights frameworks are operationalised in a hybridised fashion. It can be argued that this hybridity challenges the traditional dichotomy between the universal and the particular. It does so by examining how hegemonic frameworks change in response to each other. The thesis is interspersed with references to activists’ perceptions of the human rights and women’s human rights frameworks. These can be characterised as containing the theme that both frameworks are weakly institutionalised.
Activists’ accounts described a range of situated social, economic and cultural features which they perceived as limiting their organisation s’ ability to operationalise human rights and women’s human rights principles. The thesis argues that both human rights frameworks would be strengthened by new alliances with other hegemonic frameworks and global progress projects. The first component also develops the concept of epistemic injustice and applies it to illuminate the deployment of the human rights framework as a recourse to rhetoric to legitimate the claims made by the most vulnerable beneficiaries in the London case study.
The second component in the taxonomy focuses on the deployment of human rights as a “power to” empowerment strategy in community projects. The thesis examines how conversations about “power to” and “power over” strategies can be fleshed out to explore activists’ accounts of the deployment of the human rights framework. The thesis builds on scholarly work in the human development and postcolonial studies literature to explore NGOs’ representations of community projects and empowerment strategies.
The third category within the taxonomy is defined by a “power over” deployment of the human rights framework. This section draws upon claims made by some scholars in the field that the human rights framework is underpinned by a neoimperialist connotation of human rights discourse (for example, Merry, 2006a).
Merry (2006a) suggests that the human rights system reflects power and economic inequalities between the global North and the global South. The system, she
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suggests, often supports further neoliberalism and capitalist expansion rather than acting to reduce inequalities.
The West Bengal activists’ accounts contained descriptions of their microfinance projects and the London activists represented their organisations’ programmes that aimed at challenging institutional prejudice. This thesis examines activists ’ accounts of cultural and institutional infrastructure barriers to their ability to implement human rights based programmes in “power over” empowerment strategies.
The final element of the taxonomy is characterised by an orientation in activists’ accounts characterised by a sense of an ability to shape the infrastructure supporting human rights. Specifically, this thesis argues that some activists
’ accounts were characterised by a sense of an ability to influence policy-making in the area. This thesis uses the work of scholars who are noted for their work in the field of globalisation and international relations to examine this category of the deployment of human rights.
2.1. Western and non-Western Concepts of Agency
The project examines links between situated experiences at the grassroots level and the ability to implement human rights and women’s human rights frameworks.
In other words, it examines links between perceived agency and the operationalisation of both human rights frameworks. The thesis is both informed by and informs the critique of the Western conceptualisation of an action-based sense of agency from a non-Western perspective. The thesis takes the conversation forward by considering how these two perspectives of agency can frame the taxonomy of the deployment of human rights. The association between human rights and agency is important because, despite the adoption of human rights by an overwhelming majority of nations, inequality and oppressed agency persists.
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This thesis extends Sen’s human development approach to explore the experiences of oppressed agency by the interviewees in West Bengal. Sen’s (1998) human development approach identifies a sense of the importance of control over the quality of one’s life which reaches beyond the idea of economic empowerment:
6 See, for example, Merry (2006a), Klug (2008) and the Human Development Indices as later referenced in Table 4-1.
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Human development, as an approach, is concerned with what I take to be the basic development idea: namely, advancing the richness of human life, rather than the richness of the economy in which human beings live, which is only a part of it. (Sen,
1998 7 )
Ci (2013) considers that the worst evil of poverty is “its detrimental effect on agency, the most essential feature of human beings as human beings …. Much of the poverty in the world today that may pass for simple material scarcity is in fact the worst possible combination —of subsistence poverty, status poverty, and agency poverty” (2013: 149-150). Activists’ accounts described situated contexts that incorporated these features of poverty and did so in a manner that characterised the significant challenges to their organisation s’ desired action in oppressive contexts.
The thesis draws on features of Rotter’s (1954) social psychological construct of the locus of control. Rotter (1954) describes the extent to which individuals believe they can influence the events in their lives. Individuals who have the ability to exert power over their lives are described as those who have an internal locus of control.
People who believe that external forces determine their lives to a larger extent are held to be those with an external locus of control. This thesis proposes that the concept of locus of control can be used as the basis to explore the frames used by
NGO activists to explain situated experiences. Specifically, it proposes that the concept of locus of control can be used to explain different perceptions of ability to implement missions and programmes in relation to local social, cultural and political forces. In other words, this concept is used as a basis to differentiate between the four elements in the taxonomy.
The conceptualisation of agency used in this thesis has two forms: a definition that is based on the more traditional Western ideas as well as a less “action-based” notion which was proposed by Madhok (2013) in her work on developmentalism.
In respect of the more traditional understanding, Scott and Marshall (2012) suggest that “[t]he term agency is often juxtaposed to structure and is often no more than a synonym for action, emphasizing implicitly the undetermined nature of human action, as opposed to the alleged determinism of structural theories” ( 2012: 9 ). The
7 See: http://hdr.undp.org/en/humandev/ quote by Sen (1998).
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debate centres on whether structure or agency is most influential in shaping behaviour. Scott and Marshall (2012) point out that some recent theorists such as
Bourdieu (1972) and Giddens (1984) have attempted to bring together the individual capacity to act independently with social structure factors. They suggest that Giddens’s contention is that “[s]tructures are not something external to social actors but are rules and resources produced and reproduced by actors in their practices” (2012: 10).
The thesis examines the depicted practices of NGOs in both case studies. A taxonomy containing a family of resemblances of the relationship between perceived situated structures and agency emerged from the exploration of these depictions. This relationship is identified in the ? concept of locus of agency which is proposed here. In some accounts, for example, older women were depicted as reproducing the patriarchal structures in domestic situations according to cultural traditions. In other accounts activists portrayed programmes which aimed to empower beneficiaries to challenge oppressive structures.
This thesis is informed by these traditional and more recent understandings of agency and draws upon different perspectives contained within activists’ accounts.
It recognises that there are different positions on how agency can be conceptualised in different situated contexts. This thesis refers, for example, to
Madhok’s (2013) understanding of agency under conditions of oppression. This thesis develops two particular aspects of Madhok’s work. These include the critique of the traditional Western, action-based conceptualisation of agency and second, the development of a non-Western sense of agency in oppressive contexts which focuses on speech practices.
Madhok argues that “a synonymy between free action and autonomy capacities obstructs philosophical thinking on and exercise of agency of persons within conditions of subordination” (2007: 335). She suggests that “[a]utonomy of persons is almost always used synonymously with their ability to act freely” (2007: 335). Her aim is to produce a sociological awareness that incorporates a less Eurocentric, but yet nonrelativist conceptualisation of women’s agency. Madhok drew much of her
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material from her ethnographic work on the Sathins 8 involved in a state-sponsored initiative for women’s development in North-West India. Madhok’s work (2013) characterises oppressive contexts as “the absence of background conditions of negative freedom, and contexts where the negative consequences of socially transgressive behaviour is uncommonly high” (2013: 1). The focus of Madhok’s
(2007, 2013) and Madhok and Rai’s (2012) argument addresses ? the issues that surround the programme’s attempts to enhance women’s agency in undeveloped settings.
In terms of developing the idea of agency in conditions of oppression, Madhok and
Rai (2012) aim to address what they characterise as misdescriptions of women’s agency in oppressive conditions.
The authors contend that women’s agency in these conditions is vulnerable in two ways. First, it can be minimised by the overemphasis placed on wome n’s subordination and second, their autonomy can be exaggerated by overplaying their resistance.
Agency empowerment is more problematic than originally expected because of the impact of the social, cultural and political environment on shaping and framing individual actions. Madhok’s stance is to argue that the “alternative to free action is to look for ideas that lie behind action that might be a person’s ‘preferred preferences’ but which may not find their expression in action” (2007: 343) which, she suggests, can be demonstrated within speech practices. In addition, they conclude that NGOs fail to appreciate how the empowerment strategies they use may compromise the positions of their beneficiaries who are undergoing a transformation as a result of participation in programmes. Madhok’s (2007) work also focuses on risks of empowerment within a developmental context. It might be argued that everyone tempers their behaviour according to the risks they perceive within their social environment. This thesis contends, however, that Ma dhok’s
(2007, 2013 ) and Madhok and Rai’s (2012) work provides a convincing argument about the desirability of framing agency in oppressive contexts from a non-Western perspective. It argues that insights drawn from the situated experiences of activists in the two case studies can flesh out and strengthen this concept. It argues, for example, that Madhok’s (2007) argument that this conceptualisation of ‘preferred
8 Sathins are defined as “village-level workers of the Women’s Development Programme”
(Navlakha, 1995: 1645). They are often the poorest women from the lowest castes.
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preferences’ may not find their expression in action could be developed by looking at a resemblance conceptualisation of agency.
Madhok concludes that “in order to understand autonomy within conditions of subordination, we need a more social, contextually sensitive, less action orientated, procedural understanding of autonomy ” (2007: 353). In her work, Madhok (2007) highlights the importance of speech practices in the expression of agency. Such a conceptualisation of agency demonstrates an articulation of a choice or at least recognition of an alternative possible action. This thesis applies the non-Western idea of agency to activists’ representations of situated contexts which they perceived constricted or curtailed their ability to implement the human rights and women’s human rights frameworks. The idea of Western and non-Western forms of agency is also developed in the following chapter which reviews the literature in the area of women’s human rights.
This thesis argues that Madhok’s (2013) account provides a useful concept that can be deployed to distinguish between the three components of the taxonomy. These describe relationships between perceived forms of agency in different oppressive contexts. The thesis proposes that it is possible to refer to the more traditional definition of agency as synonymous with the more Western understanding of individual autonomy. This definition frames the fourth component within the taxonomy which is based on the deployment of human rights beyond the original framework. The taxonomy is drawn together by framing it within the locus of agency conceptualisation which melds together the internal and external dimensions of control developed by Rotter (1954) and Madhok’s ideas of non-
Western expressions of agency.
This project deploys the concept of locus of agency to describe activists’ responses to local institutional and structural contexts. It does so in two different ways. First it frames representations of socio-economic factors which are perceived as constraining NGOs’ ability to implement the abstract human rights and women’s human frameworks in a practical way at the grassroots level. This represents a position of an external locus of agency. This compares with the second frame which represents an internal locus of agency. This is characterised by an action-based position in the activists’ accounts which expressed a perceived sense of power over
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situated experiences. The second frame is associated with a perception of an ability to influence the human rights framework itself and activists’ expressions of a sense of empowering beneficiaries to maximise their potential within other social progress projects.
The four elements within the taxonomy are not unrelated. The analysis of the classifications produced by the two Alceste reports demonstrated that the human rights framework was a feature in three of the four classes. The interviews revealed that there were human rights compatible elements in activists’ accounts of programmes depicted as providing social welfare. This thesis argues that the taxonomy identifies a family resemblance conceptualisation of the deployment of the framework.
This conceptionalisation is in the same vein as Haugaard’s (2010) perspective o f power. He suggests that “[p]ower constitutes a ‘family resemblance concept’, with family members forming complex relationships within overlapping language games ” (2010: 419).
The next section focuses on the scholarly conversations which inform and are informed by the taxonomy. These debates map onto the components within the taxonomy.
2.1.1. Conversations that Map onto Human Rights as a Recourse to
Rhetoric
This thesis feeds into three key scholarly conversations that are related to the first component in the taxonomy. This component describes the deployment of human rights as a recourse to rhetoric in what were depicted as the most marginalised socio-economic contexts. The theme of the argument draws together themes in activists’ accounts that centred on the nature of what they perceived were basic human universal human rights. Human rights were represented in terms of core values as opposed to a set of clearly defined attributes. T hemes in activists’ accounts reflected upon the ability to express violations to these core values and concepts. The thesis, therefore, feeds into conversations about the extent to which human rights can be considered universal, the delocalisation of human rights attributes and finally, forms of epistemic injustice.
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One of the key tensions expressed in the West Bengal activists’ accounts was that of a disjunction between the Western 9 framework and the grassroots cultural infrastructure in place to support it. The former promotes individual rights whilst the latter was characterised as one where the core primary values reflected placed an emphasis on group rights. This thesis examines the situated experiences of activists who claimed that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) framework was relevant to their work. Human rights principles are predicated upon the idea of the universality. This thesis argues, however, that the ability to engage with the framework was affected by activists’ perceptions of local structural and institutional contexts framed by alternative hegemonic value systems. Activists described the tensions arising from operating within conflicting hegemonic frameworks. This thesis feeds into the universalism debate by arguing that the traditional dichotomy between the universal and the particular is challenged by examining how hegemonic frameworks change in response to each other.
This section briefly refers to the relevant aspects in universalism and cultural relativism with the purpose of providing the context for later analysis in relation to the research materials. In looking at the normative position, Butler (2000) has been a notable critic of the universalist position by proposing that dominant principles of justice, including human rights, reflect hegemonic culture and power structures.
Butler (2000) does not adopt a clear-cut anti-universalist position, but rather one that suggests the existence of a mediated relationship between the universal and particular. She does not abandon the universal but draws attention to what she argues is a constantly contested space between different cultural positions. In general, cultural relativists would question whether universalists have the legitimate authority to determine what normative principles should be adopted in different social contexts.
One particular critique of universal human rights at the global level is frequently linked to concerns about cultural imperialism. A particularly significant argument relates to the way that the dominant human rights framework crystallises the structure of power relations within and between states (Merry, 2006a). Despite
9 The human rights discourse is commonly accepted as being embedded in the Western liberal tradition and the Western focus on the social contract and individual rights arising from the
Enlightenment, for example see Gearty (2006), Langlois (2009).
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these obvious neo-imperialist connotations of human rights discourse, it is also important to acknowledge that human rights emerged from transnational consultations which produced a fair degree of consensus (Merry, 2006b). As Merry
(2006b) further points out human rights law is not particularly coercive, given the system of reservations. Her conclusion is that, despite this, human rights reform supports rather than challenges the more damaging consequences of globalisation, thus exacerbating global North and South inequalities in terms of social class and power relations.
It could be anticipated that a Marxian analysis would concur with this perspective, that is, the view that the function of rights is to further the dominating exploitative power of capitalism. Morris (2006) asserts, however, that a Marxian position would also view civil and political rights as an emancipatory framework. Rights, for example, could be invoked to challenge and overturn the dominant hierarchy of an exploitative status quo.
Sjoberg, Gill and Williams (2001) argue that there is a loss of nation-state sovereignty power to non-state actors, in particular to transnational corporations during the process of globalisation. The human rights framework, they claim, provides one of the few alternative standpoints remaining to contain social power by those whose activities systematically undermine human dignity.
The dominant human rights framework emerged at a critical junction in international history that allowed for the establishment of these particular normative principles which focused on individual as opposed group rights. The Asian values ideology in the 1990s critiqued this aspect of the human rights framework. Freeman (1996), for example, examines the Asian challenge to the principle of the universality of human rights. He suggests that leaders of the economically successful South East Asian societies claimed that the West was unilaterally attempting to impose neoliberal democracy in some Asian countries that valued and prioritised other values. These values were based on different historical and cultural traditions. Whilst Freeman
(1996) suggested that Asian and conservative Western values were similar in outlook the activists in this study perceived that the two systems were held in tension with each other. This finding is considered in more detail later in the thesis.
Freeman (1999) suggests that this Asian challenge to human rights took on a more subtle and pragmatic tone which arose out of debate in the international arena. He
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claims that Asian 10 states recognised the universality of human rights, but they asserted that it was irrational to ignore a truism that general principles are applied in particular contexts. In other words, they considered that international norm-setting was limited by the national, cultural and historical contexts in which they would be applied.
Mauzy (1997) states that in fact the universality debate “principally concerns the question of what constitutes 'good government' and the 'good society', and takes the position that the question of how to achieve these is significantly influenced by the values of a govern ment and a society” (1997: 236). Freeman (1999) suggests that oppressed peoples found human rights attractive but activists who wished to operationalise universal principles needed to do so in a way that was sensitive to local discourse rather than that of international law.
Other conversations in the scholarly debate centre on the value of the universal framework. A thread within this conversation focuses on human rights as a vehicle to facilitate communication between those in different cultures. Tsing, for example, contends that “[t]he universal offers us the chance to participate in the global stream of hu manity. We can’t turn it down. Yet we also can’t replicate previous versions without inserting our own genealogy of commitments and claims. Whether we place ourselves inside or outside the West, we are stuck with universals created in cultural dialogue” (2005: 1). Likewise, Arbour (2008) suggests that universal rights are not antagonistic to cultural particularism especially given that, the author suggests, the Declaration was drawn up by those from different cultural systems.
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The author claims that human rights provide a legal framework which protects both the inalienable rights of individuals and also cultural diversity. This perspective, however, does not fully cover the significance of the fact that the UDHR was drawn up with core values that promoted individual rights as opposed to group rights. In addition, human rights have traditionally focused on rights in the public as opposed to the private domestic sphere, suggests Sardar-Ali (2008). The complexities of
10 The Asian values debate has also been played out in the Islamist religious context which resulted in the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights adopted by member states of the Organisation of Islamic
Cooperation in 1990.
11 The drafters included: Dr Charles Malik (Lebanon), Alexandre Bogomolov (USSR), Dr Peng-chun
Chang (China), René Cassin (France), Eleanor Roosevelt (US), Charles Dukes (United Kingdom),
William Hodgson, Australia), Hernan Santa Cruz (Chile),John P. Humphrey (Canada), (Mrs) Hansa
Mehta of India among others (from: http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/drafters.shtml).
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these different perspectives are highlighted in activists’ accounts of the deployment of human rights in local contexts characterised by diverse value systems.
Dahre (2006) points to the value of universalism as a tool with which to compare and measure across cultures to assess local practices in terms of violations of human rights and protection of such diversity. This perspective, however, would suggest that violations need to be expressed within the hegemonic language of human rights. This point highlights the problematic deployment of a tool such as human rights which is both contested and subject to processes such as delocalisation (Gearty, 2006), friction (Tsing, 2005) and vernacularisation (Merry,
2006b) described below.
This point reflects Donnel ly’s (1984, 1989) perspective. He suggests that radical cultural relativism and radical universalism are the end points of a continuum.
There can be a wide variation in terms of relative contributions of principal sources of the validity of a moral right, he suggests. This leads Donnelly (1984, 1989) to discuss the implications of weak or strong cultural relativism held in tension in relation to an individual’s right to opt out of traditional cultural practices. Donnelly’s conclusion is that “we can justifiably insist on some form of weak cultural relativism; that is, on a fundamental universality of basic human rights, tempered by a recognition of the possible need for limited cultural variations. Basic human rights are…relatively universal” (1984: 419). This resonates with his perspective that
“[h]uman rights are, literally, the rights that one has simply because one is a human being” (Donnelly, 1984: 400).
Messer (1993) suggests that anthropologists could contribute to the understanding of human rights by undertaking comparative research in diverse cultures. Their objective would be to examine the extent to which human rights principles were expressed in common ways in different local contexts. Schirmer (2006) argues that the very nature of the relativism debate could be impeding progress with empirical research on the understandings of human rights discourses and practices.
Schirmer contends that “[w]e as anthropologists need to recognise that the debate about whether human rights are culturally specific or universal takes us in the wrong direction; whose rights a nd which rights will always be up for debate” (2006:
505). Gearty (2008) suggests that the debates about the legitimacy of human rights
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principles to act as both a pragmatic tool and a universal moral ideal enable ? their underlying concepts, such as human dignity, to be contested and adapted. These debates promote the means by which the framework survives within the international justice structures. Gearty contends that human rights as a framework to achieve social justice gains its universal legitimacy because of the language it provides to express core values. Debates can b e conducted with “local dialect[s] of a shared tongue rather than an entirely foreign language” (Gearty 2008: 9).
The thrust of Schirmer’s (2006) and Gearty’s (2008) argument is that the human rights framework itself undergoes change as the discourse is operationalised in different local contexts. Tsing’s research seeks to clarify how universals and particulars interact in a process she calls “friction”, whereby cultures are copr oduced in “awkward, unequal, unstable, and creative qualities of interconnection across difference” (2005: 4). It is this friction that leads to a significant difference in outcomes of the implementation of abstract principles by human rights and development activists in concrete situations that underpins much of the research focus. Merry (2006b) suggests that anthropologists are starting to focus on understanding the social processes involved as local activists adapt the abstract human rights principles to the needs and conditions of small communities. In discussin g this approach, she suggests “[i]nstead of asking if human rights are a good idea, it explores what difference they make” (Merry, 2006b: 39). Merry shows that her empirical work contributes “to the development of an ethnography of the practice of human rights” (Merry, 2006b: 39). She suggests that human rights discourses and practices are vernacularised by activists as they implement institutionalised principles within local contexts. This thesis fleshes out this suggestion by asking activists about their experiences of the deployment of human rights on the ground.
Merry (2006b) also alerts us to the importance of understanding how such activists frame human rights discourse, that is, how they package core ideas, so that those in local communities find the concepts more appealing. “For example, the success of the battered women’s movement in the United States depended on fundamentally changing the way women understood violence from their partners, shifting it from discipline to abuse” (Merry, 2006b: 41). The human rights agents in this research were NGO activists drawn from the two case studies. Such
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international actors, Merry (2006b) suggests, are critical agents in the attempt to hold governments in countries and transnational corporations to account. She argues that they translate human rights ideas into a localised context and correspondingly, translate local problems into conceptions of human rights. Merry
(2006b) terms this process “vernacularisation”. Levitt and Merry (2009) explore the significance of this process for the future of the human rights framework. They suggest that:
In the process of vernacularisation by social movements and organizations, the idea of human rights becomes broader, escaping the original parameters of the legal documents. Indeed, the active seizing of the human rights framework by women’s social movements is reshaping human rights itself. The proliferation of small and large women’s NGOs puts constant pressure on the human rights system to accommodate these interests, so that vernacularisation is likely to transform the global understanding and practice of human rights. As social movements seize these ideas and wrestle with them, they make them something new (Levitt and
Merry, 2009: 460).
This thesis proposes that Levitt and Merry’s (2009) concept of vernacularisation could be fleshed out by taking more account of the complexities of agents’ perceptions of ability to operationalise the human rights framework in response to situated experiences. The thesis proposes that the process of vernacularisation is in line with
Walby’s (2011) and Nadarajah and Rampton’s (2014) conceptions of hybridisation.
This section has briefly summarised some of the main points of contention in the body of scholarship that addresses the question of the universality of human rights principles. This thesis argues that the universalism – cultural relativism debate provides an important context for understanding some of the issues depicted by the activists in relation to the operationalisation of the framework. It does not suggest that interviewees were aware of all or any of the threads of the debate. Rather it argues tha t activists’ accounts contained depictions of situated experiences that could be framed as key tensions identified in the scholarly literature in relation to the universality debate.
This thesis feeds into the universality conversation by examining activi sts’ views of the function of universal human rights values. It does so by framing this
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examination within different perceptions of the ability to implement the human rights framework. It also examines the function of human rights as a recourse to rhetoric in activists’ accounts. Gearty (2006) argued that the core UDHR project is concerned with ensuring that the marginalised, the oppressed and the powerless have a voice with which to push themselves into the centre-stage of concern. He states that human rights provide the language that enables activists to speak on behalf of others who are most unable to do so and which then allows the powerless to speak for themselves. Gearty (2006) describes this as a process of delocalisation which he contends has contributed to the perseverance of the framework in the face of multifaceted critiques. Whilst the human rights project gained its intellectual roots from what might now be seen as threads emanating from the Global North,
Gearty (2006) describes how aspects of the specifically European philosophical and cultural foundations have been stripped away. What remains he contends is a reconfigured version of human rights in which core attributes have been replaced by core values. In other words, he suggests that the UN Declaration of Human
Rights articles derived from Western assumptions have been replaced by the use of human rights as a language to reflect local core values and culture.
Gearty concludes that “far from being a challenge to local values, human rights understood in a certain way represent a vindication of the best of those values ”
(Gearty, 2008: 1). He identifies these as being secularised versions of values found in many faiths, for example, respect for human dignity, and those derived from reason, such as individual autonomy and representative government according to law, as well as tolerance of diversity. “Viewed in this fashion, the idea of human rights is truly the universal ethical discourse for which its enthusiasts argue, albeit one that is particularly susceptible to being distorted to facilitate other, non-human rightsbased ends” (Gearty, 2008: 1). It is this particular vulnerability to what might be considered as change that is fleshed out in more depth during the analysis of the research materials later in the thesis. It can be argued, for example, that certain aspects of Gearty’s vulnerability can be more coherently understood as responses to perceived ability to implement the human rights framework and of their beneficiaries to enjoy them.
Gearty’s work (2008) informs the thesis by presenting a view about the nature of the framework’s moral underpinnings. His perspective is one that reinforces a
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Western view of human rights which promotes the autonomy of the individual.
Gearty’s (2008) argument could be strengthened by a more balanced approach that incorporates the possibility that some non-Western cultures might value collective cohesion rather more than individual autonomy.
This thesis is informed, however, by Gearty’s (2006) argument about function of human rights language which, he suggests, provides NGOs with a voice to represent the concerns of the most marginalised. This thesis contends, however, that Gearty’s work could be expanded by incorporating themes in Fricker’s (2003,
2006 and 2007) work on epistemic injustice, particularly in relation to the availability of concepts with which to articulate human rights violations.
Fricker (2003, 2006 and 2007) explores the concept of epistemic injustice as an umbrella concept. It draws together two main types of position where someone either suffers from a credibility deficit because of prejudice, that is, “testimonial injustice ”, or “hermeneutic injustice” where there is some significant structural obstacle that prevents the expression of a sense of unfairness. In terms of hermeneutic injustice, for example, Fricker (2007) states that “the powerful tend to have appropriate understandings of their experiences ready to draw on as they make sense of their social experiences, whereas the powerless are more likely to find themselves having some social experiences through a glass darkly, with at best ill-fitting meanings to draw on in the effort to render them intelligible” (Fricker, 2007:
148). This thesis applies this concept to describe circumstances characterised by a lack of a recognised concept with which to describe an injustice. Hermeneutic injustice could be said to exist in communities where the phenomenon of domestic violence did not exist as a recognised concept. In summary, epistemic injustice can be applied to situations where individuals or groups experience an impediment to communication because either their word is not believed or they are unable to express their experiences. Fricker argues that “[o]ur understanding of social experiences is central to our social understanding more generally. But this sphere of epistemic practice can be structurally prejudiced by unequal relations of power, so that some groups suffer a distinctive kind of epistemic injustice
—hermeneutical injustice” (Fricker, 2006: 96). As she explains, not being believed and not having the ability to express unfairness means that groups and individuals lack the power
40
to contest their political freedom. Fricker (2006) refers to this condition as generic epistemic injustice, that is, they suffer from loss and dysfunction.
In terms of human rights, Fricker (2006) concludes that the principles provide the concepts with which the oppressed can contest injustice. She considers ? equality to be a contested theoretical concept but, in practical terms, NGOs themselves categorise what is an injustice and construct their programmes to empower those whom they wish to target as beneficiaries. This thesis fleshes out Fricker’s concepts by examining the connections between specific theories of injustice and the activists
’ accounts of practices directed at overcoming human rights violations. It develops her ideas by associating them with the conceptual apparatus provided by other researchers working in the area of the expressions of injustice in oppressive contexts.
The developed concept informs the examination of the West Bengal accounts of domestic violence and the tools with which NGOs had at their disposal to articulate human rights violations. This project uncovered a complex web of linguistic, political and social practices that were represented as challenging the desired work of groups of NGOs. A second category within the taxonomy focused on depictions of community and cooperative programmes in relation to these practices. The local socio-economic contexts were also represented as being too weak to support full access to the framework. Activists in both case studies described their ability to engage with the human rights framework to a greater degree than those associated with the first component of the taxonomy.
2.1.2. Scholarly Literature that Maps onto “Power To” Empowerment
Sharp, Briggs, Yacoub and Hamed (2003) differentiate between “power over”, that is, a traditional development gender equality aim whereby women gain power at the expense of men, and “power to” in which the goal is to empower women to choose to act in certain ways.
12 This thesis is informed by these concepts in a general way
12 There is a wide literature on forms of women’s empowerment in development. Lukas (1974) first conceptualised the idea of “power-over” individual. Rowlands (1997) distinguished four different types of power which emerged from her exploration of empowerment in development projects in
Honduras. These types included: the “power over” which reflected structural power relations, the enhancement of individual agency in the “power to” type, the “power within” form which reflects a
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to describe empowerment strategies portrayed by activists. The second component in the taxonomy includes depiction s of “power to” strategies in activists’ accounts of community projects. This theme is developed in the analysis of research materials presented in Chapter Six.
This second component focuses on the deployment of human rights to underpin the objectives and operation of co-operative and community projects in West Bengal and London. The second element of the taxonomy focuses on the expression of human development and the capabilities approach within the accounts of some
West Bengal interviewees. This thesis feeds into the debate about human development by posing the question about whether Sen’s highly influential body of work in the area can be extended to incorporate an understanding of the situated experiences of activists’ work in community developments in West Bengal.
Sen’s work in the 1980s emerged from his critique of traditional economic approaches to welfare. His work provided a breakthrough in development thinking about social justice at that time when he attributed the cause of famines to socialpolitical factors, rather than arising from a lack of availability of food.
13 Glasius
(2007) describes the turn in direction in development practice from the neoliberal vision to one that incorporates a socio-economic, rights-based approach, particularly to the Right to Food.
Sen’s (1999) human development approach focused on enhancing individual human capabilities and freedoms to achieve decent standards of living. S en’s
(1999, 2009) approach can be summarised as a critique of the domination of theories of ideal just societies and institutions. Sen (1999) suggests that it is intuitively more important to focus on identifying the best approach to eliminate the most egregious injustices, such as poverty, to advance global justice, than to identify principles of perfectly just societies, if this were indeed possible. A central psychological sense of power and, finally, the “power with” form developed within collectivities. It could be argued here that the work of NGOs in the studies was primarily targeted at enhancing
“power with” and therefore, this form would have no explanatory use in this thesis. This thesis, however, found it more useful to categorise represented strategies as “power to” or “power over” in the work of NGOs in both case studies. It is argued here, therefore, that Sharp, Briggs, Yacoub and
Hamed’s (2003) differentiation between “power to” and “power over” can be used to examine activists’ accounts of empowerment strategies in the thesis. This thesis found little opportunity to consider the “power within” form of empowerment in activists’ accounts.
13 Sen, A. (1982).
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pillar of Sen’s idea of emancipation focuses on individual capabilities. Sen states that “[a] person’s capability can be characterized as well-being freedom (reflecting the freedom to advance one’s own well-being), and agency freedom (concerned with the freedom to advance whatever goals and values a person has reason to advance)” (Sen, 2009: 288-9). In summary, Sen’s work is directed at emancipating people so that they can freely pursue their own choices informed by their own values.
A key theme, allied to the liberal orientation of Sen’s approach, is the role of the individual citizen in terms of being an active agent. This role extends to both the arena of public debate as well as the responsibilities that freedom brings which includes those towards other fellow citizens, societies and species. This thesis places itself in the human development discourse by extending aspects of Sen’s perspective in two ways. First, it shifts the spotlight away from the individual towards the community. It does so by encompassing a broader understanding of situated experiences of NGOs engaged in community projects. Second, this thesis unpacks the implications of activists’ different senses of agency in response to their perceptions of local socio-economic contexts. This thesis argues that one aspect of
Sen’s thesis that could be strengthened relates to his acceptance of a particular model of what constitutes a good life. The focus of individual rights in both the liberal human rights framework and Sen’s capability theory are in tension with depicted local socio-economic value s ystems in activists’ accounts. These were characterised as promoting group rights. Activists in West Bengal represented a disjunction between visions that incorporated individual human rights as an ethos and the cooperative programmes that were based on group rights in practice. The thesis argues that Sen’s conceptualisations would benefit from a more nuanced understanding of the constraints on citizen agency. It would be strengthened by examining how individual capabilities can be broadened to encompass a more comprehensive understanding of community development.
2.1.3.
Scholarly Literature that Maps onto “Power Over” Empowerment
The third element in the deployment of human rights is defined by its role as a vehicle to empower beneficiaries by overcoming oppressive power strategies. A group of West Bengal activists described missions which this thesis argues could be interpreted as efforts to pull communities out of cultural norms and towards more
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Western hegemonic standards. This is compared to London activists who represented beneficiaries as becoming dislodged from mainstream society and, consequently, their ability to enjoy human rights was impaired. These interviewees described empowerment strategies aimed at pushing beneficiaries back into the mainstream.
The London based activists described the function of human rights as a vehicle to challenge prejudice in bureaucratic structures and influence gatekeepers. Fricker’s
(2003, 2006) work on epistemic injustice both informs and is informed by this thesis.
This work was cited earlier in this chapter. In comparison, West Bengal NGO actors expressed a disconnection between what empowerment programmes aimed to achieve and the ability of the local institutional infrastructures to support such activities. This is unlike the second component because the activists described programme objectives that were targeted at overcoming perceived challenges to their desired actions. The West Bengal activists described many of these programmes as being microfinance or microcredit projects. Themes in activists’ accounts associated these programmes as being driven by a Western political project. The thesis feeds into scholarly conversations by examining a disjunction in activists’ accounts between this view and that of the situated local value systems relating to economic empowerment. The West Bengal case study findings map onto scholarly debates which contend that the framework is underpinned by a Western cultural imperialism and neo-liberal orientation.
The debates in this area gained force as the Asian economics declined and the
Asian values force withered. At a result of this economic decline, international financial institutions considered that all countries should adopt the Economic
Growth Model. Rodrik (2006) and Williamson (2000) describe the trade, financial and regulation liberalisation policies that constituted this model, otherwise known as the Washington Consensus. Developing countries were encouraged to participate in Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) which were implemented from the
1980s. Under this scheme, World Bank loans are conditional upon the adoption of neoliberal macroeconomic policies which have the stated aim of increasing economic growth.
14 As WHO states, these policies reflected the neoliberal model that drives globalisation. WHO draws attention to adverse consequences of SAPs
14 For a detailed exploration of this area see, for example, Rodrik (2006) or Williamson (2000).
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that have arisen from, for example, cuts in health spending by some countries that implemented these programmes. This in turn led to greater maternal mortality and worsening nutrition in children in these areas. Microfinance projects sprang up to replace SAPs in some areas with the aim of alleviating poverty.
15
This thesis feeds into the conversation about how to assess the impact of microfinance projects at the grassroots level. It unpacks the perspectives of activists, particularly in relation to situated experiences of disconnection between the Western ideas of sustainable income generation projects and representations of the significance of local empowerment strategies. This research specifically places itself in the discourse on women’s empowerment, women’s human rights and gender equality later in the thesis.
It unpacks the association between women’s empowerment and microfinance projects in terms of activists’ perception of agency later in the thesis.
This section continues by contextualising the position of NGOs in West Bengal and
London by considering their position in relation to the state and civil society in their respective countries. The elements in this section build to an overall conclusion: it is asserted that sufficient commonalities exist in this context to enable an empirical comparison of their practices to be made.
This discussion starts by examining general definitions of civil society and NGOs. It then presents Lewis’s (2014) critique of what he argues is a simplistic binary distinction in the scholarly literature between third sector organisations working in what are often refer red to as “developed” compared with “developing” economies. It then examines the historical influence of Western colonialism the development of
NGOs and considers how this influenced their later role in spreading the neoliberal
15 In terms of definitions of poverty and its measurement, see Kaldor, Kumar, and Seckinelgin
(2009). They discuss how there are common narratives within the international development community about how poverty should be defined, for example, the World Bank’s use of an economic income measure of below $1.25 dollars a day as a benchmark, such that people living on less than this are considered to be poor. Estimates of absolute poverty vary according to various measures, but about 1.4 billion lived on less than $1.25 per day in 2005 (World Bank Development
Indicators for 2008). The common international poverty line has been roughly $1 a day, or more precisely $1.25 at 2005 purchasing-power parity (PPP). The United Nations employs several indices, one of the key statistics being The Human Development Index (HDI) which provides a more holistic view of an individual’s access to bundles of goods and services which would enable them to achieve their own preferred lifestyle. In addition, the UN produces the Human Poverty Index.
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agenda. The section considers the role of NGOs in post-Cold War India by focusing on their relationship with the state as well as their role in democratisation. It then examines how the development environment in which NGOs operate can be influenced by the Indian State’s priorities, such as funding restrictions and the security agenda. The section then examines some of the contextual factors that shaped the work of NGOs in the UK over the past century, focusing on the pressure for professionalisation and the increasing prominence of collaborative partnerships with government. It describes NGOs’ role in the 2000s which was influenced by the political context resulting from New Labour’s hybridisation of neo-liberalism with neo-communitarianism which was aimed at addressing social exclusion in the UK.
Finally, the section argues that NGOs working in India and the UK can be compared in an empirical study of social activists’ representations of their organisations’ practices. It, therefore, provides a rationale for the selection of the two case studies which is developed further in Chapter Four.
Mercer (2002) suggests that civil society and NGOs have become synonymous with each other. Hilton, Mckay, Crowson and Mouhot (2013) state that the term “NGO” was first used in the American New D eal to “describe the private organizations that played a role in the foundations of the United Nations at the end of the Second
World War” (Hilton, Mckay, Crowson and Mouhot, 2013: 5). The literature focuses on NGOs as not-for-profit, voluntary organisations that are self-governing, private, and primarily target their activities towards enhancing the quality of life of those perceived as most disadvantaged. White (1994) suggests that the term “civil society” can be used in a variety of ways and functions more meaningfully as a pragmatic rather than a theoretical concept.
Lewis and Kanji argue that “civil society” is a widely contested term but they suggest it “is usually taken to mean a realm of space in which there exists a set of organizational actors that are not part of the household, the state or the market”
(Lewis and Kanji, 2009: 64). The authors suggest that a Western perspective views civil society, or the third sector, as a domain where civil democratic values can be reinforced. Jalali (2008) agrees that development NGOs in what are described as developing economies “have become the “favourites” of international development agencies which see such organizations as critical actors, determining the successful achievement of the project on economic and political liberalization,
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worldwide” (Jalali, 2008: 163). Lewis and Kanji (2009) however compare this perspective commonly found in the literature with their less harmonious view of the role of NGOs. They argue that the relationship between NGOs and the state is often characterised by power struggles and negotiation. Lewis (2014) argues that the literature also often invokes a binary distinction between NGOs working in states that are characterised as having a “developing” economy compared with those working in “developed” countries. Indeed, this thesis studies the perspectives of social activists working in countries at different levels of the HDI, that is, in West
Bengal and London. As is explained later in the thesis, the aim of using these case studies was to examine the accounts of NGOs operating in one of the lower HDI tiers and to compare their experiences with those at the highest level of development
– thus to some extent adopting this binary distinction to define a sampling strategy for a comparison in which significant differences were to be expected.
It is not the case, however, that the economic environments in West Bengal and
London are so different that comparisons cannot be made, or only stark differences are to be expected. The taxonomies which were constructed from the examination of the research materials are elaborated in Chapters Six and Seven. They provide examples from social activists’ accounts of commonalities in the implementation of human rights and women’s human rights in these two local contexts. Indeed, Lewis
(2014) critiques the binary distinction in the literature between third sector organisations working in “developed”, or those taken to be wealthier states, and
“developing”, or those categorised as poorer countries. Using this binary distinction, the literature, therefore, contrasts the roles of NGOs between different economic environments each of which is supposedly homogenous. However, each economic environment is, in fact, more heterogeneous than often assumed. Lewis (2014) argues that this distinction was based on historical differences of the scale of human need. This binary classification does perpetuate, however, the colonial and postcolonial construction of parallel worlds of knowledge and the inferred ‘othering’ relationships between Western and non-Western countries, he suggests. Lewis
(2014) points out that critics have argued that this binary distinction is too simplistic and outmoded particularly given the increased global interconnectedness. There are two reasons for this. The first is that the scholarly literature is often “eurocentric in the suggestion that the ideal of development is simply an end point best
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represented by Western industrial democratic society” (Lewis, 2014: 1141). The second is that there are such variations between categories that some of the discussions in the literature on the third sector can apply to a range of economies.
An example of where such discussion can apply across categories is described by
Ishkanian and Ali (forthcoming) in their analysis of civil society opposition to austerity policies in England.
16 Poverty is now being created in pockets within countries formerly considered wealthy, Lewis (2014) suggests. Many of the policy measures in response to this crisis in the West would be familiar to those living in non-Western countries. Lewis (2014) calls for a more unified response to research involving third sector organisations. He suggests that this approach would more clearly expose the international political and economic domination of the West underpinning the wider global political economy that is currently concealed. Lewis
(2014) agrees with scholars, such as Jones (2000), who call for an exploration of converging policy and theory across the traditional boundaries of “developed” and
“developing” countries.
This thesis examines the perspectives of social activists working in West Bengal and London in relation to the implementation of human rights and women’s human rights. It recognises the commonalities and distinctions in the accounts of activists in the two case studies across the traditional boundaries of classifications of economic development. The two taxonomies that were constructed in this empirical study draw together activists’ representations by producing family resemblance accounts of the implementation of human rights and women’s human rights principles. The findings of the research, therefore, are in alignment with Lewis’s
(2014) call for a more unified approach to exploring the work of NGOs in the scholarly literature, even though the starting point was a sampling strategy based upon a binary distinction. Some of the common historical origins of civil society in both India and the UK also lend strength to the argument in favour of using such a unified approach as is explored later in this section
Whilst Ghosh (2009) argues that voluntarism has historically been woven into the fabric of Indian social structure it is also the case that the origins of many modern
INGOs working in India and domestic organisations based in the UK arose from
16 These policies resulted in substantial cut in public funding in many countries across Europe following the 2008 global financial crisis.
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specific societies, particularly those associated with the colonisation by European countries. An understanding of the precold war origins of NGOs’ later role in the provision of international aid will contribute to the argument that it is empirically possible to compare the practices of NGOs working in the UK and West Bengal.
The predominant view in the literature is that this role historically originates from
European colonisation activities. Lewis and Kanji (2009) trac e the origins of NGOs’ increasing involvement with international aid during the second half of the twentieth century to the historical traditions of philanthropy and self-help. They trace the development of Western NGOs from a range of national-level, issued based organisations in the late eighteenth century, such as the abolition of the slave trade.
Hilton, Mckay, Crowson and Mouhot (2013) also trace the origins of the modern
NGOs as arising out of specific societies, such as the Methodist Missionary Society and the Church Missionary Society, both established in the 18 th century, as well as the Anti-Slavery Society founded in the nineteenth century and their focus on single issues.
Hilton, Mckay, Crowson and Mouhot (2013) suggest that the colonisation by
European countries of what was then referred to as the less developed world brought missionaries whose activities often included prototypical NGO initiatives that attempted to bring about improvements a range of welfare and empowerment approaches. The legacy of the colonisation continued to be experienced during the post-colonial period in the 1960s. White (1994) proposes a hypothesis about postcolonialism in the 1960s and the Western democratic project. He suggests that “it was felt by many that a combination of wise institutional bequests by the colonizers and gradual social-economic improvement would lead to the consolidation of democracy [in nonWestern states]” (White, 1994: 386).
A general understanding of the role of NGOs in development following the end of the Cold War provides a context to the later examination of the specific roles of
Indian and UK NGOs. The post-cold war role of NGOs has been described in two contrasting ways. Lewis and Kanji (2009) describe the first view as NGOs as flexible agents of change, aiding the spread of neoliberal democratic norms of donor states and delivering private services more efficiently and effectively than state agencies. NGOs, from this perspective, are active agents who are key
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participants in global market forces which are helping those in developing countries to develop economically according to traditional capitalist models. Proponents of this model claimed that development NGOs became engaged with this particular vision rather than with enhancing economic and social rights.
Lewis and Kanji (2009) refer to the intensification of NGO activities in the 1970s as evidenced by their involvement in UN conferences and international UN policy processes. The golden era of NGOs extended from the late 1980s to mid-1990s.
International NGOs and their involvement in development corresponded with a shift towards finding solutions to global poverty and inequality among non-state agencies.
Fowler (2000), for example, describes the pre-eminent idea of the promotion of a partnership relationship between NGOs and the international aid system at this time. Governments were tasked with nation-building and NGOs were tolerated as marginal contributors. The 1980s saw a change in which emerged a complex interplay of domestic and institutional forces, Fowler (2000) suggests, whereby there was a relational convergence between governments, business and civic institutions around development agendas. Partnerships, he explains, became the preferred method of forming relationships with aid agencies. This model was viewed as a practical solution to the failings in international aid and as a mechanism to increase foreign penetration. Fowler (2000) proposes that it would be incorrect to assert that partnership as complementarity is always harmonious. Instead he suggests that there are contexts when a harmonious and collaborative relationship is practically appropriate and others when a more adversarial position is adopted.
As Lewis (2014) pointed out, the scholarly literature often promotes the ideal model of development as being represented by Western conceptions of democratic society and this has reinforced the binary classification distinctions. Glasius (2007) argues that the economic and social rights language failed to inspire contemporary global civil society since it was alien to the prevailing post-Cold war ideology. The
West, characterised by market capitalist and liberal values, was seen to have won the ideological war, she suggests, and the way forward was viewed as being through a democratic project which facilitated economic growth to lift poorer countries out of poverty as resources trickled down to the more deprived
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communities. The neoliberal model as a specific conception of capitalism includes the spread of free market economic policy and the rolling back of the state. In this model, governments came under pressure to reduce their involvement in the delivery of public services and NGOs took over that function.
Critics of the economic growth model, such as neo-Marxists (Frank, Amin, Cardoso) have viewed development as a process that causes dependency of poorer nations on richer donor states, reinforcing and continuing unequal power relations following the previous era of colonial exploitation as the neoliberal capitalist project unfolded.
Their perspective was that the underpinning power structures needed to be exposed and destroyed to enable the poorer nations to escape from the dependency relationship, enabling them to pursue their own more appropriate development processes.
At this point, mention needs to be made about the current global debate on the relationship between globalisation and poverty. Kaldor, Kumar, and Seckinelgin
(2009) cover the various positions on globalisation. These can be placed on a dimension with one extreme viewing the achievement of poverty reduction to be measured in terms of greater access to global markets in contrast with those who oppose all forms of globalisation on the presumed grounds that it generates extremes of wealth and poverty. Proponents of the former position would call for the expansion of democracy whilst those of the latter position would campaign for the strengthening of the state.
The role of NGOs in the global political domination of the West has traditionally been described as one that strengthens civil society which in turns supports the global neoliberal democratic project. Bebbington (2005) states NGOs were hailed as “democratizers of development (Clark, 1991), sources of development alternatives (Drabek, 1987), vehicles for popular participation (Farrington and
Bebbington, 1993), advocates for the poor, and so on” (Bebbington, 2005: 1). He points out, however, that few scholars have suggested that NGOs might not have succeeded at fostering democratisation. A contrasting view of the role of NGOs in development, for example, is provided by Escobar (1995), as quoted by Eade
(1997), who, just as controversially, views them as participating in the destruction of
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indigenous cultures as the West imposes its values and visions on the rest of the world, echoing previous colonial imperialist history.
One scholar in the area argues that there has been a failure to analyse the political impact of NGOs which “has encouraged the tendency to take NGOs’ positive role in democratization as axiomatic. This is a significant issue to raise not least because of the key role NGOs now play in donor-, government- and even World Bankfunded development projects and programmes as key agents of democratization ”
(Mercer, 2002: 6). Jalali (2008), citing Carothers and Ottaway (2000), points out that those Western governments such as the United States have significantly increased aid to promote the development of society. Mercer (2002) argues that the normative assumptions that dominate Western literature in the area of the politics of development also fail to acknowledge the complexity and diversity of relationships between NGOs, civil society and democracy. She raises the argument that whilst some NGO activity bolsters democratisation in some contexts it weakens it in others. Mercer (2002) explores such contextual factors as: focusing on the implications of local dynamics and histories; the interplay of different ethnic, religious, political and economic contexts in the civil society environment which are likely to be replicated or exacerbated rather than challenged; the politicisation of
NGO activity driven by the increase in large-scale donor funding for the provision of social welfare. Mercer (2002) refers to the scholarly literature as arguing that, whilst the Western liberal democratic perspective views a strong civil society and state as essential complementary elements, this inhibits the ability to recognise that civil society can form independent spaces in which to pursue and negotiate a range of political democratic agendas.
In the specific case of the post-Cold war role of Indian NGOs, the ability to pursue a range of agendas has been shaped by their relationship with the state following
Independence in 1947. Baviskar (2001) suggests that, in the middle of the twentieth century, the state was expected to commit to social transformation but by the 2000s
NGOs were expected to perform the same role. He describes the increasing reliance on NGOs to provide public social provision as coinciding with the rise of a post-developmentalist neoliberal economy in what he suggests is often described as a shift from inefficient states to efficient markets. This section explores this
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change in NGOs’ role by first outlining some aspects of their historical position vis-
à-vis the state.
Ghosh (2009) argues that the ethos of voluntarism is not new in India but rather “[i]t is rather woven into the very fabric of Indian social structure” (Ghosh, 2009: 233) and he traces the first generation of welfare NGOs back to the work and ideologies of Buddha, Vivekananda, Gandhi, Tagore, Phule and Ambedkar. Sahoo (2013) states that following the colonial rule, India under Nehru adopted a “high-modernist” ideology of development which resulted in the development of an extensive array of free basic social services. She claims that organisations run according to Gandhi’s values became increasingly important in the delivery of basic health and education programmes, for example. They were included in the Five Year Plans which resulted in the establishment of national platforms dedicated to those organisations involved in community and rural development programmes.
Sahoo (2013) describes Indira Gandhi’s regime as restricting the autonomy and functioning of these NGOs, particularly during the Emergency rule which was imposed on 26 June 1975 as a reaction to the government’s loss of capacity to govern. Under this rule, citizens’ civil and political rights were suspended and only non-political social welfare delivery NGOs were promoted. She explains that the post-Emergency Janata government promoted voluntary social work as well as proving significant financial and political support for Indian NGOs. The Janata government drew its ideological legitimacy from Gandhian socialist principles, she states. The more favourable political environment was further bolstered by the Rajiv
Gandhi government in the seventh Five Year Plan. This Plan significantly increased funds available to NGOs in the social sector. In addition, the Council for
Advancement of People’s Action and Rural Technology (CAPART) was established in 1986 to support NGOs working in the development of underprivileged sections of society.
Batley and Rose (2011) examine the relations between government and NGOs that collaborate in improving public service provision in Bangladesh, India and Pakistan in the 1980s. They state that much of the focus fell on NGOs because, whilst they were not the main state provider, the third sector is the most likely to enter into a collaborative partnership with government to provide these services. The authors
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state that NGOs were brought in to address governmental failures in many developing countries in the areas of adequate provision of public services, particularly in the areas of basic health, water, sanitation and also, but to a lesser extent, of basic education. Batley and Rose (2011) critique what they describe as the standard approach taken in the literature which is that NGOs respond passively to the partnership relationship. The authors found that NGOs in their study were aware of the risks of collaborating with governments and they adopted an array of tacit strategies that maintained their autonomy and capacity for influencing policy.
In the case of India, Batley (2011) states NGOs’ relationship with government is relatively decentralised and, consequently, is of little political significance for the state.
Sahoo (2013) examines the relationships between the Indian Government and
NGOs operating in that country after the adoption of the World Bank ’s and IMF’s
Structural Adjustment Programmes in 1991. This resulted in the rolling back of the
Indian State from social welfare provision and the creation of state partnerships with civil society. As part of these loan agreements and “the World Bank’s neo-liberal conditions for aid, India agreed to promote the (apolitical) NGO sector while limiting the forms of ‘oppositional [read, politicised] civil society’ as a part of the global agenda of good governance ”, (Sahoo, 2013: 263). She explains that the NGO sector promoted neoliberal values and drew those in local communities into entrepreneurial schemes and practices which deflected action away from socioeconomic and political structures that caused poverty. Sahoo (2013) continues by examining the role of NGOs and the implications for democratisation in India, specifically that the unintended consequences of some NGO delivery approaches creates a culture of organised dependency at the grassroots level. Ghosh (2009) also argues that Indian NGOs are not an alternative to the state and the public sector. He contends that “[i]rrespective of the achievements of a number of NGOs in India, there are vast areas of darkness, shortcomings and failures ” (Ghosh, 2009:
239). He explores this contention in relation to the influence of kinship on NGOs’ work. He argues that “NGOs in India are not able to escape the institution of kinship even though they are able to escape the influence of caste. The more cosy environment of the NGOs, particularly the smaller ones, makes them more indulgent towards the claims of family and kinship and they find it easy to
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accommodate the wife, the nephew and the daughter-in-law than the civil societ y”
(Ghosh, 2009: 245).
The institution of kinship within the smaller NGOs in India shapes their agendas at the grassroots level. The institutional framework at the state level also constrains the parameters within which such organisations can work. For example, the Indian government has restricted organisations’ access to international aid in that country which constrains their independent activity. Jalali (2008) describes India as having a vibrant civic society and that most voluntary organizations apply for government recognition as this provides them with access to central and state government resources. She provides an overview of the funding position of Indian NGOs 17 . If an organisation is not registered with the government, for example, it is unable to receive foreign funds. Political parties and any associated bodies are unable to receive foreign funding. Many grassroots organisations, for example women’s groups, do not receive funding from the state or from international aid donations,
Jalali (2008) explains.
Jalali (2008) covers the history of the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA) from its enactment in 1976 with the objective of guarding against foreign intervention that could have potentially destabilised the country. She also shows that the Seventh Five Year Plan (1986-1990) referred to earlier in this section recognised the role of NGOs in development and how this forged a more collaborative relationship between the government and a range of NGOs. She demonstrates how India still uses restrictive legislative practices to determine whether local activists have access to foreign donor funding. Jalali (2008) distinguishes between “high politics” policy impact of transnational organisations in such issue areas as security and the national interests of states, and “low politics” issue areas for example, those that she describes as less threatening in terms of policy impact such as environmental, women’s rights and economic matters. She points out that India uses legislative practices to restrict foreign funding of domestic minority groups, for example Dalits and Kashmiri Muslims, but it permits such
17 Lang (2013) states that national surveys have discovered that the NGO sector has now increased to a million NGOs in India and that is the result of economic liberalisation and decentralisation. Jalali
(2008) describes the increase in the number of NGOs in India that receive foreign funding and finds that the top 25 recipient organisations, mostly those with a religious background, received 22.5% of the total funds in 2001-2002. She discovered that these organisations predominantly provide welfare services such as health, education and disaster relief.
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funding of women’s groups. Low caste and ethnic rights would seem to be a relatively high politics issue but women’s rights seem to be classified as a relatively nonpolitical, low politics issue area. She suggests further that “Dalits are the poorest group in Indian society yet they receive minimal amounts of foreign funds”,
(Jalali, 2008:177).
Another example of how the development environment in which NGOs operate can be influenced by the Indian State’s priorities is provided by Basu (2011). Basu
(2011) describes the influence of the government’s security agenda on development work and, therefore, an aspect of the context in which NGOs work in
India. She argues that “security discourse has dissolved developmental issues”
(Basu, 2011: 390). She elaborates this idea by suggesting that deliberative poverty relief in the more deprived areas of India is being displaced by urgent security activity. This is associated with the representation of left wing extremism as a parallel regime and as political disorder She states that “[i]n the Naxalism 18 as terrorism version, development initiatives are collapsed within the security imperative and are taken as part of the counter-insurgency strategy. Overall, the effect of linking development with security has the effect of feeding development goals into security goals such as state legitimacy, state survival and maintaining the stability of the system” (Basu, 2011: 390).
This section has explained how various factors, such as the European colonisation missions, the role of NGOs in the democratic neoliberal project and the local as well as state-level institutional agendas have shaped the context within which NGOs in
India operate. The environment in which UK NGOs work also exhibits similar contextual factors which shape their work.
The next part of this section describes these factors particularly focusing on the collaborative partnership with the government in relation to the delivery of social welfare and participation in governments’ political agendas. This exploration will be used further to ground the assertion that there are sufficient commonalities in the
18 “The Naxalite Movement, which is the name given to this Maoist-inspired rebellion, is considered to be the most serious internal security challenge the Indian state has ever faced” explains Basu
(2011: 373).
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contextual position of both Indian and UK NGOs visà-vis the state and civil society to enable an empirical comparison of their practices to be made.
Hilton, Mckay, Crowson and Mouhot (2013) state that the National Council for
Voluntary Organisations claims that, using the broadest definition of the term, there are over 900,000 voluntary organisations in the UK. Lewis (1999) states that, at the turn of the century, the relationship between the state and the voluntary sector was reasonably equally balanced because all social provision was for local finance and administration. She suggests that the conceptualisation of the voluntary-statutory relationship was strengthened in the post-war settlement. The reason for this Lewis
(1999) explains is because Beveridge supported and believed in the idea of voluntary action, harking back to the ethical purposes of charity 50 years before the establishment of the Welfare State in 1948.
The European colonisation missions that shaped the agenda of international aid organisations during the past century were described earlier in this section. Some of the institutional influences on these organisations arising from increasing collaborative partnerships also came to bear on domestic NGOs based in the UK.
The environment in the UK over recent history is one that can be characterised by an increasing involvement in social inclusion agendas as well as an increasing pressure to become more professionalised .
Scholars in this area, for example
Hilton, Mckay, Crowson and Mouhot (2013) examine the professionalisation of international NGOs that originated in the UK as well as those in the domestic civil society sector in the UK. They argue that politics was privatised in 20 th century
Britain as professional citizens found new ways to engage with issues of the day by supporting and participating in a variety of civil society groups which increasingly became termed NGOs. This way of viewing the development of NGOs, they suggest, captures the professional spirit of these organisations. The authors claim that as UK citizens became increasingly educated during this period they came to view mass political parties as lacking sufficient expertise to deal adequately with a range of modern liberal market democratic concerns such as: the reform of social welfare; the regulation of the economy; and, the interpretation of human rights.
Hilton, Mckay, Crowson and Mouhot (2013) describe how the expansion of the professions in the 1940s brought an increasing number of experts who established voluntary organisations to tackle the increasing complexities of these democratic
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concerns. They describe, for example, how legal experts formed the human rights group JUSTICE and Amnesty as well as the way in which engineers and development economists contributed to Oxfam and Christian Aid. Hilton, Mckay,
Crowson and Mouhot (2013) contend that the political has, therefore, become personal.
In addition, according to Hilton, McKay, Crowson and Mouhout (2013), while political scientists have a tendency to represent NGOs as lobbying bodies, this fails to capture the wide range of other activities that they engage in such as disability rights, education, international development, social care and social exclusion. They claim that “[d]espite their title, NGOs cannot be placed one side of a line which clearly demarcates them from government. “They are embedded in the detailed work of government, whether it has been through changing the terms of the debate, through their representative work on countless official committees, through the revolving door between Whitehall, party politics, and NGO careers …. in the modern expert-based and technocratic state, the NGO is at one and the same time a wing of the s tate, and an agent acting against it”, (Hilton, Mckay, Crowson and
Mouhot, 2013: 16). The authors claim that the entwining of government and NGOs, particularly the acceptance of government funding, suggests that the boundaries have become blurred between the two sectors. They argue that there is no identifiable demarcation between government and NGOs in any meaningful sense and the idea is that they share the same place and endeavour. The authors suggest that voluntary organisations have often been complicit in the liberal democratic orientation which supports Western-style market economies. On the other hand, the authors content that NGOs have also continued a role of identifying and presenting social ills. Indeed the authors suggest that whilst NGOs have positioned themselves as alternatives to the status quo their work can be characterised by small scale social action rather than tackling more fundamental social transformation issues.
Chater (2008) also examines how the boundaries between government and NGOs in the UK have become blurred as they have entered into collaborative partnership relationships. He argues that, in a similar way to non-Western countries, the voluntary and community sector in the UK experienced growth since the 1980s and now plays a central role within the domestic welfare state. “This growth has been
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driven predominantly by a sustained influx of statutory funding as part of the modern ‘contract state’ and ‘quasi market’ approach to public service delivery”
(Chater 2008: 1). Roberts (2011) describes the development of the partnership relationship as referred to in the Compact on Relations between the Government and the Voluntary and Community Sector in England (1998) agreement. This
Compact governed collaborative partnership relations between the Government and civil society organisations. It focused on safeguarding the autonomy and special characteristics of voluntary organisations whilst being contracted to deliver social welfare services on behalf of the Government. Accountability and transparency measures were introduced to complement the introduction of the
Compact.
The government’s political agenda continued to shape UK NGOs’ frame of operation throughout the 2000s and beyond. Fyfe (2005) considers the repositioning of the third sector within the Third Way political philosophical approach of New Labour during this period. The government attempted to combine neoliberalism with a neo-communitarian approach in which the voluntary sector was seen as playing a vital role in social cohesion. The Coalition Government in the
2010-2015 administration has promoted neoliberal version of the role of civil society as an element within its “Big Society” vision. In line with this agenda, non-state actors were encouraged to become more entrepreneurial in terms of running public services.
Baviskar (2001) argues that civil society in both India and the UK countries is playing an increasingly prominent role in social welfare provision in contemporary times. The emergence of the collaborative partnership model between the government and NGOs in both countries has facilitated the delivery of this provision but it has also led to increased accountability responsibilities. Lewis and Kanji
(2009) suggest that accountability poses a particularly complex challenge because of NGOs’ multiple constituencies all of which will be associated with different bureaucratic requirements and interests. Baur and Schmitz (2012) argue that one of the consequences of the emergence of partnerships is the greater scrutiny directed at NGOs. They focus on the interactions between corporations and NGOs. The authors suggest that such increased demand for accountability by a variety of watchdogs leads to a greater likelihood of cooptation and a compromise of NGOs’
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independence. Baur and Schmitz (2012) suggest that a particularly common way that NGOs become co-opted is through corporate sponsorship. In addition, they claim that the accountability literature in the field has drawn attention to the phenomenon whereby NGOs pay too much attention to donors rather than to their beneficiaries.
The increased pressure for accountability is a factor common to both NGOs in India and the UK but there are other commonalities which are leading to similarities between the practices of these organisations in the two countries. This section has described the fact that voluntarism has historically been woven into the fabric of
Indian social structure but also how origins of many modern INGOs working in India and domestic organisations based in the UK arose from specific societies, particularly those associated with colonisation by European countries. It also describes the political and economic environments in these two countries after the
Cold-War, particularly the partnerships that NGOs working in both countries formed with governments to deliver social welfare. It also described the operational commonalities arising from collaborative partnership relationships and how increasingly professionalised NGO practices are crossing international boundaries within the wider neoliberal democratic global agenda. Specific political aspects of the local contexts were examined, for example the influence of the security agenda in India and the social cohesion aspiration in the UK. It is argued here, therefore, that there are sufficient commonalities in the contextual position of both Indian and
UK NGOs vis-
à-vis the state and civil society to enable an empirical comparison of their practices to be made.
The section above has described various aspects of the position of Indian and UK
NGOs in relation to the state and civil society. As Chapter 4 describes, this study here is a comparative study of the situated experiences of NGOs based in two countries, which are characterised by being at different stages of development.
India was ranged 136 th of 186 in the HDI in 2012 and the UK was ranked 26 th . The thesis was inspired by India’s tradition and culture in respect of women’s human rights, described in Sen’s work (1992, 1999) in the area of gender inequality. In
2012, India was ranked 132 nd of 148 countries on the Gender Inequality Index compared with the UK which was placed 34 th . For practical reasons, the project was restricted to drawing samples from one state rather than attempting to cover an
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entire nation. It enabled a more consistent understanding of activist accounts of socio-economic contexts. The project built on the previous research on the work of
NGOs in West Bengal, and London was selected as the second case study because of the number and diversity of NGOs serving a richly multicultural population in that city.
While the section above contextualised the NGOs’ position of Indian and UK NGOs in visà-vis the state, top-level development discourses also influence the work such organisations undertake. The following provides a brief summary of the inclusion of human rights in the development discourse. Robinson (2005) suggests that the human rights framework reinforces social justice principles that had previously underpinned development theory and practice. The development discourse continued to reflect concepts and goals such as “empowerment”, “participation”,
“gender” and “rights”. At the top-level of the framework, the UN Women
Organisation claims that it is dedicated to gender equality and the empowerment of women. There is little mention of an objective to promote women’s human rights as a specific framework.
19 In comparison, this project explores how activists’ accounts reflect the changing nature of human rights discourse as it is contested at the grassroots level.
Robinson was the second UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, serving between 1997 and 2002. Glasius (2007) points out that she campaigned vigorously for the recognition of economic and social rights, and she changed developmental specialists’ views of extreme poverty to being the worst violation of human rights abuse rather than being an intractable problem. Robinson refers to her Presidential
Address to the World Bank in 2001 in which she defined a rights-based approach to development:
A rights-based approach is a conceptual framework for the process of human development that is normatively based on international human rights standards and operationally directed to promoting and protecting human rights. The rights-based approach integrates the norms, standards and principles of the international human rights system into the plans, policy and processes of development (Robinson, 2005:
38).
19 http://www.unwomen.org/en/about-us accessed on 15 April, 2014.
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The human rights-based approach to development emphasised accountability by bestowing agency to beneficiaries as rights-holders and increasing the governance capacity of countries, and was seen as a response to the failure of the more traditional models to alleviate poverty.
Uvin (2002) referred to in Glasius (2007), has defined three levels of NGO engagement with human rights. These include: a rhetorical incorporation of rights, a more in-depth add-on where some aspects of human rights are included as objectives of programmes and, finally, a fully-integrated approach to the vision and mission of the development agency. Glasius (2007) wonders how far International
Non-Governmental Organisations (INGOs) and development agencies are currently engaging with rights-based discourse and practice. She concludes that many mainstream human rights and development agencies are adopting economic and social rights as a frame. This thesis contributes to an enrichment of the understanding of NGO engagement with human rights by framing the definition in terms of their sense of agency. This theme is developed later in the thesis in
Chapter Six.
Cornwall and Nyamu-Musembi (2004) contend that human rights drive UN international agencies who often work in partnership with NGOs to deliver services to beneficiaries and, therefore, objectives such as equality would be incorporated into, and integrated with, development programmes and advocacy practice at the grassroots level. The authors argue that there is no single rights-based development approach and they have constructed a typology of the ways in which human rights are deployed within different rights-based approaches to development. These include: a normative framework to guide practice; a set of instruments with which to evaluate intervention effectiveness; as a component to be incorporated into their approach; and as a rationale for initiating an intervention.
Cornwall and Nyamu-Musembi (2004) suggest that “[a]ny version of the rightsbased approach needs to be analysed in terms of its normative content …and how this vision is contrasted with existing practice and turned into a basis for reorientating development practice and practitioners” (2004: 1430). They ask whether there is any evidence to assess whether passive beneficiaries become active rights-holders. In other words, how NGOs deploy human rights and whether they
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empower the recipients of their services are empirical questions. Cornwall and
NyamuMusembi conclude that “in the current international climate, however,
‘rights-based’ hopes are as good as it gets….Rights talk is above all talk of politics, of power and of social justice” (2004: 1433). Conversely, Robinson suggests, such talk has the potential to alienate development specialists who consider that the international standards of human rights threatens a sense of national sovereignty, despite that fact that the framework is focused on the responsibilities of the state to its citizens. Usually the assumption is that the state is held to have specific obligations towards its own citizens but, with the recent impact of globalisation, this reliance may prove to be inadequate in addressing issues such as poverty.
Robinson (2005) argues that these international human rights standards can be used as objective benchmarks to determine whether or not states are protecting the interests of their citizens in key areas. If, however, the state is failing in its duties to implement social welfare and human rights obligations, this could also be seen as a violation towards its citizens, as discussed by Guerrina and Zalewski (2007).
Human rights can be used to identify and form a basis upon which to redress egregious violations such as poverty and violence towards women. In addition, they are useful in identifying discrimination and exclusion, so that rights have the potential to protect marginalised groups against damage by ill-conceived macroscale development projects.
Lewis and Kanji (2009) argue that the integration of a human-rights based approach has been beneficial in linking poverty reduction efforts with the need to focus on wider institutions of state, public accountability and law. Robinson (2005) also states that human-rights take a holistic approach, uniting action towards economic and social progress with political pressure and law reform. Cornwall and Nyamu-
Musembi (2004) suggest the framework has provided a moral framework which allows the development community to reflect more broadly on power dynamics and ethical questions. The human rights framework, built on a set of international agreed documents and standards, potentially provides development agencies and specialists with a more powerful set of tools.
There is debate in the literature about whether NGOs have been successful in alleviating poverty. Gideon (1998) suggests that NGOs have successfully delivered
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services to some sectors of the population who form their beneficiaries, particularly by taking over responsibility for many traditional functions performed by the state, but this is on a somewhat piecemeal basis. Gideon (1998) concludes that the evidence is that they have contributed to programmes to alleviate poverty but there is little evidence that INGOs examine the impact of their projects, so it is difficult to determine whether they have been successful in delivering outcomes.
Nevertheless, Gideon concludes that NGOs “have not been able to secure effective citizenship for their recipients or promote democratisation and empowerment (1998:
317) primarily because of the neoliberal strategies which have created a market-led resource environment”. Both Clark (2010) and Gideon (1998) contend that significant further progress towards the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and poverty reduction can be made when women are involved in development practice decision-making.
Kelly (1989) and Gideon (1998) have reviewed the research literature on the emerging field of gender and development. One of the key findings from Kelly’s research in this field is that women “cannot be fully incorporated into the labor force without threatening the political and economic stab ility of the system as a whole”
(Kelly, 1989: 631). She claims that NGOs themselves are often aware that the goals of women’s empowerment can be culturally sensitive and progressive gender agendas could be perceived as culturally imperialistic. Even where NGOs have been funded to undertake gender sensitive projects, governments may intervene.
They may in these cases, for example, abandon implementation of them. NGOs may meet with obstacles and lack of co-operation from the external cultural environment or even from within the organisation (Gideon, 1998). A substantial amount of work has gone into mainstreaming gender in development policy and this is examined in the following chapter which focuses on gender equality and women’s empowerment programmes.
This project feeds into and strengthens scholarly conversations in the area of
“power over” empowerment strategies and the role of NGOs in development. It does so by examining the perspective of activists operating at the grassroots microlevel in terms of perceptions of top-down discourses and what was represented as responses to bottom-up traditional practices. The thesis argues that the conversation could be developed by understanding how activists unpack human
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rights and apply different conceptualisations in response to structural and institutional features in local contexts.
2.1.4. Scholarly Literature that Maps onto the Broader Global Justice
Movements
The fourth component in the taxonomy was centred on themes in activists’ accounts which portrayed the function of human rights as a bridge between the ideas contained within global justice movements, state-level justice institutions and policy-makers as well as members of local communities.
This thesis feeds into the conversations on the role of NGOs as mediators between the international development agencies, donor sources and beneficiaries. It also draws on scholarly literature which describes the processes of hybridisation which occur when hegemonic frameworks conflict with each other in situated localities ? .
This discussion will lead onto discussions about the hybridisation of human rights and feminism with other global progress projects.
Gideon (1998) claims that NGOs are often mediators between the international development agencies, donor sources and beneficiaries who themselves are situated in local contexts and cultural traditions. Their agendas may be many and varied, perhaps with conflicting demands and expectations. Gideon (1998) describes the role of NGOs in development as having expanded due to the World
Bank and the IMF pursued a poverty alleviation agenda. Towards the end of the twentieth century, the World Bank particularly wanted to by-pass state agencies and saw NGOs as a flexible way of directing resources according to their policies.
Consequently, more radically-orientated NGOs were re-directed from engagement with grassroots social movements towards delivering poverty reduction goals defined by the international development community. Bebbington, Hickey and Mitlin
(2008) suggest that, as aid resources flowed, NGOs became entangled with the neoliberal projects of free trade and the spread of democracy within developing nations. NGOs, they claim, became contracted to deliver specific development objectives against the MDGs, particularly assuming greater responsibility for this where countries had withdrawn from social service provision following public expenditure cuts and the decentralisation of state functions. The authors suggest
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that NGOs have become co-opted and thus can be seen as promoting or being part of a wider neo-liberal agenda.
Hulme (2008) argues, however, that NGOs have evolved towards assuming a hybrid role, that is, one which encompasses contracted service delivery as well as acting as a platform for implementing local level democratisation where concerns of poverty, rights and participation play a central role. One possible consequence of this role is that NGOs may alleviate the symptoms of extreme global inequality but without addressing its causes.
Nadarajah and Rampton’s (2014) work on forms of hybridity in the fields of international relations and peace studies inform this component within the taxonomy. They suggest that hybridisation has recently emerged as a solution to the crisis of liberal peace. The authors describe this approach as a problem-solving tool such that “hybrid peace reproduces the liberal peace's logics of inclusion and exclusion, and through a reconfiguration of the international interface with resistant
‘local’ orders, intensifies the governmental and bio-political reach of liberal peace for their containment, trans formation, and assimilation” (2014: 1). In other words, the solution leads to a reconfiguration of each approach which assimilates aspects of each. The new solution is non-reducible to the original elements.
Themes within activists’ accounts in the research described the interweaving of different hegemonic frameworks within their organisation s’ programmes. The results of this thesis are in line with Nadarajah and Rampton’s (2014) work but relate to the situated experiences of the deployment of the human rights framework.
2.2. Conclusion
The review of the literature has revealed that scholarly work often lacks more than a cursory understanding of activists’ experiences of operationalising the framework at the grassroots level. The thesis argues that there is a gap in the literature which can be represented as a systematic assessment of the operationalisation of the human rights framework which takes account of agents’ perceptions of situated agency in relation to desired action. It argues that a dimensional model based on significant socio-economic features identified by activists themselves would provide a tool to measure deployment of human rights across situated experiences. Such a
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systematic assessment would inform policy-makers in the area. This research starts to form a picture illustrated by activists’ accounts and provides a basis for developing future research.
The thesis offers a method of mapping the territory by undertaking an analysis of natural accounts of the deployment of human rights on NGO websites as well as the generated ones from the interviewees. The thesis places itself in the contemporary global discourses of the disjunctions between what the human rights framework aimed to do and what happens during operationalisation at the grassroots level. The taxonomy of human rights is a tool to identify disjunctions as well as resonances between NGO visions and the framework.
More specifically, the thesis strengthens arguments in four particular conversations within the broader scholarly literature. This thesis draws on these conversations to produce a taxonomy which describes different approaches to the depicted deployment of human rights. Themes in the taxonomy can be mapped onto five key debates in the literature.
First, it unpacks the framing of agency in oppressive and non-oppressive contexts by examining the situated experiences of activists in two case studies. The thesis contends that Madhok’s (2007, 2013) and Madhok and Rai’s (2012) understanding of agency could be strengthened by expanding it to a model which represents a resemblance concept of agency. The thesis argues that the taxonomy identifies a family resemblance conceptualisation of the human rights framework. The review of the literature has demonstrated the necessity of framing the operationalisation of human rights within an understanding of activists’ perceptions of agency in response to situated experiences of socio-economic contexts. This in turn is framed by different accounts of ability to operationalise human rights in response to perceptions of local structural and institutional contexts.
The thesis, for example examines activists’ accounts of the different functions and outcomes of the human rights outcomes in different local contexts. Gearty (2006), for example, highlights the role of the human rights language in providing the powerless with a voice. During the course of the project, it became clear that certain specific conversations existing in the literature about agency, knowledge and
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language would be strengthened by building links between them. This thesis contends, for example, that Spivak’s (1988) concept of epistemic violence could be expanded by being informed by Fricker’s (2003, 2006 and 2007) conceptualisations of epistemic injustice and Madhok’s (2013) ideas of agency in oppressive contexts.
It focuses on the associations in activists’ accounts between the role of NGOs, human rights-based concepts and on speech practices in oppressive and nonoppressive contexts.
A further debate that the thesis feeds into is the general debate about the extent to which human rights principles can be considered universal. This debate maps onto the first component in the taxonomy of representations of the deployment of human rights in activists’ accounts. Various scholars, for example such as Dean (1992) and Pateman and Hirschmann (1992) have critiqued the human rights framework as promoting hegemonic Western values which were founded on masculine obligations as citizens, liberal principles of individual freedom and equality of opportunity within the public sphere. The thesis strengthens the conversations about processes involved in the operationalisation of the human rights framework by examining strategies that activist s’ adopt in situated contexts. The global literature has started to address the implementation process of the abstract human rights framework at the grassroots level.
20 Gearty (2006) describes aspects of this process as “delocalisation”. Merry (2006b) has termed this as “vernacularisation” and Tsing (2005) as “friction”. This exploration is informed by Sen’s (1999, 2009) work and argues that the strategies described by activists comment on his ready acceptance of a certain model of what constitutes a good life. The thesis argues that the widely contested debate over the universality of human rights can be broadened to incorporate an understanding of the interweaving of co-constituting hegemonic frameworks in situated contexts. The thesis explores the implications of the hybridisation of the human rights framework within other global progress projects.
The second component in the taxonomy of the portrayed deployment of human rights maps onto debates on the framework’s emphasis on the promotion of autonomy, freedom and individual rights. The conversations consider what
20 The UN Declaration of human rights does not provide specific operational guidance about how to manage change.
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relevance this orientation has for those cultures that place a greater value on enhancing community and group rights. The second element in the taxonomy that emerged from the empirical research was characterised by a “power to” empowerment strategy. This component feeds into this debate by arguing how
Sen’s (1999, 209) work cited earlier in the chapter could be developed by incorporating a dimension of the different types of strategies represented by NGO activists in both the London and West Bengal case studies who depicted their organisation’s work as being related to community projects.
The third component in the deployment of human rights taxonomy feeds into conversations about the processes associated with the operationalisation of the human rights framework.
This component focuses on the “power over” strategies which emerged from the examination of activists’ accounts. This component focuses on activists’ accounts of microfinance projects which were represented as predominantly being targeted at women beneficiaries. As discussed earlier in this chapter, this thesis feeds into the conversation about how to assess the impact of microfinance projects at the grassroots level. The analysis of activists’ accounts focuses on their perceptions of disconnection between the Western ideas of sustainable income generation projects and representations of the significance of local empowerment strategies. This theme is explored in more depth in relation to the operationalisation of women’s human rights in the following chapter. It is developed further in the discussion of the third component in the women’s human rights taxonomy.
The accounts of activists’ in London also contained accounts of what could be interpreted here as “power over” strategies. The human rights framework provided a “power over” vehicle which was deployed in missions to reconnect beneficiaries to the existing power and bureaucratic infrastructures from which they had become dislodged.
The fourth and final component in the human rights taxonomy feeds into debates about how global progress projects are delivered by hybridisation of different hegemonic frameworks such as neoliberalism and social democracy. This component is associated with the final component in the women’s human rights taxonomy that identifies themes about the future of feminism.
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Themes from the literature review in this chapter are expanded in Chapter Six which focuses on the research material analysis. Chapter Eight draws together the conclusions from the analyses throughout the thesis. The chapter demonstrates how the thesis informs policy making about the operationalisation of human rights by activists and identifies future research projects in this area. Chapter Eight includes speculative ideas about how the future role of NGOs is in line with Walby’s
(2011) ideas of hybridisation with global progress projects. These ideas are developed by referring to elements within the taxonomy and how the arguments can be situated within the wider global context, especially in light of the expected power shifts from the Global North to the Global South. It might be concluded, for example that the future trajectory of the human rights framework will be determined by how the current hegemonic human rights framework adapts to predicated future political paradigms as power shifts towards the East.
This chapter has focused on the relevant conversations in the literature about human rights and this thesis will bring to life the cultural complexities involved in the implementation of a specific set of rights and entitlements. The thesis uses women’s human rights as a lens to focus on the experiences associated with the operationalisation of women’s empowerment and gender equality visions. This focus allows the research question to be addressed more fully by incorporating a deeper understanding of the relationship be tween activists’ representations of perceptions of agency and desired action within a specific political struggle.
Chapter Three will build on themes discussed in this chapter and supplement them with threads within other conversations that relate to wome n’s human rights.
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3. Chapter Three: Women’s Human Rights: Theoretical
Debates
This thesis situates the deployment of women’s human rights taxonomy within the discourse on the feminist critical literature on the operationalisation of gender equality and the empowerment of women. UN Women, formed in 2010, states that it draws on several international agreements to guide its work. These include the
Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women
(CEDAW), the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action (PFA), the UN Security
Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security (2000) and the Millennium
Declaration and Millennium Development Goals. Its stated position is that:
UN Women is the UN organization dedicated to gender equality and the empowerment of women. A global champion for women and girls, UN Women was established to accelerate progress on meeting their needs worldwide.
21
The UN website is notable for its emphasis on gender equality and women’s empowerment rather than on women’s human rights. The UN reform agenda brought these documents together with the aim of system-wide reporting and drawing together resources and mandates. It claims that civil societies form one of their major constituencies.
This thesis recognises that the UN establishes visions and aspirations relating to women’s empowerment at the highest international level. It proposes, however, that it is also important to examine the situated experiences of activists themselves to provide a clearer understanding of the processes of the operationalisation of women’s gender and empowerment programmes at the grassroots level. Therefore, this thesis places itself in the contemporary global discourses of disjunctions between top-level frameworks and what happens during operationalisation at the grassroots level. It particularly examines how activists’ accounts provided insight into the perceived links between situated agency and conceptualisations of women’s empowerment. The empirical analysis of these accounts maps on to debates in the scholarly literature and the thesis strengthens arguments in four particular conversations within the broader areas of w omen’s human rights and feminism. These areas also include themes as outlined in the concluding section of
21 From UN http://www.unwomen.org/en/about-us.
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Chapter Two. The structure of the literature review focuses on scholarly debates that inform the taxonomy of the deployment of women’s human rights which emerged during the empirical analysis. The review opens by positioning the thesis within discourses on Western-centric and non-Western assertions about the nature of women’s agency.
The following is a summary of the four main debates and outlines how the components within the taxonomy map onto them: i) first, the thesis feeds into conversations about women’s agency in the most marginalised local contexts. It does so by examining how women’s human rights provide the concepts and framework with which the oppressed can contest injustice. This thesis contributes to the general debate about the extent to which women’s human rights principles can be considered universal. The first component in the taxonomy examines the representation of women’s human rights as a universal political tool and a political commitment in activists’ accounts; ii) the thesis contends that certain specific conversations existing in the literature about agency, knowledge and language would be strengthened by building links between them. The second component in the taxonomy focuses on those NGOs whose work was represented as supporting female victims of violence in domestic environments. This project develops a conceptualisation of epistemic violence drawn from different areas of the literature. It also reveals the extent to which representations of women’s essentialism in oppressive contexts underlies these specific conversations; iii) t he thesis unpacks activists’ accounts of women’s economic empowerment programmes and identifies a disjunction expressed in these accounts between the objective of women’s economic emancipation and the reduction of gender inequality. The thesis feeds into the gender responsibilisation literature. It identifies the distortion between gender responsibilities and rights in activists’ account. The third category within the taxonomy in the thesis positions itself in the discourse about the future of feminism, women’s human rights and essentialised perceptions of women’s citizenship by
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considering activists ’ perceptions of agency in relation to socio-economic structures; iv) finally, this thesis contributes to conversations about the future of feminism.
It does so by those exploring activists’ accounts which include themes associated with the hybridisation between human rights and other global progress projects. The final element of the taxonomy is characterised by an orientation within the activists’ accounts that focuses on the association between the maximisation of individual potential and the future of feminism in hybrid global progress projects.
This chapter then presents a snapshot of the progress towards the implementation of human rights and women’s human rights in India and the UK by referring to a range of development indices which can act as a proxy for the achievement of this framework.
3.1. Assertions about the Natur e of Women’s Agency
This thesis is informed by the debate about the conceptualisations of Westerncentric and nonWestern assertions about the nature of women’s agency. Key conversations that inform this thesis relate to the feminist discourses on poverty and development. These concepts were explored in Chapter Two but are described in more detail in this section in relation to the global discourse on women’s agency in oppressive contexts. A ctivists’ accounts were in line with the position taken by the UN Women’s vision which places emphasis on the practical aims of women’s empowerment as opposed to the more abstract idea of women’s human rights.
Scholarly work within the global discourse on women, development and poverty has included a focus on postcolonial studies, the globalisation of law and international legal human rights matters.
22 This thesis focuses on the postcolonial work of Spivak
(1988). Her work informs the thesis particularly in relation to the exploration of
NGOs’ agency under conditions of oppression. This is because many activists’ accounts centred on perceptions of agency in contexts described as oppressive.
Gramsci (1971) coined the term “subaltern” to conceptualise a broad understanding
22 For example Baxi (1998), whose work concerns the globalisation of law and Kapur (2002) on international legal human rights matters.
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of the non-elite in society who were excluded from political representation and, therefore, were without human agency. Spivak (1988) develops Gramsci’s concept by examining the process which renders the subaltern silent. This practice of disenfranchisement particularly affects those women who are most marginalised and they become separated from opportunities of social mobility. “Subalternity is where social lines of mobility, being elsewhere, do not permit the formation of a recognisable basis of action” (Spivak, 2005: 476). She suggests that the subaltern
“will have recourse, perhaps surprisingly, to an argument that Western intellectual production is, in many ways, complicit with Western international economic interests” (1988: 271). “Everything that has limited or no access to the cultural imperialism is subaltern —a space of difference” (Spivak in De Kock, 1992: 45).
This thesis contends that this argument can include depicted positions of beneficiaries in both a developing nation, for example India, as well as in a developed nation for example the United Kingdom.
Spivak (1988) drew upon the Indian practice of sati, or the duties of the good wife which has the expectation that a widow will choose to sacrifice herself on her husband's funeral pyre. She exposes the race and power dynamics involved in the banning of this tradition by the British, in consultation with Hindu leaders. She argues that the ban provides an example of how Indian women were deprived of agency in terms of their choices. She demonstrates how subalterns are deprived of a voice because any effort of resistance is not recognised unless it is expressed within the hegemonic discourse. Subalterns are reduced to silence or at least nonviolent resistance which, Spivak (1988) claims, is not recognised as an intended action. Spivak (1988) calls for the construction of infrastructure which will agency to be recognised. Those who are subalterns would then become active citizens with the possibility of feeling part of the state, she claims.
This thesis proposes that themes from the postcolonial literature can inform the research. The question of representation resonates throughout the thesis in several distinct ways in relation to the Indian samples of NGOs in terms of: i) how the
NGOs speak on behalf of their subaltern beneficiaries; ii) their use of human rights language to form a bridge between the representation of their communities and others, including the interviewer. The extent to which it is possible to expand
Spivak’s (1988) notion of a voiceless subaltern to incorporate Fricker’s (2003, 2006
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and 2007) conceptualisations of epistemic injustice is discussed in Chapter Seven of this thesis. It can be argued that Spivak’s (1998) notion can also be used to enrich Madhok’s (2013) ideas of agency in oppressive contexts. The thesis contends that each of these three contributions to the literature can inform the others. All three scholars can be interpreted here as addressing the position of the most marginalised citizens in relation to hegemonic power structures. The overall goal of expanding these concepts is to explore the extent to which human rights are experienced and practiced as a universally applicable schema in the work of NGOs.
This thesis proposes that these ideas can be drawn together under the aegis of a concept of epistemic injustice where the elements include the need for the recognition of the powerless in relation to the women’s human rights framework, the idea of resistance to it, and the availability of concepts to express experiences of the most marginalised and to express preferences for alternative action.
This thesis asserts that this conceptualisation of agency frames the first three components of the taxonomy of the deployment of women’s human rights. It asserts, therefore, that in situated contexts represented as presenting significant challenges to desired action were associated with different perceptions of the ability to operationalise women’s empowerment programmes. As Guerrina and Zalewski
(2007) point out it is “evident that there remains an enormous gap between the rhetoric and realities of women’s human rights, whereby women’s rights continue to be contested in countries across the world and governments are often unwilling to fulfil their in ternational obligations” (2007: 5). The findings in this thesis discussed in
Chapters Six and Seven support the aut hors’ argument.
Sardar-Ali (2008) suggests that, arguably, women in the developing world should benefit most from a human rights-based approach to development that promotes equality in areas such as gender-based discrimination, unequal pay, violence and exclusion from decision-making. Sardar-Ali asks “[t]o what extent are the concepts of equality and non-discrimination cast within the liberal framework equally beneficial for al l women?” (2008: 10). This question could be developed further by asking whethe r the concepts cast within the women’s human rights framework would be the most advantageous for women in more developed countries. CEDAW affirms in legal terms that all women are entitled to equality in both the public and
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private spheres. This thesis argues that the situated experiences of activists in both the case studies feed into the conversation about the limitations of the women’s human rights framework experienced by those at the grassroots level. It contends, for example, that some of those activists whose accounts denoted reluctance to engage with the framework expressed a view that it challenged their aspirations to an alternative way of being which did not incorporate Western views of individual freedoms and autonomy. Activists’ accounts contained themes of disjunctions between Western hegemonic values contained in their organisation s’ values and alternative moral and cultural frameworks in situated contexts.
There are, however, possible key tensions between principles contained within the two UDHR Covenants 23 which reflect the complexities of human rights as an abstract conceptual framework underpinned by ideas of individual autonomy when they engage with alternative moral frameworks 24 and particularities. However,
Walby (2000) concluded that the women’s rights as a human rights campaign evolved by a process of decentralisation . Despite this move, women’s human rights continued to hold in ‘creative tension both “universalism” and sensitivity to particular contexts’ (Walby, 2000: 26). This thesis takes the approach, however, that activists’ accounts provide insight into the relevance of human rights and women’s human rights frameworks based on promoting individual autonomy within cultures that emphasise collective priorities. It provides illustrations of how women engage with empowerment by adopting non-Western centric strategies. In other words, the thesis feeds into the debate by asserting that different forms of agency exist in relation to socio-economic situated experiences.
3.2. Components within Taxonomy
The four components within the taxonomy are informed by key tensions arising from the scholarly literature in such areas that consider women’s human rights as a universal project. The components are also positioned within recent discourses in postcolonial studies which relate to the representation of women’s agency. These tensions also arise in conversations on essentialism and the critique of women’s empowerment programmes.
23 The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on
Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.
24 Examples would be communitarianism and cosmopolitanism.
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3.2.1. Scholarly Literature that Maps the
Women’s Human Rights
Framework as a Political Tool
The first component identifies themes within the West Bengal activists’ accounts which relate to violations of basic universal human rights in communities represented as being most deprived in terms of resources and institutional infrastructure. It focuses on women’s human rights as a political tool to measure perceptions about whether the state was fulfilling its international obligations to women’s human rights. The two case studies in this thesis feed into the cultural relativism debate about how NGOs operationalise women’s empowerment and gender equality visions in response to different perceptions of local socio-economic contexts.
The review of the literature which informs this component positions the thesis within the universality debate on women’s human rights as a political tool and as a political commitment. The thesis argues that insights gained from exploring interviewee s’ accounts can provide a fresh contribution to this conversation. It anchors these within the discourse that explores the essentialism of women. It also continues the discussion in Chapter Two in relation to those activists’ accounts that identified a disjunction between the relevance of individual rights compared with situated cultural experiences which prioritised solidarity within the community.
Engle (2005) argues that feminists in the developing world would contend that human rights law has excluded them. This has, she suggests, had the effect of obscuring economic and cultural differences between women living in different stages of development. She argues that it is not possible to conflate their interests.
Women in the developed world need to hear and acknowledge perspectives on human rights that are different from their own. She continues by suggesting that these women need to realise that human rights in their own countries have not been fully implemented. Engle (2005) considers that women in the developed world need to understand that women in the developing world might prioritise human rights violations arising from economic deprivation above discriminatory cultural practices. She suggests that human rights that focus on the private sphere could detract from the main concerns of the poorest women. She contends that women in the developing world often resent being represented by those in the developed world as being a homogenous group, defined as victims of traditions or socio-
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economic conditions, rather than being acknowledged as active agents against oppression within their own communities.
Davis (2007) illustrates how the dialogue within these transnational networks might lead to feminist knowledge being developed as the lived experience of feminism.
She suggests a politics of location would help to understand how feminist knowledge crosses national borders and identifies dimensions to generate a
“transnational feminist politics of the body” (2007: 200). Her inquiry assumed that women do not necessarily have identical experiences on the basis of having a female body nor that there is a single narrative of feminist history. Instead, her research focused on how feminist knowledge evolves and emerges as it crosses lines of difference and adapts to local contexts. In a similar vein, but in a more l imited sense, this thesis proposes there was no single narrative in the activists’ accounts about the function of women’s human rights in the work of the NGOs. It argues that, as in the taxonomy in Chapter Two, the model identifies a family resemblance co nceptualisation of women’s empowerment and gender equality missions.
Given the tensions portrayed in the work of scholars such as Engle (2005) and the changing nature of feminist knowledge suggested by Davis (2007), how is it possible to defend the abstract nature of women’s human rights and human rights based development as useful political tools in feminist activism? One of the paradoxes that is explored by Steans (2007a) is that, given the strategic necessity of speaking as ‘women’ and “while a ‘politics of difference’ has dogged efforts to build feminist sol idarity across the boundaries…[d]ifferences among women do not necessarily preclude the possibility of solidarity ” (2007a: 730). She contends that these differences based on intersectionality can facilitate debate which clarifies where common grounds exist.
25 Steans (2007a) refers to transnational and
25 See also Walby (1994). She concluded that any feminist analysis of gendered globalisation must also address the question of how feminist theory can incorporate gender into political debates about citizenship. So far, such debates have exposed the divergent perspectives of varying feminist approaches and articulations in connection with, for example, power, patriarchy, social, economic and class inequality and concepts of justice as well as political and civil rights. Feminist analysis must also focus on inter-sectionalism, that is, how gender is connected to other sources of oppression, such as race and class. Walby (1994) suggests that feminists must seek to understand how women in different global regions experience oppression and they seek to explore what separates and binds women in different cultures.
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postcolonial feminisms that can create strategic coalitions and which link multiple identities together. She suggests that this provides a basis upon which to challenge both Western-dominated Women in Development (WID) conceptions of women’s empowerment which reinforced rather than challenged oppressive power structures, and also the economic exploitation she claims is inherent in the globalisation process. She suggests that transnational feminist solidarity networks can harness women who share a common aim of challenging gender inequality and providing basic women’s human rights to those in diverse societies while embracing differences based on a plurality of identities and experiences. This approach avoids essentialising women but instead highlights the common interests arising from the perception of common experiences of oppressive power structures, she contends.
In alignment with Steans’ (2007a) contention, the thesis argues in Chapter Seven that the implication emerging from activists’ accounts was that women’s human rights framework would be most effective as a tool to combat violations where there was an emphasis on establishing mechanisms to deliver collective assent.
Steans (2007b) comments on Ackerly’s (2001) observation about women’s activists’ views of human rights. This is that feminists consider the framework as being both culturally specific yet universal, as well as being embraced but contested. Steans
(2007b) argues that it might be advantageous for transnational feminist solidarity networks to base constructive gender-sensitive debates on central human rights concepts of equality and autonomy. Steans (2007b) believes that this is because feminist projects would seem to demand challenges to forms of oppression and social inequality (Steans 2007b). Women may experience diverse social and historical contexts but can be united, not by sharing a biological or cultural identity, but rather by engagement in a political struggle for freedom. This conversation informs the analysis in Chapter Seven which includes an examination of the interaction portrayed in activists’ accounts between organisations’ engagement with the feminist political struggle and the underlying essentialist representations of the role of women in local contexts.
The thesis contends that activists demonstrated a political commitment to feminist activism. Some of the key tensions involving this commitment involved considering how to challenge gender inequality as well as providing access to basic women’s human rights in a manner that was free from essentialised ways of understanding
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gender issues. This thesis unpacks this position by looking at two case studies that provide illustrative insights into the situated experiences of the operationalisation of women’s human rights as a political tool. The thesis argues that, if the women’s human rights framework is grounded in a political struggle, then it is necessary to understand activists’ perceptions of the challenges to desired action in this area.
This understanding i ncludes examining activists’ accounts of perceptions of women’s essentialised roles at various levels in society.
Phillips (2013) takes a normative position in relation to a universal commitment to equality based on a problematic conception of common humanity which is neither contentless abstraction nor an overloaded concept based on stereotypes. De
Beauvoir opens her
Part IV, The Formative Years, Chapter 1 “Childhood” with the assertion that “[o]ne is not born but rather becomes a woman” (1972: 295). Phillips
(2013) continues this train of thought by suggesting that we learn the cultural norms about becoming a woman but she wonders whether it makes sense to talk about what it is to be a man or woman before these processes of learning get underway.
Phillips (2013) referred to Hannah Arendt’s contention that “[t]he conception of human rights based upon the assumed existence of a human being as such broke down at the very moment when those who professed to believe in it were for the first time confronted with people who had indeed lost all other qualities and specific relationships – except that they were still human. (Arendt, 1989) suggests that
“[t]he world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human”
(Arendt, 1989: 299). Phillips (2013) critiques this essentialist position of the human in human rights. She is sceptical that it is possible to throw off the shackles of learning to strip down to just a physiological being. She suggests that the human in human rights cannot be reduced to an abstract concept lacking in content but that it is only within a political community based on equality that a conceptualisation of human rights acquires significance. Phillips (2013) takes issue with the fact that historically, the human has been based on being a man or reason or rationality and claims that human rights are no longer based on human nature. Phillips (2013) argues that it is unnecessary to cast aside the particularity of gender to be recognised as human. From this perspective it is possible to assert a conception of commonality as a basis for human rights and equality, including gender equality, but this concept must not be so loaded in terms of stereotypical or ideological attributes or alternatively, lacking in content that it becomes a disembodied
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abstraction. Instead, she contends that what is human is political, and human rights and equality form a fragile consensus for reaffirmation. Equality is a political commitment; it is a normative commitment to a position that we are all equal.
This thesis positions itself in alignment with Donnelly’s conclusion, as cited in
Chapter Two, that “Basic human rights are…relatively universal” (1984: 419) on the basis of being a human being. This identifies themes in the West Bengal activists’ accounts associated with this component about women’s entitlements to basic universal human rights even in the most marginalised communities. The thesis also recognises Phillips’s (2013) contention about equality being a political commitment and the need to avoid essentialism. It combines these perspectives with that of themes in the activists’ accounts to feed into the conversation about the depiction of women’s human rights as a political tool at the grassroots level in relation to situated experiences.
3.2.2. Conversations that Map onto Representations of Domestic
Violence
The second component in the taxonomy draws together themes in the accounts of interviewees from both case studies whose work was represented as supporting women victims of violence in domestic environments. This component within the taxonomy is also based in the discourse of gender essentialism, particularly referring to the work of feminist activists and feminist political theorists.
Okin contends that categorisation of individuals by sex has been “regarded as one of the clearest legitimisers of different rights and restrictions, both formal and informal” (Okin 1987: 42). Such categorisation has led to gender stratification in terms of those who have access to the resources to wield power, those who are considered to be full and equal citizens and, finally, those who are subject to the principles of justice. Stratification based on anatomy and reinforced by social practices has led to gender inequalities that motivate the feminist project. She also suggests that the “male-stream” ideology of gender inequality is one of the most
“all-encompassing and pervasive examples of ideology in history” (Okin 1987: 58).
26
26 For a more comprehensive debate about the origins and social reinforcement of gender segregated roles, see: Mooney-Marini (1990), West and Zimmerman (1987) and Irvine (1990).
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There have been attempts to identify the roots of the persistence of patriarchal societies arising from gender stratification. One explanation, for example, focuses on the consequences for the conceptualisation of citizenship arising from the differentiation of the private and political spheres.
27 Early human rights legislation was criticised as being alien to women’s interests on two main grounds, the first being the assumption of the dichotomy between the public and private sphere. This separation arose from liberal thought, an orientation underpinning much of the original human rights project. This explanation focuses on the deconstructed of this dichotomy which, it is contended, had become internationally institutionalised. This institutionalisation of the dichotomy had resulted in governments and non-state actors not recognising gender discrimination and violence against women in the home as human rights issues. Human rights law was structurally biased against women because it was derived from principles about behaviour in the public sphere. Power differentials permeate domestic life, diminishing women’s public power and opportunities for flourishing. The ‘personal is political’ 28 concept encapsulates this idea and Enloe (2000) suggests that relationships that are imagined as private or social are infused with power. The private sphere is held to be the unregulated domestic life where women conduct their work. Sardar-Ali
(2008) claims that whilst human rights discourse has historically focused on the rights of citizens in the public sphere, violations against women have been seen as private or cultural matters and not subject to state intervention and, as such, were excluded from the rights agenda.
Until recently, human rights discourse was not applied to the domestic sphere and was extended only recently by as an outcome of the Vienna Conference in 1993.
29
The scholarly literature has suggested that this has arisen because of the lack of association between the private sphere and meaningful citizenship. Explanations include: obligations in terms of being a citizen (see Dean, 1992); payment of taxes
27 See, for example, Pateman and Hirschmann (1992).
28 This term was coined by Hanisch (1969).
29 The Vienna Declaration in 1993, which arose from the Vienna World Conference on Human
Rights, affirmed the universality of human rights but attempted to reconcile the sets of rights in both Covenants. The Conference also was more issue-based and group-focused, particularly in the area of extending rights to the private sphere and the protection of women against domestic violence. The Declaration acknowledged that women’s rights were human rights. A Special
Rapporteur was appointed with the mandate to address the causes and consequences of women’s vulnerability in all spheres of life including discrimination, culture, resource allocations, and in particular property ownership and other resource allocations.
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as a property owner (see Mooney-Marini, 1990); the lack of recognition of the value of women’s work in the home (see Pateman in Puwar and Pateman 2002); aspects of multiculturalism suggesting that male elders are empowered to define what it means to be a woman in their culture (Phillips, 2013).
Grewal (2005) laments the fact that gender-based discrimination was only recognised as a violation of human rights in international law at the end of the twentieth century. Even in the contemporary world, she claims, laws codifying human rights do not necessarily translate into enforceable policies which address gender imbalances within cultures. Whereas human rights give a voice to those expected to act in accordance with traditional practices, often particularistic forms of justice would often silence them.
30 Grewal (2005) suggests that there is a gap between human rights derived laws and enjoyment of women’s rights.
The human rights adversarial framework was also criticised, for example by Bunch
(2006), as being alien to the everyday experience of women and a more constructive human needs approach was called for which reflected their interests more appropriately. There was recognition that women could only realise their political and civil rights if they had access to sufficient economic and social resources as well as the ability to participate in decision-making infrastructure. As
Lloyd (2007) explains, the feminist critique of human rights drew attention to the masculine assumptions underlying the framework which often deflected attention away from the structural causes of oppression suffered by women as women. She argues that “[m]erely contending that all humans have certain human rights as human does little concretely to overturn or to mitigate the conditions of subordination and oppression women actually suffer” (Lloyd, 2007: 100). As Dean
(1992) states, “[c]itizenship is defined in opposition to the qualities of womanhood seen as features of the private sphere of domestic and fa milial life” (Dean 1992:
122). Traditionally, he claims, the private sphere is not accorded any political significance in terms of citizenship. It reinforced the patriarchal structure of citizenship where women were relegated to the politically insignificant private sphere. On the other hand, demanding that women’s specific attributes are taken
30 For example, CEDAW has been met with resistance from many Islamic states who perceive a
Western cultural bias that is to some extent incompatible with Sharia Law. On the other hand, some
US-based organisations view the treaty as being too radically feminist whilst some in the Catholic community resist the emphasis on easier access to contraception and abortion.
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into account to achieve equal citizens’ rights would condemn them to a lesser status because their contribution as citizens would remain devalued (Pateman and
Hirschmann, 1992).
Yuval-Davis (1997) also develops the idea of democratic citizenship to suggest that the concept should be broadened out from being solely defined by the relationship between the individual and the state. It needs to incorporate many women’s concerns such as social justice, reproductive rights, oppressive cultures and the politics of presence. “The interest in citizenship is not just in the narrow formalistic meaning of having the right to carry a specific passport
….It addresses an overall concept encapsulating the relationship between the individual, state and so ciety”
(Yuval-Davis 1997: 14).
Referring to Marshall’s (1950) understanding of citizenship, she demonstrates how it can be viewed as a multi-dimensional concept. A gender reading of citizenship needs to include ethnicity, location of residence and women’s relationship to men as well as affiliation to dominant and subordinate associations.
In summary, the author echoes the perspective of those who consider that citizenship should be seen as a construct in the context of inter-sectional affiliation and identities within a variety of collectivities. This view is in contrast with the liberal tradition of viewing citizens as individuals who have no association with each other and who are presumed to have equal status and enforceable rights. Having established that research in the area focuses on the need to consider a gendered reading of citizenship, this thesis examines activists’ accounts and explores their perceptions of the role of women in society. It also considers whether these perceptions were represented as influencing the nature of programmes aimed at women beneficiaries, including those claimed to be supporting victims of domestic violence.
Conversely, Bovarnik (2007) in her comparative study of violence against women in
Mexico and Pakistan suggests that universal human rights proved to be an ineffective tool in the pursuit of eradicating violence as conceptualised under
CEDAW in the case examples she researched. She explains that the cause of the failure is that human rights and violence against women were conceptualised in different ways in these two contexts. She concludes by suggesting “[s]pecifically in the face of violence, should we not put aside technicalitie s that divide ‘human rights defenders’ and ‘human rights opponents’ and start by focusing on a common
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goal, to be free from violence, whatever that may mean in a particular cultural context?
” (Bovarnik, 2007: 74). Lloyd (2007) supports this position by arguing that treating violence within traditional liberal individualist terms conceals the different power structures that produce conditions of violation of women’s human rights.
This thesis develops this position by proposing an answer to the question: “How could violence as a concept be deployed to re-focus an understanding of gendered power struggles?”.
Walby (2013) covers the contribution that classical sociological theorists, such as
Marx, Engels and Parsons have made to the intellectual understanding of violence as the interplay of social processes and institutions. She shows how new research is challenging previous assumptions and unifying the scholarship which had become fragmented within a core issue within the discipline. Hearn (2013) focuses on the sociological significance of domestic violence but states that, despite its continued global prevalence, the issues underlying this form of gender coercion have rarely been at the core of mainstream of sociology
This thesis positions itself in the discourse by looking at the activists’ account of support for those represented as being victims of domestic violence. It contrasts this with a potential alternative representation of male perpetrators of crimes and abuse. This thesis argues that if human rights state that a potential victim has the right not to be abused then the focus is in on the victim. This thesis further argues that the human rights and women’s human rights frameworks have the potential to conceal the different power structures that produce conditions of the violation of women’s rights. If the declaration had been framed as human duties or obligations, then the locus of concern would be on the perpetrator. This theme is developed later in the thesis to look at the framing of domestic violence by interviewees from both case studies. It argues that this frame has been derived from the historical focus on the rights of citizens in the public sphere which cast violations against women as private matters.
This thesis examines the framing of women’s violence in the activists’ accounts.
This analysis is informed by the literature which focuses on the relationship between women’s essentialism and human rights discourse. Okin (1994) contends that there is a tendency of feminist discourse to reflect the concerns of Western,
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middle-class women living in industrialised societies. On the other hand, if cultural differences between women are emphasised, she argues, this leads to a slide towards cultural relativism. This process then obscures the real commonalities of the shared experiences of womanhood such as their difference from and oppression by men. There is then a danger that the formulation of general principles of gender justice is precluded, she claims. It is not that Okin (1994) denies differences of women’s experiences in terms of race, class and location, but she considers that the feminist mission should not be paralysed by these differences.
Phillips suggests that the objective is to “formulate strong policies for gender equality that do not feed into cultural stereotypes, and how to reframe discourses of sex equality so as to detach them from projects of cultural or racial superiority”
(2010: 14). Phillips (2010) is also concer ned that women’s agency should be recognised and that they are not presented as hapless “captives of culture” in need of paternalistic protection. She is worried, however, that stressing such agency may conceal the possibility that some cultural practices are indeed oppressive towards women. Phillips (2010) considers various strategies which would sustain the pursuit of both sexual and cultural equality policies and rights. In her deliberations, she rejects cultural relativism and concludes that “the guiding principle is that we should respect the diverse choices people make about their lives, not assume that these are forced on them by oppressive and patriarchal cultures, and not leap prematurely into protective mode” (Phillips, 2010: 11). It is not the difference between the genders per se that has to be eliminated, but only factors that make it relevant to the unequal distribution of power and rights. Feminists have distrusted the often male perspective of universal discourses of rights and equality, since these often conceal the background inequalities arising from differences of gender, class, religion and race.
31 Universal discourses equate equality with sameness and, indeed, universal rights may even perpetuate inequalities of power arising from unacknowledged background differences. “Universalism has to be nuanced by a better understanding of disparities in income and power” (Phillips 2010: 19).
Although this does not rule out the possibility that some rights are universal, it permits local variations in certain compelling cases.
31 See, for example, Yuval-Davis (1997).
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In fact, Phillips (2010) does concur with Okin (1994) that key principles of gender equality can be identified that “set the limits to cultural accommodation: certain nonnegotiable rights or equalities that must be respected in any pursuit of multicultural citizenship” (Phillips, 2010: 4). Phillips (2010) provides the following examples of these violations: harm, particularly irreversible violation of bodily integrity; reversible but grossly harmful forced marriages; inequality and the absence of conditions to enable individuals to choose their lifestyle. Phillips (2010) and Okin (1994) would argue that other principles of rights and justice should be open to contestation and revision.
Phillips (2010) is particularly concerned that researchers in the West should be aware of the dangers of ethnocentric views. Feminists in the West might wish to impose their feminist project on those in different cultures without realising that those women may have a diverse range of perspectives and circumstances.
Western women should not necessarily assume that those whom they have identified as in need of emancipation feel as if they are oppressed. This also applies to those from certain educational and social backgrounds making judgements about the circumstances of others. On the other hand, it might be argued that such women might be unable to recognise injustice because they have adapted to their position, and “[i]t may be then the outsiders, not insiders, who are best placed to jud ge” (Phillips, 2010: 30). She suggests, however, that care must be taken when making such statements about false consciousness, for example, not to sound arrogant to those being judged as being oppressed.
32
Phillips ’s (2010) suggests that cultural and gender equality should not be viewed as competing claims or value systems. Instead, she states that “it is not culture that dictates the unequal treatment of women, but particular interpretations of cultural tradition…the pressing problem, in many cases is that sex equality claims are already implicated in other discourses – anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, indigenous peoples” (Phillips, 2010: 56). She maintains that the key is for feminists to recognise the diverse interests and conditions of different women rather than
32 The answer to this might be, as Phillips (2010) suggests, that the under-representation of women in institutional decision-making needs to be countered so that they can participate on an equal basis with men. On the other hand, Baden and Goetz (1997) argue that there can be no assumption that increased representation of women would lead to more feminist decisions since women are not a homogenous group and their interests could conflict with one another.
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attempting to impose a Western universal standard on non-universal experiences and preferences.
Themes in groups of activists’ accounts contained contrasting essentialised depictions of women beneficiaries as hapless victims of cultural traditions. These portrayals also contrasted with representations of the women’s role in society. The conversations about women’s essentialism inform and are informed by distinctive features in activists ’ accounts that can be characterised by a growing distortion between gender responsibilities and rights.
3.2.3. Scholarly Literature that Maps onto Women’s Empowerment in
Development Projects
The third element of the taxonomy focused on the West Bengal activists’ accounts of women’s economic empowerment programmes. It identifies a disjunction expressed in these accounts between the objective of women’s economic emancipation and the reduction of gender inequality. This component identifies the tension between portrayals of economic empowerment as a rig ht and women’s wellbeing. This was represented as being played out in relation to perceived cultural and institutional infrastructure influences on the work of microfinance NGOs. The element describes characterisations of different strategies in relation to the deployment of women’s human rights. This thesis feeds into discourses which critique women’s economic empowerment programmes by examining activists’ accounts of situated experiences characterised by conflicting visions.
One of the key features of this component in the taxonomy is the link in the activists’ accounts between representations of participation in economic empowerment and perceptions of agency. As Madhok, Phillips and Wilson (2013) suggested the focus should not necessarily be on who has agency, but what work it does. Later in the thesis, this association is examined by focusing on two main distinctive themes that emerged during analysis of the research materials. This thesis will argue that these themes were related to the relationship between external forces and agency in terms of: i) two distinctive temporal dimensions; and,
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ii) the framing of women either as social agents of India’s regeneration or as individual agents operating with an individualistic social norm.
33
In order to inform this association this section revisits an examination of salient aspects of Madhok (2007) and Madhok, Phillips and Wilson ’s (2013) work which critiques what is described as the action bias that underpins development practice.
Madhok’s (2007, 2013) and Madhok and Rai’s (2012) work was discussed in relation to agency in oppressive contexts in Chapter Two. This thesis argues that aspects of this work can be strengthened by exploring their conception of a development subject in a more nuanced manner by taking into account situated experiences of activists. This is discussed later in the thesis.
Madhok (2007) is particularly critical of perceived power structures that underlie
Women’s Development Programmes (WDPs). She suggests that the term “actionbias” can used to describe contemporary thinking about autonomy within the neoliberal framework that she claims underpins the WDP and its programmes.
Discussing the role of women in developing countries in neoliberal projects,
Madhok, Phillips an d Wilson (2013) suggest that they are “removed, it seems, from structural inequalities, detached from any politics and collective struggle, engaged only in individualised strategies of self-improvement, transformation and empowerment, then emerge as a perverse counter to feminist critiques that have focused on the colonising moves that had previously denied [them] a hearing”
(2013: 5).
33 The instrumentalisation of women in development practice has been examined in the literature by authors Wilson (2013) and Madhok, Phillips and Wilson (2013).
This thesis does not extend to examining the impact of globalisation on women’s wellbeing but there are themes within the literature that are of interest to the discussion. Walby (2000), for example, suggests that much contemporary feminist analysis has concentrated on the particular, emphasising the value of cultural diversity rather than commonality. Walby (2000) has claimed that this focus has led to a neglect of large scale global change, that is, globalisation. Feminist analysis now needs to address how globalisation is gendered as well as the implications for the global future, she suggests. Enloe studies this globalising effect under a feminist microscope and considers “[h]ow the conduct of international politics has depended on men’s control of women has been left unexamined” (2000:
4). She continues to expand on the idea that “politics is personal” to incorporate the notion that the
“international is personal” (Enloe, 2000: 196). She then concludes that “governments and companies with government backing have made explicit attempts to try to control and channel women’s actions in order to achieve their own ends” (Enloe, 2000: 199).
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Madhok’s (2013) view is that developmentalism creates a development subject.
She argues that development practice creates new forms of coercion and oppression because the framework is based on a very Western idea of agency with its emphasis on concepts such as free will, choice and liberty. Women’s development programmes operate within the discourse of human rights and development subjects are exposed to ideas which are in tension with frameworks and structures which shape their identities in their everyday lives. Madhok (2013) contends that many feminists have come to regard autonomy as a double-edged concept which devalues roles and responsibilities mostly associated with women.
Empowerment increasingly incorporates the idea of creating development subjects motivated by self-interest who are amenable to its neoliberal project rather than pursuing objectives such as equality.
“The neoliberal turn within development discourse is most pronounced in the reformulation of the feminist language of empowerment of collective struggle over public resources into one of a private striving enabled through an active participation in market relations principally through microcredit schemes” (Madhok, 2013: 16). Instead women’s political agency needs to be located within their social, political and cultural contexts, she suggests, and challenges to oppressive power structures should not merely be in the service of pursuing Western universalistic ideas of freedom and individual rights and agency.
Madhok (2013) describes the impact of the Women's Development Program which was introduced in six regions in Rajasthan, India in 1984. It was a key nationalist project that focused on women after it became clear that they as a group were not benefitting from modernisation plans. Its underpinning strategy included the introduction of new patterns of behaviour, such as self-empowerment, based on the idea of a universal citizen. This Program floundered when these abstract principles encountered resistance from the expectation of behaviour according to traditional roles. “At the close of the century, the women’s movement found itself at the forefront of debates on aspects of sexualities, identities and citizenship, with sexual rights, parliamentary quotas and guaranteed citizenship entitlements becoming increasingly important” (Madhok, 2013: 21). In her view the “feminist intellectual work on the institutional articulation and workings of rights must be accompanied by an attention to the ways in which the languages of rights are picked up and put into use in different political contexts by disparate, and especially marginal groups so
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that we might produce accounts of how this manifold use complicates and expands the current thinking on rights ” (Madhok, 2013: 23). Madhok (2013) demonstrates how recent feminist thinking is focused ? on how women’s agency is constrained by oppressive structures. She suggests that the action bias in the WDP places a high expectation on Sathins to demonstrate a direct correspondence between preferences and actions. Given the constraints in their everyday lives, Madhok
(2013) concludes that this expectation essentialised women as a category and made them vulnerable to conflict, intimidation and injury. The key objective of empowering women by enhancing their agency and self-respect within the arena of citizenship by their participation in local government policy formulation was drained of impact by the oppressive power structures. “It is not hard to see the difficulties posed by such an understanding of self-respect based as it is upon abstract and essentialist conceptions of personhood” (Madhok, 2013: 174). The universal “right bearing personhood” (Madhok, 2013: 174) is shown, she concludes, to be an identity fashioned by social, cultural and political intersectionality. Self-respect is in
Madhok’s eyes, therefore, not a stripped down abstract concept based on Western ideals of autonomy. In this view, the rights discourse, with its emphasis on the rights of citizens, does provide a foundation for inclusion in political participation. As
Madhok (2013) suggests “the formal promise of equal rights and citizenship for the free-standing, abstract and unencumbered individual hollowed out and rendered unrealisable for the concrete and socially located one – was only too well realised and unambiguously articulated by the sathins ” (Madhok, 2013: 175).
This thesis argues that the conversation about women’s agency in development can be strengthened by drawing together the work of Spivak (1988), Madhok (2007,
2013) and Madhok and Rai (2012) and Fricker (2003, 2006 and 2007). It proposes that this would expand the concept of epistemic injustice to incorporate themes of agency in oppressed contexts. This concept can be applied in a way that illustrates particular themes within the activists’ accounts that relate to the deployment of women’s human rights.
There have been other critiques of women’s empowerment schemes. Malhotra and
Mather (1997) suggest that o ne objective of women’s empowerment in development is to emancipate women from oppression or, specifically “to ‘empower’ women in developing countries so that gender inequalities will be reduced, socio-
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economic conditions will improve, and population growth will subside” (Malhotra and Mather 1997: 603).
34 Whilst much of the feminist literature has involved theorising about what could be termed the politics of recognition, that is, what gender equality means in terms of citizenship, Ferguson (2010) suggests that development rhetoric has virtually reduced the concept in practice to a desire to help women. Despite the aspirational commitments to gender equality in development, it identifies a Western discourse where equality is codified in abstract international and domestic legal systems.
Gender equality, Kabeer (2003) claims, became incorporated into the development agenda since the programmes that aimed at increasing women’s economic activity implied a change in gender relations. The disadvantage of concentrating on economic activity alone was that women’s often marginalised status in the development process was not addressed. She adds that, if the objective of development programmes were directed at alleviating women’s poverty, the most effective policy would have been to institute anti-poverty programmes directed at women. Substantial disbursement of funds to poor women would have been more successful than income-generation schemes which have the often unintended consequences of potentially doubling women’s workload burdens in terms of domestic responsibilities and paid employment, she argued. Kabeer (2003) suggests that the economic empowerment approach failed to take into account the complexities arising from interactions of gender inequalities in both the domestic and market spheres. Chapter Seven in this thesis considers the complexities of these interactions represented in activists’ accounts and focuses on their essentialised perce ptions of women’s role as citizens in local contexts. These findings are also in line with Baden and Goetz ’s suggestion (1997) that the feminist activist movements which promote gender equality find that human rights have
34 The development discourse eventually incorporated strategies to promote gender equality as part of the development process. Goal 3 of the MDGs specifically addresses the need to achieve gender equality and promote women’s empowerment. Goal 3 is mentioned at this point as background context although none of the activists specifically mentioned MDGs, however. This thesis does not, therefore, extend to examining MDGs. Questions have been raised about whether this goal has displaced the more focused and substantive gender-based rights contained within the human rights framework. Kabeer (2003) claims that the human rights-based approach to development which underpinned the MDGs emerged as the best theoretical framework to achieve this goal. MDGs focused on providing women with a political voice, improving access to primary and secondary education, commitment to reproductive and health services, and eliminating discrimination in employment markets, Kabeer (2003) explains.
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been pushed onto the agendas of development agencies and, in the process, have become mainstreamed and possibly depoliticised.
The mainstreaming of gender equality within broader institutional settings may also lead to a process of compromise. Gender mainstreaming is a contested process but is aimed at rebranding key gender strategies and revising main concepts to reflect the contemporary world. Perrons (2005) suggests that this process involves different frames of reference where gender equality could suffer from the prioritisation of other mainstream goals within a broader political and economic context, such as enhanced economic competitiveness.
Other debates in the scholarly literature have also critiqued women’s microfinance projects. Keating, Rasmussen and Rishi (2010) summarise the contributions of the main scholarship in the area of microfinance and explain that feminist work has critiqued such a strategy on the basis that “the programs represent a particularly insidious form of neoliberal policy dressed in feminist clothing ” (2010: 153). The authors posit a mechanism of accumulation by dispossession in which women are brought into the structure of capitalism in exploitative ways. Bateman describes a process of a “woman’s gradual entrapment in a web of microdebt” (2010: 44) and how this contributes to their over-extension of the burden of household survival.
Bateman (2010) dismisses the narrative that the microfinance industry promotes the empowerment of women as a myth generated by those in the West who wish to advance local neoliberalism. Poor women are particularly vulnerable because of the propensity of such schemes to recast them as relatively unprotected self-employed subcontractors. Bateman (2010) cites work by Goetz and Sen Gupta (1996) who demonstrated that women who participated in these schemes lost control of the microloans to their husbands but retained responsibility for repaying them.
Bateman (2010) also refers to Mayoux’s (2002) argument that the neoliberal driving force of profitability which underpins the microfinance industry conflicts with a broader strategy of women’s empowerment and gender equality. Chant (2007,
2008) also points to the fact that antipoverty programmes focus more on women’s relative economic disadvantage rather than their inferior status in society. She also concludes that “poverty is unlikely to be effectively addressed by a unilateral focus on incomes” (Chant, 2007: 35). Ferguson (2010) suggests that the move towards equating gender equality with women’s economic empowerment can be partly
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explained as a consequence of the neoliberal ideologies of many international development organisations such as the World Bank. Such thinking construes gender equality as gender economic empowerment which, rather than being an end in itself, she suggests, is a means to achieving other development outcomes.
International finance institutions targeted anti-poverty programmes at women because of what might be described as their essentialist view that women were more credit-worthy than men. Parthasarathy (2012) suggests that this deflected efforts away from challenging the norms underlying patriarchy and power relations which shape them. This thesis examines this view and other essentialised portrayals in activists’ accounts about the role of women in economic empowerment programmes. The ? thesis places this examination in the context of the potential conflict between economic empowerment and women’s wellbeing.
The feminist project in development has increasingly suffered further set-backs. As
Cornwall and Molyneux (2006) suggest, governments have coopted women’s movements, particularly gender equality programmes, to attract international funding rather than to improve women’s rights and experiences. Writing more recentl y, Ferguson (2010) has concluded that, although the term “gender” has been adopted as a fundamental component of any international development programme, the concept is understood and interpreted in contradictory ways by different development practitioners and policy-makers. Cornwall and Molyneux
(2006) argue that even NGOs may subvert the original goals of social movements during the process known as ‘NGOisation’ where professionals who staff the organisations often comply more with the neoliberal economic growth agendas of funding donors than advancing the activists’ objectives in relation to the reduction of inequalities. This has meant that development NGOs are less likely to address the needs of women beneficiaries at the grassroots level. The authors also claim, however, that feminist NGOs still remain amongst the most active forces in achieving the translation of international rights and development discourse into concrete service provision and activity. As this is the case, as Ferguson (2010) argues, the aim of incorporating the concept into development practice has become conceptually empty. Development practitioners may currently aim to improve women’s economic position, but it is not necessarily the case that this will lead to equality with men, even if their explicit aim is gender equality.
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This thesis builds on this work by examining the representations in the activists’ accounts of perceived associations between women’s human rights as a political tool and participation in women’s economic empowerment programmes at the grassroots level. The third component in the taxonomy draws together key disjunctions and frames them in relation to the debates about women’s citizenship and essentialisation of women as well as gender responsibilities discourses.
The core theme of the third element is the representation of the deployment of women’s human rights in relation to economic empowerment programmes. It situates itself in the feminist discourse on development practice. Madhok (2013) suggests ? that women’s economic empowerment programmes create new forms of coercion and oppression because the framework is based on Western ideas of agency such as free will, choice and liberty. Autonomy is regarded as a doubleedged concept which devalues roles and responsibilities mostly associated with women, she claims. This thesis suggests that this critique could be strengthened by an understanding of perceptions of the ability to operationalise women’s economic empowerment and gender equality visions drawn from the activists’ accounts.
This thesis also explores activists’ representations which centre on the deployment of different operational strategies. It argues that, in some cases, that there was a disconnection between accounts which emphasised the relevance of the human rights and women’s human rights frameworks and the use of alternative empowerment strategies deployed at the grassroots level.
This thesis is informed by key existing scholarly work which focuses on alternative empowerment strategies in development. These include adopting a more holistic approach to women’s empowerment.
35 Feminist scholars have argued that women’s empowerment might best be achieved by developing transnational networks and forming solidarity as previously discussed earlier in this chapter.
36
The literature in these discourses focuses on the contention that, from a bottom-up, grassroots perspective, the very objective of emancipation might be misguided and
35 See, for example, the work on capability by Sen (1999) and Nussbaum (2000) as well as Robeyns
(2006) observations on the capability approach.
36 See Anthias (2006), Steans (2007a and b) and Davis (2007).
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have little meaning for women in a diverse range of cultures who are citizens of local communities.
The conclusion that Sardar-Ali (2008) drew from her research is that in some cultures, women gain empowerment from alternative sources. That is, “[i]n the
African and Asian contexts most women rely on entitlements embodied in family relationships that do not re late to ‘equal rights’ language’ or even human rightsbased development rhetoric” (Sardar-Ali 2008: 10). Sardar-Ali continues to underline how important religion is for women within some communities in terms of their identities and this does not necessarily accord with a Western secular approach. It may be that the UN Framework places an “exaggerated emphasis”
(Cornwall and Molyneux 2006: 1184) on individual rights and it is increasingly becoming apparent that a “gulf … exists between elegant laws and the indignities of women’s everyday realities, and between being accorded a right and being in any position at all to make use of it” (Cornwall and Molyneux 2006: 1183).
This finding is in line with the writings by Sharp, Briggs, Yacoub and Hamed
(2003) 37 on patriarchal power bargaining strategies, who explored the advantages that some women experience from patriarchal bargaining by examining the position of women in the desert and market places in Upper Egypt. They demonstrate that those who adopt this strategy may be reluctant to embrace projects that might provide opportunities for economic empowerment. The researchers found that such women considered that the development projects incur further burdens in terms of time, particularly as they were already responsible for childcare and domestic social arrangements. They discovered that women adopted short-term survival strategies that colluded with a patriarchal societal structure. These women actively resisted attempts to involve them in programmes that aimed at addressing subordination but which would only bear fruition in the longer-term.
37 This finding is in line with the work of Malhotra and Mather’s (1997) findings. The authors cite evidence that marriage and motherhood confer increased status and domestic power on women, since more household decisions are related to children. Older women in families benefit from increasing mobility through fewer restrictions placed on their movements in comparison with younger women. The authors claim that modern bases of power, particularly where women shoulder both the burdens of paid employment and most of the childrearing duties, are not necessarily more advantageous than traditional bases of power. They contend that motherhood is so central in many societies that it “cannot be dismissed as a potential source of domestic power simply because it may be derivative or traditional” (Malhotra and Mather 1997: 609).
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The authors found that that patriarchal bargaining for certain women in the study reflected their practical needs in terms of the concrete conditions they experienced.
Their empowerment derives from their roles as women and the sense of security of, and identity within, the household rather than from engagement in economic decision-making. Sharp, Briggs, Yacoub and Hamed ’s (2003) differentiation between “power to” and “power over” strategies was referred to in Chapter Two.
The authors concluded that women’s “power to” and equality was derived from the complementarity of roles that men and women occupied in their community. As the authors conclude, it is only when women decide that the benefits of development programmes, and the changes they aim to engender, outweigh the structural status quo that they will consider engaging in development programmes. It appears from these illustrative studies that some women can quite successfully negotiate increased power and autonomy in their households and, consequently, they would not necessarily perceiv e themselves to be powerless or in need of ‘emancipation’.
This thesis later refers to “power to” and “power over” strategies that were described in the activists’ accounts in both case studies. It does so, however, by fleshing the concepts out to provi de an understanding of activists’ accounts of the different strategies in the operationalisation of women’s empowerment programmes. It also applies the concepts to a wider range of contexts. The thesis argues, that a “power over” could be used to describe a strategy adopted by NGOs in an attempt to transform oppressive structures. This is compared with a “power to” approach which aims to enable beneficiaries to empower women to choose to act in certain ways.
This thesis feeds into this discourse by il lustrating the disconnections in activists’ accounts centred on the deployment of women’s human rights. The activists perceived there was an increasing gap between the ir organisations’ objectives of improving women’s wellbeing and participation in economic empowerment programmes. This was because the activists perceived that such participation which placed additional burdens on the beneficiaries in terms of responsibilities
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3.2.4. Conversations that Map onto the Hybridisation of
Women’s
Human Rights
This thesis is informed by Walby
’s (2009) argument that feminism is becoming embedded within powerful political and civil societal projects. The fourth element in the taxonomy is distinct from the other three in that it identifies activists’ expressions of an ability to shape the local structural and institutional contexts to maximise the potential of women beneficiaries. There were threads from the accounts which could also be interpreted as expressing a vision of drawing the women beneficiaries into wider global justice projects. This is in line with Walby’s perspective on the future of feminism as well as how women’s human rights will develop as part of global progress projects.
Walby (2009) suggests that global progress is a contested concept. She identifies these projects, however, as economic growth, crime reduction, environmentalism, human development and human rights and social democracy. She does suggest that “the agenda of ‘human rights’ offers more rhetorical than practical support, since it is relatively weakly institutionalised, with the possible exception of some international laws” (Walby, 2011: 154). Walby (2011) describes human rights as containing a minimal component of equality. She argues that this concept is usually restricted to civil liberties and suffrage democracy and this limited usage is not sufficient to underpin the delivery of economic growth. However, she argues that social democratic projects include components that also more effectively support human development and capabilities since they contains ideological objectives that are associated with creating these ideals directly rather than indirectly. Social democratic projects also promote equality and this is manifested by practices which ensure representation of women and minority groups, she suggests. Walby (2011) contends that social democratic projects would more effectively deliver progress towards environmental sustainability and crime reduction, for example in the area of violence against women, because of its focus on equality.
3.3. Chapter Conclusion
The review of the literature has revealed that scholarly work could be strengthened by an understanding of activists’ perceptions of an ability to operationalise women’s human rights and equality visions. This thesis seeks to contribute to specific
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conversations by offering a method to address gaps in the academic literature. It does so by undertaking an analysis of natural accounts of the deployment of women’s human rights on NGO websites as well as the generated ones from the interviewees in the case studies. The thesis argues that the way that activists portrayed their organisations’ deployment of women’s human rights is informed by an understanding of perceptions of agency in response to situated experiences of socio-economic contexts. This thesis argues the taxonomy can be developed ? which identifies a family of resemblances to different positions on perceived functions of the women’s human rights framework.
The thesis contends that themes underlying the taxonomy can be fleshed out by unpacking the accounts of activists in two case studies. This chapter has been structured by mapping elements within women’s human rights taxonomy and mapped onto four different debates in specific conversations in the feminist literature.
The first of these focuses on examining how women’s human rights provide the concepts and framework with which the oppressed can contest injustice. This component describes the use of women human rights as a recourse to rhetoric.
This thesis contributes to a specific aspect within the general debate about the universality of women’s human rights. Rather than examining activists’ accounts to inform the conversation about the extent to which these rights are universal, this thesis focuses on the representation of these principles as a universal political tool and a political commitment. The first component in the women’s human rights taxonomy comments on the use of such a political tool to measure gap between the rhetoric and realities of women’s human rights to highlight where governments are not fulfilling their international obligations. The thesis contends that activists’ accounts support the argument that universality debates would be enriched by focusing on building strategic collective coalitions which targeted intersectional power struggles. The thesis argues further that a conceptualisation of violence should act as a compass at the heart of these coalitions.
The second component in the women’s human rights taxonomy focused on the representation of domestic violence in both the London and West Bengal activists’ accounts. This element also drew on scholarly conversations about women’s
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human rights as a political tool. The discussion of this element included an analysis of the ways in which activists represented beneficiaries of their organisation s’ programmes they claimed supported victims of violence in domestic environments.
In addition, the thesis feeds into discourses centred on gender essentialism, particularly in relation to a gendered reading of citizenship in activists’ accounts. It informs the literature about the implications of framing what could be viewed as men’s situated patriarchal behaviour as “women’s issues”. It also does so in the context of activists’ accounts of programmes described as targeted at women. The thesis contends that certain specific conversations existing in the literature about agency, knowledge and language would be strengthened by building links between them. As previously mentioned earlier in the chapter, this thesis, for example, argues that the conversation about women’s agency in development can be strengthened by drawing together the work of Spivak (1988), Madhok (2007, 2013) and Madhok and Rai (2012) and Fricker (2003, 2006 and 2007).
The thesis continues the theme of gender essentialism during the analysis of activists’ accounts of empowerment strategies. It feeds into conversations about gender respon sibilities and women’s rights. The thesis considers the implications of the essentialised depiction in West Bengal accounts of women as guardians of
India’s future economic saviour in activists’ accounts of microfinance projects. The project feeds into debates about whether Western economic growth models conflict with the attainment of gender equality and human rights.
Finally, the thesis contributes to conversations about the future of feminism. It does so by those exploring activists’ accounts which include themes associated with the hybridisation between human rights and other global progress projects.
This thesis draws on these four conversations to produce a taxonomy which describes different approaches to the depicted deployment of women’s human rights. This thesis positions itself in the contemporary global discourses of the disjunctions between what the women’s human rights framework aimed to do and what happens during operationalisation at the grassroots level. More specifically, the thesis strengthens arguments in the following particular conversations within the broader scholarly literature. The thesis, therefore, contributes to and strengthens
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global discourses existing in the literature about women’s agency, knowledge and human rights language by building links between them.
Chapters Two and Three have situated the major research question about accounts of the deployment of human rights and women’s human rights frameworks within the key debates of the scholarly literatures. It is important to be clear what features in situate d experiences were perceived to be significant in relation to NGOs’ ability to operationalise these frameworks. The next section of this chapter will therefore explore the precise methodology used to explore the accounts of the deployment of the frameworks showing what features were identified as being significant. This exploration will be provided before moving on to the analysis later in the thesis which will demonstrate that these were perceived as influencing activists’ accounts of organisations’ ability to operationalise the frameworks human rights and women’s human rights principles.
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4. Chapter Four – Methodology
The previous two chapters positioned the research question in the scholarly literature and identified how the thesis would strengthen current conversations. The thesis contends that the two proposed taxonomies, these being the deployment of human rights and also women’s human rights, capture themes arising in the activists’ accounts in the two case studies. The project argues that these proposed taxonomies are framed by different representations of agency in response to local socio-economic infrastructures. The purpose of this chapter is to describe the research data needed to answer the research questions and the methods chosen to collect and analyse the materials.
The first section of this chapter focuses on the selection of data and methodology. It outlines some of the research ethics issues associated with the project and how these were addressed in order to ensure confidentiality and anonymity. The section provides a rationale for the selection of the specialist text-mining software which was used to analyse the materials extra cted from the NGOs’ websites. It then outlines how the sub-samples of NGOs were selected for the interview stage of the research.
The conclusion prepares the ground for the presentation of the results of the first phase of the project by linking together the research question, methodology and the research objectives.
4.1. Selection of Methodology in Relation to Research Question
During the first phase of the research (see Table 1-1), the vision and mission statements which appeared on publicly accessible NGOs’ websites were analysed to explore whether they contained representations of the human rights and women’s human rights frameworks. These materials gave access to relatively wellrehearsed, publicfacing versions of the NGOs’ deployment of human rights. During the second phase of the study, a sub-sample of NGOs in each case study was selected for the purposes of inviting activists to participate in interviews. The objective of these interviews was to elicit a clearer sense of whether those working on the gro und felt that the human rights and women’s human rights abstract frameworks were relevant to their organisations’ visions and, if so, the ways in
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which they operationalised them. The aim was to gain access to accounts that were more likely to be less rehearsed and, therefore, which had the potential to provide supplementary insights. The materials drew out the complexity of the translation of human rights abstract principles into practical interventions. It became clear that a fruitful strategy for looking at the complexities arising from the different ways in which NGOs approached the role of social activism in this area was to consider their perceptions of agency in terms of their ability to enhance beneficiaries’ wellbeing.
Interviewees were asked questions about the relevance of the human rights framework to their work. Activists were also asked whether their organisations ran programmes targeted at women with the purpose of eliciting perspectives about the relevance of women’s human rights, gender equality and women’s empowerment to their work.
The research question centred on comparing how samples of publicly accessible
NGOs based in two countries at different levels of economic development framed their deployment of human rights and women’s human rights in their work. Chapters
Two and Three mapped the two taxonomies onto conversations in the scholarly literature. The research question and the literature review formed the basis of the research inquiry. The following section describes the data collected to examine them. It describes how the research materials were generated.
At first, an ethnographic study of the relevance of human rights work of NGOs in two different countries at different stages of economic development seemed to be a useful research design. This was not practical to take forward for the current study.
However, it would be a useful future research direction, given the focus on the onthe-ground negotiation of human rights frameworks. An ethnographic study might have provided a more nuanced perspective on the situated nature of statements about human rights, to the extent that they arose in the practice of NGOs in their daily work. By focusing on interviews, the study lost the real-time sense of context, but was able instead to make comparisons across a larger number of NGOs than would have been possible in an ethnographic study. Suggestions for further research employing and ethnographic design are discussed in Chapter Eight.
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4.2. Selection of Two Countries for a Comparative Study
The thesis focused on comparing the deployment of human rights by NGOs in two case studies. The aim was to undertake a study to examine the accounts of NGOs operating in one of the lower HDI tiers and to compare their experiences with those at the highest level of development.
The United Nations produces a vast array of statistical data as part of their Human
Development Reports which measures human development around the globe.
38
The following table was constructed from some of the most salient headline indicators from the International Human Development Report. It shows the key comparative development statistics of India and the United Kingdom as well as data for the bottom and top ranked countries within each index to provide background context to this thesis. The multidimensional poverty index can be understood as a reverse of the other indices in the table in that the top ranked country is the most deprived according to this measure.
38 http://hdr.undp.org/en/humandev/.
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Table 4-1: To Show the Major UN Development Programme Indices
To provide context for India and United Kingdom indices, 2012
Accessed: 22 December 2013 from: http://hdr.undp.org/en/data
Index
*Human Development Index (HDI) (rank)
HDI (value)
India
136
0.554
UK
26
0.875
Top
Norway (1)
0.995
Bottom
Niger (186)
0.304
Year
2012
2012
**Inequality Adjusted HDI (value)
***Gender Inequality Index (rank)
Gender Inequality Index (value)
0.392
132
0.610
0.802 0.894
34 Netherlands (1)
0.205 0.045
0.200
Yemen (148)
0.747
2012
2012
2012
****Multidimensional Poverty Index (rank) 30 n/a *****Niger Armenia (101) 2005-6
Multidimensional Poverty Index (% of pop.)
Key (from the UNDP Indices Site)
53.7 n/a 69.4 0.3 2010
*UNDP describes that "The first Human Development Report introduced a new way of measuring development by combining indicators of life expectancy, educational attainment and income into a composite human development index, the HDI ”. The breakthrough for the HDI was the creation of a single statistic which was to serve as a frame of reference for both social and economic development. The HDI sets a minimum and a maximum for each dimension, called goalposts, and then shows where each country stands in relation to these goalposts, expressed as a value between 0 and 1. A full explanation of these indices can be found at ”: http://hdr.undp.org/en/statistics/hdi.
**The 2010 Report introduced the Inequality-adjusted HDI (IHDI), a measure of the level of human development of people in a society that accounts for inequality. Under perfect equality the IHDI is equal to the HDI, but falls below the HDI when inequality rises. “In this sense, the IHDI is the actual level of human development (taking into account inequality), while the HDI can be viewed as an index of the potential human development that could be achieved if there is no inequality”. http://hdr.undp.org/en/statistics/ihdi.
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***The GII measures the "differences in the distribution of achievements between women and men…Gender inequality varies tremendously across countries —the losses in achievement due to gender inequality (not directly comparable to total inequality losses because different variables are used) range fro m 4.5 percent to 74.7 percent”.
It includes measures to r eflect women’s disadvantages in three main areas, these being: reproductive health; empowerment; and labour market participation in relation to men. http://hdr.undp.org/en/statistics/gii.
**** "The Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI), published for the first time in the 2010 Report, complements money-based measures by considering multiple deprivations and their overlap. The index identifies deprivations across the same three dimensions as the HDI and shows the number of people who are multidimensionally poor
(suffering deprivations in 33% of weighted indicators) and the number of deprivations with which poor households typically contend ”. http://hdr.undp.org/en/statistics/mpi
*****2006
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The general picture in Table 4-1 above shows that India and the UK occupy fairly contrasting levels of development. India is described in the UNDP set of indices as experiencing a medium level of development but the UK is amongst the most highly developed nations. These positions are also reflected in the gender equality index.
India is ranked 30 th in a ranking of 101 countries that are listed amongst the multidimensionally poorest.
Table 4-1 shows that India occupied a low rank in the HDI index at the time the research was conducted (136 th out of 186 countries) but other factors influenced the decision to draw one of the case studies from that country. One prominent factor is that India is the world’s largest democracy. It has a diverse population and is a rising influence as an economic power on the global stage. This project aimed to contribute to an understanding of the operationalisation of the human rights framework and women’s empowerment and gender equality interventions in a country that was characterised by a low ranking in the HDI index. The thesis was also inspired by India’s tradition and culture in respect of women’s human rights, described in Sen’s work (1992, 1999) in the area of gender inequality. He noted the phenomenon of the “missing millions” of women in Asia and North Africa 39 , this being the excess mortality and artificially lower survival rates of women in these areas. In alignment with this observation, India had a particularly low gender equality ranking (132 nd of 148 countries). For practical reasons, the project was restricted to drawing samples from one state rather than attempting to cover an entire nation. It enabled a more consistent understanding of activist accounts of socio-economic contexts. The project concentrated on the work of NGOs in West
Bengal after being informed by the experiences of another researcher who had explored methodological issues involved with obtaining samples of Englishspeaking activists in India.
40
This was a comparative study of the situated experiences of NGOs based in two countries, which are characterised by being at different stages of development. It
39 Lagarde (2014) cited what she called Sen’s pioneering role in calling to attention the scandal of missing women who would been alive today if they had been born as men. Lagarde referred to the cause of the missing women as neglect of girl children, inadequate health care and malnutrition.
The solution, she said, is to empower women’s voice and agency through their empowerment which means focussing on education and ownership rights, employment outside the home, and reducing the gap in workplace participation.
40 Harrison’s (2009) work is covered later in the chapter.
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was decided, therefore, to draw the second case study from those countries that ranked in the top tier of the HDI. The UK was selected, given the nationality of the researcher and the fact that it was 26 th in the HDI index and had a relatively high gender equality ranking (34 th ). It was decided to select London as the second case study because of the number and diversity of NGOs serving a richly multicultural population in that city. The following section describes how the samples of NGOs which formed the two case studies were selected.
4.3. Population Definitions and Sampling Frames
The fieldwork which forms the basis of this thesis was undertaken between 2009 and 2011 and comprised two main phases.
The first phase comprised an exploratory analysis of vision and mission statements extracted from the websites of two case studies. The first case study comprised a sample of 100 publicly accessible NGOs in West Bengal and the second case study comprised a further 100 NGOs based in London. The aim of this phase was to identify whether there was a meaningful structure which underlay these statements that could be interpreted as incorporating human rights, women’s human rights or human rights-based development frameworks. The second objective was to identify a subsample of NGOs within each case study to invite to participate in the second phase of the research.
During the first phase of the project, the data were analysed in order to investigate the following specific questions: i) Was there a structure underlying the visions and mission statements extracted from the websites of the publicly accessible NGOs in the case studies? If so, was this structure composed of clusters of different development or human rights orientations and how were these grouped? ii) What were the predominant features or themes that might describe these different orientations? iii) Did development and human rights rhetoric feature in the mission statements? If so, did they specifically refer to concepts such as gender equality, empowerment, participation or social justice?
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During the second phase, interviews were undertaken with 17 activists attached to the West Bengal sub-sample and a further 17 members of staff working in London
NGOs. The objective of the second phase was to explore in more depth some of the findings arising during the first phase about the structures underlying the vision and mission statements of the two case studies. Specifically, the aim was to interview staff in sub-samples of the NGOs to elicit accounts of the deployment of human rights and women’s human rights.
Several steps were taken at the outset of the project in an attempt to establish a definitive sampling frame of publicly accessible NGOs in West Bengal. After consulting with the Indian Embassy in London, the LSE Library Helpdesk, Professor
Lewis in the Social Policy Department at LSE and Tom Harrison, who had recently completed a PhD thesis on NGOs in India (2009), it became apparent that there was unlikely to be any definitive list of NGOs that would act as a sampling frame.
This thesis is informed by Harrison’s (2009) experience of deriving a sample of
NGOs in India for the purposes of his research. Harrison’s thesis “explores the analytical shortcomings of academic and policy literature on non-governmental development organisations (NGOs)…which focuses on differentiating NGOs from other institutions, particularly the s tate and the market….[i]n this thesis, I develop an alternative methodology for studying the NGO sector in developing countries that seeks to address these shortcomings by drawing on a set of approaches to studying the state and the market as socially embedded to provide an account of the social embeddedness of local NGOs” (Harrison, 2009: 1). Harrison interviewed
NGO leaders to assess the influence of their social identities and political contacts on the work of NGOs.
Harrison (2009) concluded that, whilst many research studies were based on case studies, there had been little discussion in the literature about the appropriate methodology with which to conduct a study of NGOs. He suggested that this was because researchers assumed that the sector was so diverse in terms of interests that it led researchers to infer it was not practically or theoretically possible to make generalisations about these organisations and their staff.
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Harrison (2009) explained the difficulties he experienced in establishing a sampling frame. He suggested that this was primarily because there was no legal category of
‘NGO’ in India, although non-profit organisations could be registered through one of five mechanisms that conferred this status on them, such as under the 1860
Societies Registration Act. Harrison (2009) was unable to construct a sampling frame because there was, in summary, no definitive list of NGOs in India. Instead, he drew his sample of 94 NGOs operating in two districts in West Bengal from a variety of sources and he recommended that other researchers wanting to define a representative sample of all NGOs in this field adopt the same strategy.
Harrison (2009) constructed his eventual sampling frame by drawing on four online databases: IndianNGO.com, ProPoor, the Charities Aid Foundation India and the
Government of India database. He also tried other various methods of defining and augmenting his sample such as snowballing, contacting universities for their lists and addresses from government sources. He discusses the advantages and disadvantages of each method and the problems he faced with each approach.
Harrison’s (2009) original objective was to identify a representative sample of all
NGOs in West Bengal. In contrast, the aim of this thesis was to construct a sampling frame which would recognise the distinctiveness of a category of NGOs that had a public-facing website. Bearing in mind Harrison’s (2009) approach and the focus of this project on publicly accessible online NGOs, the assumption was made that those who had their own website and also chose to subscribe to online databases based in India could be defined as being publicly accessible. It was concluded that these NGOs formed a pool that could be drawn upon for this thesis.
A variety of indices were used to measure the visibility of online databases taking into account that not all organisations listed were likely to fall within the category of
NGO.
41
41 What organisations count as NGOs? Harrison defines seven criteria to apply to NGOs. This contrasts with Hilhorst’s (2003) approach who considered that all those NGOs that present themselves as NGOs to be NGOs by definition. For Hilhorst, what is important is that they adopt the label of NGO. See Hilhorst (2003). Harrison’s (2009) seven criteria include: the organisation should have an explicit and/or primary focus on development work, which for all its ambiguities implies aiming to improve the social and/or economic wellbeing of the poorer sections of society. The development work should require some external financial resources. This development work should be carried out through particular specifiable interventions , which are commonly but not necessarily referred to programmes or projects. It should have some formal structure. Each selected West
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Online databases of these publicly accessible NGOs are usually searchable by state within India. Those who wish to be listed subscribe to the database and thus they are self-selecting, but not all organisations listed fell within the category of
NGO.
A series of ALEXA 42 website traffic information reports were run to determine the extent of global visibility. According to ALEXA, the top global internet site at the time was “Google”, and on the basis of this it was decided to use this search engine as a way of determining which online NGO databases to draw upon for the Indian NGO case study sample. These searches were performed using a variety of phrases informed by ALEXA reports, such as "Directory of NGOs in India", "List of NGOs in
India", “Indian NGOs", to obtain ranked Google lists of online databases of NGOs in
India.
One of the four online databases that Harrison used for his sampling frame was the self-registration screen on the Indian Government website. It had 3,178 NGOs listed in West Bengal at the time it was accessed in 2010. ALEXA rated it as having a high page ranking in terms of impact and high traffic flow statistics. It also appeared in a relatively high position on the Google search. Harrison also used
ProPoor which had a Google sponsored link. The IndianNGOs.com site that
Harrison had used in his research was no longer working and there was no directory of NGOs within the Charities Aid Foundation website.
Other studies informed the selection of NGO databases. A report by Ha, Helbing,
Inagaki and Lahoti (2007) prepared by researchers at Columbia University (SIPA), listed recommended databases of NGOs in India.
43 These included the
IndianNGOs.com, WANGO and Idealist online databases. WANGO (World
Association of Non-Governmental Organizations) had produced a publicly accessible online database but it was not searchable by Indian state.
44
Bengal NGO was assessed against these criteria in both case studies and those that did not meet them all to a satisfactory degree were discarded.
42 See http://www.alexa.com/. ALEXA is an internet analytics company.
43 School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University.
44 A feasibility study of a sample of 51 NGOs was previously undertaken in May and June 2010 by extracting information from two India-based online databases, ngosindia.com and karmayog.org, and found that they provided a reliable service with a facility to search by region.
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On the bases of these measures of visibility and conclusions of other research in the area, the following online databases were selected: i) ProPoor; ii) Government of India; iii) Idealist; iv) ngosindia.com; v) Karmayog.
Echoing Harrison’s (2009) conclusions, it was decided that it was not possible to establish a definitive sampling frame from these databases. Reasons for this included the fact that some of the NGOs who had website addresses listed on the database were no longer operating or their websites were only available intermittently. The websites of some of the NGOs listed were undeveloped sites.
Two further complications emerged during the course of the project: i) that just under 10% of the randomly drawn NGOs had registered with more than one database; and ii) that the selected databases contained varying numbers of registered NGOs. It was decided that these factors were of little significance as the project aimed at deriving a diverse sample rather than a representative one. The intention to construct a corpus which potentially contained a variety of types of vision and mission statements was also taken into account. The objective was not to produce generalisable results which could be applied to a wider population but rather to analyse a diverse range of NGO visions to begin to map the territory of the orientations towards the deployment of human rights.
The NGOs for this case study were selected by using an approximated stratified sampling method. The aim was to obtain a sample of 100 NGOs registered in West
Bengal that had publicly accessible websites and that were actively engaged currently in intervention programmes.
A random sequence generator 45 was used to select NGOs from each database on a stratified basis and then each selected NGO was subjected to the criteria established by Harrison. All of the selected NGOs except two complied with the criteria.
45 Random.Org, the true random number service at http://www.random.org/sequences/.
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The project aimed to select a total of 100 NGOs in each case study as it was decided that this would provide a sufficient number to explore a variety of approaches of interventions and visions. This decision was later supported by the robust classification indices contained in the Alceste reports. Appendix I contains a summary of the NGOs that participated in the research, including a list of the 100 organisations that formed the sample of NGOs in West Bengal. The NGOs identified were outward-facing, given that that they had websites accessible to
English-speaking and Western audiences. The importance of this factor is that it maximised the possibility of being able to speak in English for the purpose of conducting interviews.
After the sample of West Bengal NGOs had been obtained, the next objective was to decide on the method used to generate the sample of London NGOs which formed the second case study. Several steps were taken to define the population of
NGOs in London from which to draw a sample of one hundred to include in the
Alceste analysis.
46 These steps were also undertaken during 2010. Staff on the
Helpdesk in the LSE Library recommended paper-based databases of UK NGOs among their lists, such as A Guide to the Major Trusts: Directory of Social Change and the Voluntary Agencies Directory .
The advice was to approach the Charity
Commission but those on the Helpdesk reported that they were unaware of any online database of UK NGOs.
The website of the Birmingham University NGO Project, the Database Archive of
Non-Governmental Organisations (DANGO), provided a list of organisations. Both they and the National Council of Voluntary Organisations directed researchers to the register of charities maintained by the Charity Commission which had 180,993 organisations listed at the time of accessing their database. Echoing the previous conclusions in relation to the West Bengal NGOs and those of Harrison (2009), it was decided that it was not possible to establish a definitive sampling frame from which to identify a sample of NGOs in the London area on the basis there was no one definitive online directory or set of directories containing NGOs in the UK. It was decided to adopt the same strategy to select the NGOs in the second case study as was used in the West Bengal case study. A sampling frame was
46 The development factor, that formed one of the definition criteria of NGOs as described in
Harrison’s (2009) thesis, could not be taken into account.
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constructed, therefore by drawing upon a variety of online self-subscription databases.
A variety of indices were used to measure the visibility of online databases taking into account the assumption that not all organisations listed were likely to fall within the category of NGO.
As in the selection of West Bengal NGOs, ALEXA website traffic information reports were run to determine the extent of global visibility of the online NGO databases in
London. Google searches were performed, again mirroring the type of phrases used in the first website survey of Indian NGOs, to determine the accessibility rankings of listed databases. These phrases included: “NGOs in UK”, “Directory of
NGOs in Uni ted Kingdom”, “List of NGOs in UK” and “List of NGOs in United
Kingdom”. The Database of Archives of Non-Governmental Organisations
(DANGO) was returned as having the highest position of online databases when the phrase “NGOs in UK” was entered into the Google search. Bond was ranked second, but this database contained only INGOs based in the UK. Given that the objective was to select a sample of national NGOs based in London and serving national if not solely local beneficiaries, this database was discounted.
Also near the top of search lists was “NGOs: A-E” which is an NGO resource library guide maintained by Duke University Library in the United States. Amongst their key resources, they listed the “Directory of Development Organizations” which contained a series of publications accessible online with a separate section for UKbased NGOs. The Idealist NGO database was also used to draw a sample of organisations in the London area. Another database, the Worldwide NGO Directory
(WANGO) listed NGOs in the United Kingdom, but it was less easy to extract
London organisations. This database was excluded from the final list on the same basis as it had been from the selection of West Bengal NGOs.
The sampling strategy was to identify a diverse range of the most visible and accessible online databases of London-based NGOs. As in the first case study, the aim was to look at the diversity and richness of vision statements and mission statements in order to prepare the groundwork for the interview strand of the second stage of the research project. One criterion for selection was the ability to
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self-register on each of these databases. On the basis of these criteria, the following online databases were selected with the aim of extracting a stratified sample of NGOs from them: i) Idealist.org; ii) The Charity Commission; iii) DANGO; iv) Directory of Development Organizations.
During the sampling stage, it became clear that some NGOs had registered on more than one of these databases. Overall, there were fewer multiple registrations compared with those NGOs operating in West Bengal and, in addition, more NGOs in London had websites that were fully-functioning. The NGOs were selected for the case studies by approximating a stratified sampling method.
The objective of the stratified sampling was to obtain a sample of 100 NGOs registered in London. This was achieved by applying a random selection method stratified by the databases using RANDOM.ORG. Appendix I contains a list of the
100 organisations that formed the sample of NGOs in London.
4.4. Text-Mining Software: Alceste
47
This section explains and provides a rationale of the use of Alceste to analyse the vision and mission statements. It also shows how the material to be examined in the first phase of the research was generated.
Alceste, a text-mining application, was used to analyse the corpus. This section describes how the application package analyses text in some detail because it is not currently widely used. The corpus for the West Bengal and London based NGO case studies was derived in the same fashion by extracting text about mission statements and visions from their websites. The data from West Bengal sites was collected during Spring 2010 and from those in London during the periods of Winter
2010 and Spring 2011. Some NGOs had pages or sections labelled as their
“objectives”, “mission”, “mandate” or “vision” which were included in the corpus.
47 Analyse des Lexèmes Co-occurents dans les Énnoncés Simples d’un Texte (Alceste).
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Sometimes the text appeared on pages dedicated to explaining their programmes and relevant sections in these cases were included. In cases where a website did not have a main page which contained these labels, higher level objectives of programmes were included as proxies for visions and mission statements.
These corpora were analysed using Alceste, which is an automated content analysis software package. It provides a means of quantifying text for empirical purposes by mapping a framework of ideas and arguments within corpora containing large volumes of text where satisfactory solutions can be derived. In this cross-national study, the objective was to provide comparisons of text downloaded from NGO websites to identify similarities and variations with the intention of identifying themes to analyse in more depth later in the analysis. An alternative approach to conducting such analysis would have been to investigate whether there were key topics within the text, that is, topic modelling. The approach chosen, however, was to look at whether thematic structures underlay the text. Alceste looks at words in context within the corpus and uses correspondence analysis to divide it into contextual units which form the basis of a hierarchical classification. In other words, it “considers the text as a large matrix of co-occurrences between lexical forms, and processes it with multivariate techniques” (Schonhardt-Bailey,
2012: 5). The package considers the context within which words occur in the corpus rather than examining the words, or the meaning of words themselves to classify content. Researchers employ Alceste for exploration and description rather than for hypothesis testing.
Alceste produces an analysis that uses the χ2 test to identify the relative weights of classes or themes within a corpus. Researchers are given a variety of information within a report with which to interpret these themes within the context of their study.
If the analysis finds a clear structure within a corpus, the software produces a dendrogram that illustrates the relationships between underlying themes in a hierarchical representation. In the Alceste reports run on the corpora in this project, there were commonalities and factors that were interpreted as differentiating between the clusters of NGO visions that were represented in the classification output.
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Alceste, therefore, identifies patterns in large data sets by extracting statistical units from the corpus and then applying a range of statistical methods to obtain a stable solution. Alceste achieves this by generating its own segments of analysis, as
Beaudouin (2010) and Lebart (2010) explained. These segments are statistical units that are derived from the corpus. The package then applies a range of statistical methods to obtain a stable solution in terms of clusters within a hierarchical classification. These methods include those derived from factor and correspondence analysis, such as Fisher’s exact statistical test of significance, as well as the Kendall rank correlation coefficient. The analysis report produces a typology of statements and clusters based on similarity and dissimilarities within each class. In other words, Alceste produces subsets of the corpus where statements are clustered on the basis of lexical similarities so that the classes are as homogenous as possible.
In his presentation, Lebart (2010) described how Alceste undertakes the analysis.
He explained that it did so by replacing sentence meaning by analysing cooccurrences of words. The LSE Alceste Training Guide (2006) explains that Alceste produces this clustering by attempting to partition words into classes, ideally so that these do not contain words in common. It suggests that the reliability of this solution lies more in terms of the researcher’s skill in the interpretation of classes rather than how they are formed by Alceste. The researcher can use this solution to describe the structure within the corpus, rather than to make inferences from it or test hypotheses.
The LSE Alceste Training Guide (2006) also states that the researcher uses their skill to divide the corpus in meaningful ways and tags sections. These tags or passive variables are referred to as initial context units, or ucis, in Alceste. The aim of this project was to investigate the role that human rights, gender equality and women’s empowerment played in the visions of NGOs in the two case studies. The text derived from each NGO’s website was tagged in the corpus with a unique identifier as well as the database source code. Alceste automatically generates classifications and this has the advantage over other content analysis methods in that it eliminates category biases in coding. Alceste is insensitive to meaning and context but it quickly provides an analysis so that the researcher can gain an impression of a large data corpus. Its strength, therefore, is in a preliminary
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investigation of a corpus and can be used to complement the more in-depth approach that can be achieved using other software applications such as Atlas.TI and NVivo. Text-mining as an approach has advantages but only provides results which need interpreting within the context of the more systematic quantitative or qualitative designs. In the case of this project, the Alceste analysis formed the first stage of the research. The analysis from the first stage was complemented with indepth interviews in the second phase.
In terms of the output report, the hierarchical categorisation generated in Alceste summarises and compares the patterns in the corpus and the relationships between them. Alceste also produces a correspondence analysis to assist the researcher with the interpretation of the hierarchical ordering of the classes.
Caution needs to be exercised, however, since the distance between groups on the correspondence space could be dependent on a just a small number of concepts within the corpus. A particular advantage with Alceste in comparison with other analysis tools is, however, that it can produce a robust solution even with variable sizes of tagged text within the corpus because its algorithm is based on a descending analysis technique. Alceste splits the text in an arbitrary manner into uces or elementary context units (ECUs).
48 The package claims that this method avoids the problem of varying statement length. The package removes grammatical words and syntax. In other words, the analysis it conducts is focused on the content of the corpus rather than extraneous factors. Words with low frequencies are omitted and the text is further distilled by the use of lemmatisation 49 which reduces the variety of language. Researchers use Alceste when they have grounds to assume that there is a structure within a corpus that this software will expose. The researcher need only prepare the corpus for analysis by the Alceste programme by making some minor editing amendments.
Whilst Alceste is a French software package and it produces outputs in that language, it covers a range of different language dictionaries, including English.
Researchers have used the package in a variety of areas where the objective is to explore themes within different contexts. Early application of this software was
48 Alceste automatically segments the corpus into units of text or Elementary Context Units (ECUs) by looking at the natural flow of text using punctuation to drive this process. The software calculates the frequency word co-occurrences within these ECUs.
49 This means the reduction of variants of words to their root-forms
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mostly in the fields of psychological investigation and linguistic analysis. Reinert
(1993), for example, analysed nightmares reported by French adolescents, Noel-
Jorand, Reinert, Bonnon, and Therme (1995) conducted a discourse analysis of a team of physicians who undertook an expedition to Mount Sajama to understand different approaches to the psychological adaptation to extreme environments.
Lahlou (1996, 1998) analysed interviews and encyclopaedia entries referring to eating.
The use of Alceste has now broadened out to other disciplines such as political science 50 and anthropology.
51 Alceste was selected rather than other text-mining software. One of the reasons for this is based on the use of the package to examine corpora with similar structures and research objectives. This thesis is informed by the ways in which other researchers have applied this software package both in conference presentation papers and peer-reviewed publications.
The “Social Science Text-Mining and the Particular Contribution of Alceste”
Conference held at the LSE in June 2010 provided a forum for participants to discuss their application of the software package and identify methodological matters for further consideration. Schonhardt-Bailey in her session 52 explained that
Alceste identified the thematic priorities in the corpus and helps the researcher to understand the framing of the object of study by mapping text onto paradigms or ideas. In this paper, Schonhardt-Bailey, Yager and Lahlou (2010) explained how they used Alceste to analyse the differences and similarities in the political speech discourses of President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
Turning to other recently published research, Bara, Weale and Bicquelet (2007) in their paper also wondered what light computer-aided text analysis can shed on the analysis of parliamentary debates. As a case study, they analysed the patterns of discourse in a second reading on a private member’s bill on abortion in July 1966 in the House of Commons. They proposed that there was a detectable dimensionality underlying political debate and found that Alceste identified five dimensions underlying debate in their case study which they interpreted as: i) the Ground of
50 For example see Schonhardt-Bailey, Lahlou and Yager (2010).
51 For example see: Romand and Pantaleon (2007).
52 Now published as Schonhardt-Bailey, Yager and Lahlou (2012).
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Legislation; ii) the Sanctity of Life; iii) the Operation of the Current Law; iv) the
Rhetoric of Debate; and v) the Character of Procedure.
Bara, Weale and Bicquelet (2007) compared the approaches of Hamlet, a semiautomated package with that of Alceste, a fully-automated one. They concluded that “the analysis in Hamlet allows identification of the extent to which individual speakers employ one type of vocabulary rather than another. Alceste is able to provide a statistical basis for the different classes of vocabulary that occur in the debate” (Bara, Weale and Bicquelet, 2007: 577). Taking these views into account, it was decided that the particular strength of Alceste was its ability to detect the underlying dimensionality of a large corpus whilst Hamlet was weaker in this respect, particularly as the analyst needed to create the directory. T-Lab also uses a text mapping algorithm and it employs an ascending hierarchical classification.
The researcher decides on the length of the contextual units. Schonhardt-Bailey
(2012: 8) concludes that it places greater onus on the researcher to direct the analysis compared with Alceste. Since the objective of the first phase of the project was to look at the underlying structure of NGO mission statements in an as objective manner as possible, it was decided that Alceste was a more appropriate text-mining package for the research than either Hamlet or T-Lab.
The underlying theoretical approach that Alceste took was explained by Beaudouin
(2010) in her conference presentation. She explained that the software originated from an approach to textual analysis derived from the French School of analysis based on correspondence analysis and initiated by Benzecri ’s 53 work in the 1970s.
She explained that Alceste embedded Max Reinert’s theory of association within lexical worlds. In this theory, there is an assumption that the speaker refers to specific wo rlds or ‘mental rooms’ during their speech. These worlds have different properties and these are associated with a specific vocabulary. Therefore, the statistical study of the distribution of this vocabulary should be able to trace these
‘mental rooms’ that the speaker has successively inhabited; traces perceptible in terms of ‘lexical worlds’. In terms of the discourse analysis, these traces in a lexical world would be the particular vocabulary used by, for example, NGOs orientated towards a human rights perspective. As Schonhardt-Bailey (2012: 5-6) suggests
“[a] key feature of Alceste is that it can be used to identify the speakers’ tendency to
53 See Benzécri (1981).
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articulate particular ideas and arguments —ideas and arguments which can then be correlated with characteristics of the speaker (e.g., in political texts —the name of speaker, party affiliation, constituency characteristics and so on) ”. In addition,
Schonhardt-Bailey, Lahlou and Yager (2010) suggest that “[b]y classifying together the statements that contain similar words, we can hope to understand what semantic territories were behind the construction of the observed discourse” (2010:
32).
Echoing Schonhardt-
Bailey’s (2010, 2012) methodological use of Alceste, the objective of this stage of the project was to identify in both corpora whether: i) ii) ii) there was a meaningful structure underlying NGOs’ tendency to articulate their visions and mission statements in terms of development and human rights discourse; these themes could be grouped together in a meaningful hierarchical classification scheme; the analysis identified groups of NGOs that were most closely associated with each class. The aim of this was to invite staff in NGOs associated with each class to participate in the second stage of the project.
4.5. Interview Phase of Research
The results of the Alceste analysis of mission and vision statements are presented in the following chapter. To anticipate the outcome presented there, it was decided that there was a meaningful hierarchical structure underlying the vision and mission statements in both cases. These did reflect human rights based themes to varying extents and it was possible to identify sub-sets of NGOs most closely associated with each class in the hierarchies.
It was decided, therefore, to continue with the second stage of the project, this being undertaking semi-structured interviews with staff in these sub-sets of NGOs.
The objective was to elicit a deeper understanding of the deployment of the human rights framework and women’s empowerment and gender equality programmes by conducting semi-structured interviews with those who were founder-members, volunteers or others actively involved in the work of the organisations. The aim was to elicit accounts that illuminated and enriched the results of the Alceste analysis.
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Most of the interviews were conducted directly over the telephone but, on occasion, the interviewee requested a follow-up telephone call after they had produced written answers to the questions. The interviewees were asked to provide accounts of the factors that had influenced the visions and implementation practices of the NGOs in which they worked. The interviewees were asked whether human rights were relevant to the work undertaken, particularly with regard to the programmes run for women beneficiaries. The activists were also asked about understandings of the concepts of gender equality and women’s empowerment. NVivo 54 , a qualitative data analysis computer software package, was used to code the interview transcripts.
Coded sections were then structured into emergent themes. Later in the thesis, the findings from the analysis of the rehearsed publicly facing website extracts were complemented by an understanding of the themes arising from the interviews.
Chapters Six and Seven contain extracts from the transcripts. These were anonymised to preserve the confidentiality of the interviewees and Appendix I indicates the Alceste report class from which the NGO was drawn.
The Alceste report classified the vision and mission statements according to a large matrix of co-occurrences between lexical forms. The interview questions were targeted at eliciting themes that were more specifically related to organisations’ deployment human rights and women’s human rights. In some cases, NGOs were represented by activists as deploying human rights in different ways according to different programmes. The components within the taxonomy of the deployment of human rights, therefore, do not correspond exactly with the classes within the
Alceste classification.
It is argued that it was possible to propose a taxonomy of different positions in relation to the human rights framework based on the findings in the first phase of the research.
4.6. Chapter Conclusion
The purpose of this chapter was to explain the methodology used to conduct the research which analysed both natural and generated accounts of how NGOs in the
54 An alternative package Atlas.Ti could have been used for coding. A few transcripts were coded using both Atlas.TI and NVivo. NVivo was found to be most suited to the coding and structuring needs in this exercise.
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two case studies deployed the human rights framework and women’s empowerment and gender equality programmes. The following chapter presents the results of the Alceste analysis and argues that the structures underlying the visions and mission statements start to map the territory which will form the basis of the proposed taxonomies o f different outcomes of the human rights and women’s human rights outcomes. Chapter Five will, therefore, start to identify what features were identified as being significant and started to map the territory for the forthcoming empirical analysis of accounts of the deployment of the human rights and women’s human rights frameworks.
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5. Chapter Five – Analysis of Vision and Mission Statements
The main aim of this chapter is to provide an account of the outcomes arising from the first phase of the project. It examines the Alceste reports of the West Bengal and London corpora. As described in the previous chapter, the analysis documents contained vision and mission statements extracted from the websites of the publicly accessible NGOs in the two case studies. The aims of the chapter include: i) an examination of the corpora to establish whether there were meaningful underlying common structures and human rights themes; ii) an explanation of how NGOs most closely associated with themes in the corpora were identified; and iii) an explanation of the selection process of NGOs who were invited to participate in the second phase.
The literature review in Chapters Two and Three positioned the thesis in terms of key tensions in current scholarly conversations. The thesis uses the analysis of research materials to feed into debates in four main areas. These centre on the universality of human rights, particularly in light of literature which focuses on the hybridisation processes. The thesis is informed by and informs discourses in the literature about situated experiences of agency. It differentiates between forms of agency in contexts described by activists as being oppressive in some manner. It links together themes of the use of human rights concepts with agency and forms of epistemic injustice. Finally, it feeds into gender responsibility discourse, highlighting a disjunction between activists’ objectives for women’s economic empowerment and other aspects of wellbeing.
The results of the first phase are situated within these debates. The arguments presented in this chapter are developed in Chapters Six and Seven, which discuss the analysis of the extracted materials from websites and focus on themes in interview transcripts. The results in this chapter are also mapped onto the components in the two taxonomies which emerged from the empirical analysis.
This chapter opens by describing and interpreting the hierarchical classifications that were produced in the Alceste reports of the West Bengal and London NGO corpora. Themes within classes in the hierarchies are fleshed out by examining indicators in the reports, such as the characteristic words and phrases used. The chapter argues that the outline themes identified in the Alceste reports provide
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robust foundations for the development of the two taxonomies, both of which identify different human rights outcomes elic ited from activists’ accounts. Main features of these themes form the preliminary foundation of components within the taxonomies outlined in Tables 1-2 and 1-3 in Chapter One. These components are fleshed out in these later chapters by incorporating themes arising from the interview transcripts. Finally, indicators from the Alceste reports are used to select
NGOs for the second phase in the project.
5.1.
West Bengal: Structure Underlying NGOs’ Vision and Mission
Statements
The first Alceste analysis of the corpus contained the extracted text from the 100
West Bengal websites. The text for this corpus was extracted during the period
June to October, 2010. Of the volume of the text that was available for classification
Alceste classified 73%.
55 One of the classes formed an outlying branch on the tree diagram meaning that it was very distinct in nature from the others in the corpus.
The mission statements of this class were related to the provision of alternative or traditional medicine and health services. These NGOs were rather less orientated towards interventions that could have been based on the human rights framework.
Arguably, these visions could be characterised in terms of promoting an integration of body, minds and soul within a system of integrated medicine. It was concluded that this class fell outside the specific research area. The three NGOs in this category, as well as three others that were mostly engaged with animal protection activities, were excluded from further analysis.
The Alceste analysis was re-run with the 94 remaining NGOs from the sample and this produced a stable solution of four categories of mission statements. These solutions are represented in Figures 5-1 and 5-2 below which were extracted from the summary report.
56 Figure 5-2 includes the hierarchical classification structure produced by the Alceste report. It is divided into two branches the first comprises one class meaning that this orientation was distinctive in nature compared with the
55 70% is considered to be the minimum threshold which enables the researcher to continue to attempt a meaningful analysis of the results.
56 The summary page from this report is appended and this lists the most characteristic words by class (Appendix II). “Classe” refers to class or category. The percentage figure should be interpreted as the percentage of the volume of the text that the programme was able to classify (4100% being
41%, for example).
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other classes. Upon examination, it was decided to retain this class for further examination because the proposed topic, social welfare, was genealogically related to the underlying theme in the second branch. The second branch contains three classes, two of which form a sub-branch within it. The various components of the report informed interpretation of the themes underlying each class. The Key below contains a summary of the proposed structure underpinning the West Bengal missions and visions statements extracted from the websites. Together with themes from the Alceste of the second case study, they start to map the territories which underlie the taxonomies of the deployment of the human rights and women’s human rights frameworks. These are developed in Chapters Six and Seven of the thesis.
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Alceste Analysis of West Bengal NGOs’ Vision and Mission Statements
(Figures 5-1 and 5-2 have been extracted from the Alceste Report)
Figure 5-1: To Show Relative Size of Classes (West Bengal)
Branch One Branch Two
Figure 5-2: To Show the Hierarchical Classification (West Bengal)
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Key: Interpretation of the classification Structure in terms of Vision and
Mission Statements
Proposed interpretations of the branches and classes as follows in terms of the structure underpinning the missions and visions of the sample of 94 West Bengal
NGOs:
Branch 1: Social Welfare
Class 1: Humanitarian and social welfare programmes for mothers and children as well as the disadvantaged, including rehabilitation schemes for the sexually abused.
Branch 2 : Human Rights-Based Development
Class 4: Deployment of human rights as a societal transformative framework with a specific focus on achieving a range of equalities.
Cluster within Branch 2: Delivery of Human Rights Development Projects
Class 3: Economic empowerment activities in rural communities.
Class 2: Sustainable community projects and NGO capacity building.
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Alceste was able to classify 82% of the original elementary context units 57 (ECUs) this being above the 80% threshold required for a strong analysis. This iteration generated four categories of themes and the coherent hierarchical set of relationships between them. The figure in Appendix II lists the function words which had the most significant presence for each class in the Alceste report, ranked by their χ2 value.
58 The full Alceste report contained a more extensive list. It was possible to draw on these lists, as well as the examples of the most representative
ECUs, to conceptualise these categories in terms of distinct development and human rights visions and missions themes within the corpus. It is proposed here that the analysis uncovered two underlying core dimensions among the sample’s visions. The first core theme drew together a variety of visions related to social welfare interventions and service provision. It was although it was possible to identify an ambition to transform oppressive power in some statements classified within this category. The second dimension appeared to be consistent with a human rights-based development orientation where the emphasis was on activities related to economic empowerment of rural communities and specifically poorer women. The following section proposes interpretations of each theme in more detail and illustrates these by providing extracts from the Alceste reports. Appendix I contains the list of NGOs in the case study sample that were most strongly associated with each class.
5.2. West Bengal, Branch One: Social Welfare Provision (Class 1)
Class 1 formed one of the two dimensions of the analysis and accounted for 41% of the total ECUs which Alceste classified within its analysis, this being the highest contribution to the classification amongst all the classes. Themes that were associated with this class involved the provision of social welfare. Amongst the highest scoring typical ECUs for this class are the following:
The Emancipating Network, Kolkata: so for (many) (girls), (a) (shelter) is the safest
(place) for (them) to (stay) immediately (after) returning (from) (their) (place) of
(bondage). (also), (they) can (get) services at (a) (shelter), (such) as health (care),
(auto) (immune) (treatment) if needed, (education), (job) (training), and legal (aid).
57 These are the units of text from the West Bengal corpus within which Alceste has calculated the word co-occurrences. These segments lack standard punctuation as this is eliminated by the software during processing.
58 Alceste sets a minimum standard [chi] 2 value of 2.13 at the 10% significance level.
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Asansol Anandam, Asansol: a (special) (child) development and (vocational)
(training) (center), (located) at asansol, west bengal, (has) been striving for the cause of (special) (children) since 1992. the services rendered by the (center)
(include) assessment, (counselling) (special) (educational) facilities and
(therapeutic) services to the (physically) (handicapped), (hearing) (impaired) autistic, (mentally) retarded, (emotionally) disturbed and cerebral palsied (children).
Noah’s Ark: noahs ark is (a) (family) (run) charity, to support local (families) (who)
(are) unable to afford basic (educational) (fees) (or) (medical) (treatment). in (his)
(own) words (I) (have) (a) (dream) to make (a) (home) for the (destitute) women and
(orphan) (street) (girls) (where) (I) (live) and in other parts of (world).
It can be argued here that these examples encapsulate the core theme of social welfare provision targeted at specific groups within society. These include victims of abuse and those, particularly children, with special needs arising from physical or mental incapacity. It is suggested here that this dimension represents a social welfare orientation as opposed to one which emphasises development planning and practice.
This interpretation is supported by the list of the most characteristic words ranked under class 1 in Figure 5-1 59 which include “children” χ2 = 68, “school+” 60 χ2 = 33,
“rehabilit+” χ2 = 31, “care” χ2= 28, “vocational” χ2= 26, “mother+” χ2= 22, “girl+” χ2
= 15, “traffic+” χ2 = 15. These words suggest that the targeted beneficiaries of the schooling, counselling rehabilitation and vocational training are children, mothers and girls. Men and boys are incorporated within the concept of “family”. Women, however, are often categorised as mothers and girls as victims. Alceste associated the mission statements of 28 of the 94 NGOs as being most characteristic of this class (see Appendix I).
Alceste also produced a list of words within the corpus which were significantly absent from the classification. These include: “develop+” χ2 = -77, “sustain+” χ2 = -
44 , “rural” χ2 = -27, “resource+” χ2 = -24, “econom+” χ2 = -19. These function words are related to the second main dimension within the analysis. They also lend strength to the proposal that these mission statements are orientated towards the
59 As Alceste eliminates acronyms from its analysis, I edited HIV/AIDs in the original corpus to “auto immune” which accounts for the separate entry within the list.
60 The plus sign indicates a lemmatised form.
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provision of social welfare, such as rescue, protection and rehabilitation, as opposed to sustainable rural and economic development within a rights-based orientation. This is not to suggest that the mission statements of the 28 NGOs that
Alceste identified as being most closely associated with this class do not contain at least some conceptualisation of the human rights framework. The conclusion was, however, that these NGOs primarily provided social welfare.
Class 1 resonates with the suggestion by Bebbington, Hickey and Mitlin (2008) that economic liberalisation in India has resulted in the government withdrawing from the provision of social services. As previously stated in Chapter Two, the authors claim that NGOs began to be contracted to deliver specific development objectives specified within against the MDGs. These NGOs also started to assume greater responsibility for delivering these services in areas where states had withdrawn following public expenditure cuts and the decentralisation of state functions.
The three most closely associated NGOs with this class were: The Emancipation
Network (TEN), LUCY (Let Us Care for You) and Naihati New Life Society. The impression gained from looking at the websites of these NGOs, is that the emphasis is on providing practical and acute rescue for the most vulnerable sectors in society set within a general context of creating a better future for their beneficiaries. TEN, for example, is an international NGO who claim that their mission is to fight human trafficking and slavery with the aim of reintegrating survivors into society. Their listed services include HIV/AIDs treatment, education, job training and legal aid and training to provide their beneficiaries with an opportunity to live a meaningful life. TEN claimed that they sponsor 50 children born into brothel districts in Calcutta and provide schooling for them. LUCY ’s website described their work as being targeted at HIV/AIDS sufferers, with services such as organising blood donation, whilst the Naihati New Life Society claimed they had established homes for the elderly and orphans.
The predominant vision of the NGOs within this class was, therefore, situated within a social welfare framework. They did also appear to incorporate some development rhetoric on their website, including the use of concepts such as the empowerment and what they termed as being the upliftment of women beneficiaries. This thesis develops this theme in the context of the two case studies by feeding into
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conversations about the extent to which human rights principles are universal. It does so by considering the activists’ perceptions of agency in local marginalised and deprived contexts. Although human rights discourse was not a predominant feature of this theme, activists whose NGO was associated with this class were interviewed to see whether human rights were relevant to their organisation’s work.
61 These results feed through to the discussion in Chapter Six about the use of the framework as a recourse to rhetoric in such contexts. These results map onto the first component of the taxonomy, which describes the deployment of the general human rights.
5.3. West Bengal Branch Two: Human Rights-Based Development
The second Branch groups together three classes in a hierarchical relationship. The core common theme of this Branch can be interpreted here as being related to human rights-based development. The lowest level grouping is between classes 2 and 3 and together they contribute approximately 35% of the retained ECUs within the Alceste analysis.
5.3.1. Class 4: Deployment of Human Rights to Link to Global
Movements
Looking at the Alceste analysis report, the predominant themes of mission statements classified within class 4 are interpreted here as representing core human rights terms and concepts. One of the most distinctive features of this class was that it had clustered together NGOs in the case study that concentrated on developing national, global and international social justice. Some of these websites included basic human rights rhetoric. The most characteristic words in these visions and mission statements resonated with a discourse of individualism and enhancing agency within a national and global context. The following most representative
ECUs from the Alceste report provide support for this interpretation:
Ashoka: founded on the premise (that) the most (effective) (way) (to) (promote)
(positive) (social) (change) (is) (to) (invest) in (social) (entrepreneurs) with
61 Charity provision of welfare can be viewed as a lack of official obligations on the part of the provider towards beneficiaries. In comparison, human rights-based development involves subjects who have rights and duties within the context of national and international obligations. For the purposes of this thesis, the term “beneficiaries” is used indiscriminately to refer to those described as actual or potential recipients of NGO programmes and interventions.
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innovative (solutions) (that) are sustainable and replicable, (both) (nationally) and
(globally).
Action Aid India, Kolkata: our (goal) (is) (to) facilitate (an) (alliance) of (marginalised)
(communities) (that) (will) empower the poor and (excluded) (to) (claim) their (rights) as (indian) and (global) (citizens).
Ashoka: (mission:) (ashoka) (strives) (to) (shape) a (global), (entrepreneurial), competitive (citizen) (sector:) one (that) allows (social) (entrepreneurs) (to) thrive and (enables) the worlds (citizens) (to) (think) and act as changemakers.
Development Action Society Kalkota: “arithmetic (to) realising their (full) (potential)
(to) (enable) them (to) (positively) (shape) their (futures) and (that) of their
(communities) and countries. (we) (believe) (that) (we) need (an) education
(system) (that) also develops the 3 cs: (character), (full) capability and
(commitment) (to) (others).
Underpinning many of the NGOs’ mission statements was the stated motivation to transform local and national societal forces to eliminate poverty and empower individuals. The most characteristic words associated with this class included:
“equal+” χ2 = 36, “global+” χ2 = 34, “individual” χ2 = 34, “achieve” χ2= 33,
“potential” χ2= 20. Words which were significantly absent from this class included:
“children” χ2 = -31, “train” χ2 = -24, “women” χ2 = -16 and “rural” χ2 = -14. These words are consistent with the idea of developing the potential of individual beneficiaries and achieving human rights within what might be termed a Westerncentric perspective. These NGOs also aimed to establish principles of good governance and justice, particularly by sponsoring social entrepreneurs to act as agents of change. In terms of this project, the themes of this class very closely resonated with the core research questions such as: conceptualisations of agency and identity; the rhetoric of human rights language as a framework for the expression of NGO visions; and, the meaning of empowerment. Arguably, vision and mission statements were couched in somewhat inspirational terms because of the very nature of their purpose. Discussions about how these become bounded by situated perceptions of agency are developed later in the thesis.
Alceste also listed NGOs according to how closely they were associated with this class. The three most highly ranked NGOs in class 4 were international NGOs with offices registered in Bengal, these being ActionAid India, Ashoka, CCLP worldwide
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and Education Charter International. The mission statements incorporated aspects of human rights rhetoric and this is illustrated by the following extracts from their websites: “[o]ur focus is on the rights of India’s most marginalised communities:
Dalit and indigenous people, rural, and urban poor, women, children and minorities” 62 (Action Aid), “[i]ndeed, education consolidates in the long run representative democracy where citizens are fully aware of its rights and obligations under legal parameters and provision” 63 (CCLP). Ashoka’s vision and mission statements included the aim of empowering citizens, for example “[t]hrough our
Fellows and our programs, we are providing the framework from which the world can fully participate in the transformation of the citizen sector”.
64 This statement echoes the visions contained in the other two NGOs who both aim to end poverty and injustice through some conceptualisation of empowerment.
This thesis explores associations between the reported objectives of transforming adverse economic, bureaucratic or cultural environments and the outcomes in local contexts. This class contains themes of developing individual potential within a
Western-centric approach. This class is most closely associated with the fourth ? component in both the taxonomies. These components identified themes in activists’ accounts that characterised the function of human rights framework as providing a bridge to global growth projects and global social justice networks. One of the themes of this component looks at the interlocking of human rights and development programmes with local hegemonic frameworks in the process of hybridisation. The thesis broadens out the discussion about the deployment of human rights in activists’ accounts to consider the future thrust of human rights and women’s human rights projects later in the thesis.
5.3.2. Class 3: Economic Empowerment
Class 3 NGOs were characterised primarily by having visions and missions relating to economic empowerment projects. One of the more distinctive characteristics of this class was the predominate engagement in income generation and microfinance programmes targeted at women beneficiaries. The following extracts from the report illustrate this theme:
62 See: http://www.climatenetwork.org/profile/member/actionaid-india.
63 See: http://www.cclpworldwide.com/index1.html.
64 See: http://eastafrica.ashoka.org/about-ashoka-0.
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Sabuj Sangha: restoring (and) (sustaining) (the) (productive) (natural) (resource) base of (the) (area). (women) (s) (livelihood) (and) (empowerment). (encouraging)
(savings) (activity). (women) are encouraged to (form) (self) (help) (groups) (and) initiate (savings). this becomes (the) first (step) in a (process) which enables them to (access) (loans) (and) (undertake) (income) (generation) (activities).
Vivekananda Sevakendra-O-Sishu Uddyan: promote (economic) (development) (by)
(increasing) (the) (income/) level of (the) (rural) (poor). operate a (self) (sustaining)
(microfinance) (program). economically (empower) (poor) (women) (especially) in
(the) (rural) (areas) from (economic) shocks. assist (rural) (poor) to (improve) their lives in a (sustainable) (capacity) (development) (building) (capacity) of a (micro) entrepreneurs.
Anirban: (micro) (credit:) mobilizing (resources) in order to (provide) (financial) support services to (poor) (particularly) (women) (for) viable (income) (generation)
(initiatives), (enabling) them to (reduce) their poverty (and) to motivate (the) communities (for) (formation) of community based (self) (help) (groups), (thereby).
The most characteristic words associated with this class also reinforced the idea of the sustainability of such poverty reduction interventions within grassroots communities . These words included: “rural” χ2 = 78, “self “χ2 = 68, “resource+” χ2
= 58, “income+” χ2= 44, “devel+” χ2= 37, “sustain” χ2= 22, “credit” χ2 = 21. Words which were significantly absent from this class included: “vision” χ2 = -10, “poverty”
χ2 = -9, “legal” χ2 = -7 and “individual” χ2 = -7. The mission statements classified in this class often incorporated the objective of creating self-help groups within microfinance projects. As discussed in the feminist literature, women’s empowerment is often closely associated with establishing economic development.
Such schemes are held to promote individualised strategies of self-improvement
(see Madhok, Phillips and Wilson, 2013). This depoliticises empowerment and diverts efforts away from overcoming oppressive structures, the authors suggest.
T he term “gender equality” occurred in the mission statements extracted from the websites of four NGOs. These NGOs did, however, mention visions that characterised the objective of wanting to achieve equality for beneficiaries in more general terms. In contrast, there were references to women’s empowerment in the mi ssion statements of 23 NGOs and 11 NGOs included the word “gender”. The term “gender”, however, mostly appeared accompanied by a list of other characteristics that are associated with various forms of discrimination, for example,
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age or disability. The purpose of the interviews was to explore activists’ portrayals of the relevance of gender equality, economic empowerment and women’s agency.
Class 3 NGOs were those most likely to want to improve the position of women within a context of radical transformation, including a more egalitarian society. Not one, however, referred explicitly to what the practical consequences of such an improvement would be for the position of women within both the public and private spheres and the possible impact on their identities.
The three most highly ranked NGOs in class 3 were the Anirban Rural Welfare
Society (ARWS), the Liberal Association for Movement of People (LAMP) and The
West Bengal Society Working for Schedule Caste, Schedule Tribe and Minority
People. It is possible to detect the common theme of income generation and resource management running through their objectives, but these varied in the degree to which they were motivated by social transformation to achieve an improvement in their beneficiaries’ circumstances.
ARWS asserted that it was dedicated to improving educational, health and environmental facilities and conditions within its local community. The organisation’s website stated that its objective was to provide services to children and women from underprivileged sectors in society. Along with microfinance schemes ARWS also claimed to run awareness campaigns about human rights in remote areas. The website made no mention of women in the context of citizenship, but it suggested that interventions were aimed at increasing self-sustaining economic empowerment. One of the more noticeable features of this NGO was the absence of interventions that could be classified as aiming at a radical transformation of power structures.
In contrast, the second most representative NGO in this class, LAMP, used social action rhetoric on its introductory pages, for example:
T he task of LAMP is easier said than done …. Liberation of people of the kind that
LAMP visualizes, calls for strength of mind, body and soul, and the precondition to this is to create a liberal and sustainable social situation – a society that is egalitarian economically, socially, politically, culturally and also environmentally.
65
65 See: http://www.lamp-ngo-india.org/.
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LAMP’s mission was stated as the “making of an egalitarian society” 66 , and
“empowering the weaker sections of the Society 67 ”. The NGO’s programmes included: i) social education; ii) social action; iii) social reform; and, iv) social development and soc ial welfare. The organisation’s website stated: “[i]n India, women constitute the major socio-cultural and economically oppressed group and an equitable social order can never be established unless the equal rights for both women and the men are recognised in society ”.
68 The organisation’s self-evaluation was that the women’s resource development centre had been successful in leading to empowerment and targeted women beneficiaries had been able to raise family incomes by about 3,000 rupees per annum. LAMP was one of the few NGOs in the case study to mention “gender equality” as a concept: the site posited that “gender equality requires women ’s empowerment and women’s empowerment requires gender equality”.
69
Finally, the asserted remit of the West Bengal Society Working for Schedule Caste,
Schedule Tribe and Minority People included a more sustainable development agenda. The NGO described its projects as including economic empowerment by means of economic development self-help groups and the establishment of shelter homes primarily for women who had previously been sex workers. It declared that it
“[was] committed to the cause of all-round and sustainable development to the distressed, down-caste and down trodden segment of the society with a prime focus on the women and children belonging to low socio-economic condition and backward and minority communities by way of taking up innovative and selfsustained development activities amongst the rural, semi-urban and urban areas ”.
70
The NGO asserted that it wished to bring women into the development mainstream by creating social structures based on, amongst other things, justice, freedom and equity, which, it claimed, uphold the basic human rights and the dignity of every individual. One of the organisation’s priorities was to reduce women’s drudgery in the running of households.
66 See: http://www.lamp-ngo-india.org/.
67 See: http://www.lamp-ngo-india.org/about.html.
68 See: http://www.lamp-ngo-india.org/womenemp.html.
69 This sentence was included in a written response to one of my questions.
70 See: htt://wbscstmwa.org/content.php?id2=3.
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By drawing together the various strands of evidence from Alceste analysis, this chapter argues that the distinctive theme of this class is the integration of several strands of human rights and development practice. These include: the ideas of economic and environmental resource management; the development of communities; and the empowerment of women within a human rights-based development framework, particularly by fostering self-reliance.
Later in the thesis, this theme is fleshed out by developing arguments based on representations of these programmes from the activists’ perspectives. It draws on these accounts to explore situated expectations placed on women who participate in economic empowerment schemes. The thesis places the themes emerging from the Alceste analysis of vision and mission statements into the context of different empowerment strategies available to NGOs and women beneficiaries. This class most closely maps onto the third components in both taxonomies, these being
“power over” strategies in the general human rights model and “the growing distortion between gender responsibilities and rights” in the women’s human rights model. The thesis is informed by and informs the responsibilities discourses and those associated with feminisation of poverty. It explores the NGOs’ characterisations of potential tensions between perceptions of woma n’s roles in the household and what Sen (2009) has reported as being the identity of women in
India as agents responsible for lifting communities out of poverty. The thesis feeds into scholarly conversations about gender essentialism, such as Chant’s (2007,
2008) work on the feminisation of poverty, in the portra yals of activists’ accounts.
5.3.3. Class 2: Capacity Building and Sustainable Community Projects
Finally, class 2 accounts for 11% of the retained analysed text within the corpus and its theme is interpreted as being “Sustainable Community Projects and NGO
CapacityBuilding”. The most distinctive feature of this class was that it clustered together NGOs in the case study that concentrated on delivering consultancy and expertise to other NGOs engaged in development practices. This interpretation is supported by the following selection of the most representative ECUs:
Path Welfare Society-Kolkata: (research) and (documentation) for (non)
(governmental) (organisations), (CBos), IGNos and (government). (PATH) (welfare) society supports (non) (governmental) (organisations), (CBos) and (other)
(grassroot) (organization) to (conduct) action (research), impact (assessments) and
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(organize) (workshops) and (meeting) to (share) their (learning) with (various)
(stakeholders).
Seva Bharati, Kapgari: developing (region) (specific) sustainable land (use) system.
(organise) training to update the extension personnel within the area of (operation) with emerging (advances) (in) (agricultural) (research) (on) (regular) (basis).
Forum of Communities United in Service: before the establishment (in) 1985, (large)
(numbers) of community workers (were) working independently (in) (small) communities (in) (different) (parts) of the city of kolkata. (FOCUS) was established
(in) order to unite these slum communities and to strengthen the (grass) root
(voluntary) development work (as) (well) (as) to (highlight) the (problems) the bustee (populations) are facing and draw attention to these (issues) (in) the.
The most characteristic words associated with this class included: “flood” χ2 = 32,
“grassroot+”“χ2 = 31, “earthquake+” χ2 = 24, “research+” χ2= 24, “disaster+” χ2=
19. These indicate that the NGOs associated with this class also aimed to support and promote disaster management. The words which are significantly absent from this class include: “women+” χ2 = -11, “children+” χ2 = -8, “care” χ2 = -7, “self” χ2 =
-7 , “right” χ2 = -6. Whilst NGOs classified within class 2 were engaged in a wide variety of interventions and activities, the distinctive approach included a combination of undertaking sustainable community projects and NGO capacity building by providing training in good governance. As capacity building is a key element of human rights-based development, this section argues that this finding supports the claim that the algorithm within the package is effective.
The three most representative NGOs in class 2 were, in order: the Amanat
Foundation, The Networking Alliance for Voluntary Acton (NAVA) and Krishnaa
Human Initiatives.
The Amanat Foundation was an “NGO working in the fields of health, education and poverty elimination and also general welfare of the people
”
and it “undertake[s] projects of empowering poor, especially women, coming from BPL (below poverty level) families” 71 by promoting self-help groups and micro-credit programmes ”. The stated priority of their economic related activities was to tackle poverty by practical interventions where those benefitting from the interventions were involved in the
71 See: http://amanatindia.com/amanat/index.php/about.
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planning and implementation stages. Beneficiaries were seen as stakeholders of other programmes, which include mother and child immunisation projects. One of the aims was to share expertise across the stakeholders.
NAVA’s vision was couched in terms that incorporated a rare expression of the term
“gender equality” as opposed to, for example, the frequent references to the desire to increase women’s “empowerment”, this being a rather more relative than ab solute goal. NAVA’s site claimed the NGO believed “in a sustainable people orientated development process leading to a eco-friendly, gender free society based on a equitable value base”.
72 The NGO claimed it supported grassroots activists by training senior and executive voluntary development workers in a variety of areas including community and women’s organisation, leadership development and rural health.
Finally, the Krishnaa Human Initiatives (a journey to sustainable future) described itself as an NGO “that works with grassroots-level organizations NGOs working directly with and for the underprivileged” 73 by holding seminars in natural resource management (August 2010). In cluded in its objectives were: “[t]o fight against exploitation, injustice and corruption if found against any individual, class, community in the society” and “[t]o work for uplifting the status of women in the society. To work against female circumcision and to fight against the victimization of girls / women by anybody in the society on female circumcision or any other related issues ”.
74 As there were few activities listed on its website, this NGO could be in the early stages of development.
The common theme binding this cluster of NGOs together is the intertwining of the more invisible activities of capacity-building with the more visible practical and sustainable social justice programmes within grassroots communities. In addition, in cases where NGOs mentioned visions and missions that were targeted at women beneficiaries, a list of concerns was given. These particularly included female genital mutilation and other forms of violence against women and girl children
(VAWG). This project is situated in the feminist discourses about the framing of
72 See: http://www.navaindia.in/aboutnava.htm.
73 The site has since moved to: http://www.linkedin.com/company/krishnaa-human-initiatives since the interview.
74 These quotes were extracted from the original website which no longer exists.
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VAWG ? in the scholarly literature. It feeds into the conversation by incorporating themes from the results of the Alceste analysis and activists’ accounts ? from the second phase. This discussion is developed in relation to the component on the deployment of women’s human rights in economic empowerment schemes (Table
7-1
). The framing of women’s agency in coercive environments is discussed in relation to the second component in the ? deployment of women’s human rights taxonomy described in Chapter Seven.
5.4. West Bengal: General Themes Emerging from the Alceste
Analysis
The data analysis results provided supported the suggestion that vision and mission statements of public accessible NGOs could be classified according to an underlying hierarchical structure. Further, this classification is interpreted here in a meaningful way in terms of orientations that were either aligned with human rightsbased development or social welfare practices. Themes associated with the human rights rhetoric were woven in different and nuanced ways within the statements of classes 2, 3 and 4. The human rights framework underpinned the visions of those
INGOs and national NGOs in class 4 whose objectives included overcoming more oppressive social forces and fostering the creation of empowered global citizens.
Visions of NGOs clustered under groups 3 and 4 contained descriptions of practical measures to be implemented at the grassroots level. It was apparent that the statements of a small subsample of NGOs in these two classes also had visions of accomplishing some transformation of the power structures in society by, for example, campaigning for a gender-free, egalitarian society.
The websites included in this case study generally made few references to the concept of gender equality in relation to their work. One of the original key research questions focused on how a Western concept such as this was operationalised in a non-Western society. Gender equality is a key theme underpinning not just women’s human rights but is also central to development projects. Ferguson
(2010) argued that development practitioners may aim to improve women’s economic position but it was not necessarily the case that such programmes would lead to gender equality. Ferguson (2010) also concluded that the neoliberal ideologies of international development organisations construe gender equality as gender economic empowerment. Women in Development, she claims, also aimed
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to integrate women into the market and this directed NGOs to set up micro-finance schemes. The initial results of the Alceste analysis are in alignment with these conclusions in part because many of the objectives of NGOs clustered in class 3 included the economic empowerment of women through income generation schemes. The visions were not explicitly aimed at challenging inequalities themselves.
A human rights-based development orientation within the NGOs clustered under the second Branch of Figure 1 did not predominantly address empowerment or equality within the domestic sphere. As Kabeer (2003) claimed, increasing w omen’s economic activity might imply an improvement in gender relations. It was not possible to draw a conclusion from the NGO s’ visions on websites in this case study, however, how perceptions of economic empowerment interfaced with women’s role in the home. These themes were developed in more detail in Chapter
Seven during the analysis of activists’ accounts which map onto the third component of the deployment of women’s human rights taxonomy which emerged from the empirical analysis.
This section turns to focus on a specific example of a potential disjunction between the operationalisation of public codes in private contexts shaped by cultural norms.
Sardar-Ali (2008) concluded that domestic violence has historically been considered as a private matter rather than a human rights violation. The website materials that described programmes aimed at providing protection for female victims of violence and sex-trafficking, were clustered under the social welfare dimension in Figures 5-1 and 5-2, rather than within the human rights framework on the second dimension. This is not to suggest that human rights or development rhetoric was entirely absent from mission statements of these NGOs and a minority of the websites referred to women’s empowerment as an objective in itself. The
Alceste results are in alignment with Dean’s suggestion (1992) that women are not accorded equal citizen rights because the qualities of womanhood, which are associated with the private sphere, have little political significance. It is noticeable that the vision of a social transformation of oppressive, unjust and unequal social forces was the most distinctive characteristic of NGOs in class 4 rather than in class
1.
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In answer to SardarAli’s (2008) question about whether legal rights really offered anything to women, the conclusion from the first phase of the project was that the results provided some evidence that they did. Arguably, women beneficiaries associated with NGOs in class 1 had most to gain from the incorporation of the human rights framework and women’s empowerment programmes within their visions and mission statements, particularly in relation to the human indignity of the lived experience of physical and mental abuse. Sardar-Ali (2008) also questioned whether NGOs found any use for the human rights framework for any purpose other than attracting funding. These themes were developed during the interviews with
NGO activists in the second phase of the project and map onto the second component in the taxonomy, which depicts the deployment of women’s human rights. This component focuses on the use of the women ’s human rights framework as a political tool in the struggle against violence against women and girls. It incorporates an analysis of activists’ framing of women beneficiaries as well as the abuse itself.
5.5.
London NGOs’ Vision and Mission Statements from their
Websites
An Alceste analysis was run on the corpus containing the text from the websites of the case study of 100 NGOs based in London. The corpus included texts from national NGOs whose work was mostly conducted in London as opposed to
(INGOs) whose programmes were targeted at those in the developing world.
Alceste was able to classify 70% of the original elementary context units and this met the minimum threshold criterion required to proceed with the analysis. Figures
5-3 and 5-4 contain the classifications extracted from the summary report. The software generated four categories and a coherent hierarchical set of relationships between them. The function words which had the most significant presence are listed beneath each class in Appendix III, ranked by their χ2 value. Figure 5-4 demonstrates the classification structure that the Alceste analysis produced. This section argues that the analysis uncovered two underlying core approaches among the sample’s visions and mission statements.
This section proposes that the core theme of b ranch 1 related to NGOs’ vision and mission statements about the provision of social welfare services. Alceste clustered
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together three classes within this branch. By drawing together threads within the vision and mission statements associated with this branch, it can be argued that it was possible to detect a common approach. This section proposes that these visions were driven by the objective of connecting beneficiaries to human rights and resources available to those in the mainstream. Activists described barriers which they perceived hampered access to the human rights framework. The causes of such obstructions were attributed to weaknesses in the local institutional infrastructure, prejudice in mainstream society or the lack of awareness about the nature of particular disadvantages. Classes 1 and 4 shared some distinguishing features and were classified at the lowest level within this theme. Class 2 formed a separate sub-branch.
Branch 2 comprises one group, that is, class 3. This section argues that the second core theme can be interpreted here as the pursuit of political and civil human rights on behalf of beneficiaries. This section argues that human rights underpinned many
NGO activities. These included campaigning to challenge social prejudices that beneficiaries faced and running empowerment programmes aimed at enhancing individual potential.
The Key below contains a summary of the proposed interpretation of themes characterising the branches and classes arising from the Alceste analysis of the vision and mission statements of the London NGOs case study.
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Alceste Analysis of London NGOs’ Vision and Mission Statements
(Figures 5-3 and 5-4 have been extracted from the Alceste Report)
Figure 5-3: To Show Relative Size of classes (London) (from the Alceste
Report)
Branch One
Branch Two
Figure 5-4: To Show the Hierarchical classification (London)
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Key: Interpretation of the classification Structure in terms of Vision and
Mission Statements
Proposed interpretations of the branches and classes as follows in terms of the structure underpinning the missions and visions of the sample of 100 London
NGOs:
Branch 1: Connection to Mainstreamed Human Rights
Class 1: Transforming the Everyday Lives of Disadvantaged or Disaffected
Individuals by Building a Better World and helping them to Overcome Barriers such as Prejudice.
Class 4: Social Welfare Services and Support: Family and the Disadvantaged.
Class 2: Children, Youth and Adult Education Community Programmes.
Branch 2: Political and Civil Rights
Class 3: Political and Civil Rights NGOs (including a focus on women’s rights).
The features of each of these four classes are fleshed out in turn below. The list of
NGOs most closely associated with each class is appended (see Appendix I).
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5.6. London NGOs: Branch 1: Connection to Mainstreamed Human
Rights
5.6.1. Branch 1, Class 1: Reconnecting Dis-Engaged Individuals
This section proposes that characteristics of mission and vision statements within class 1 shared a common theme, that is, an aspiration to connect or reconnect their beneficiaries to mainstream society. The NGOs in this cluster attempted to challenge injustices faced by those suffering from various prejudicial disadvantages, such as discrimination. Such injustices were perceived as barriers which prevented beneficiaries from accessing and enjoying the rights available to those free from such disadvantages. One of the underlying inspirational motivations behind these visions was not just that of building a better world for beneficiaries, but a desire to empower them to fulfil their individual potential. In some cases, this also included awareness campaigns aimed at tackling prejudices amongst those in mainstream society about characteristics or conditions that beneficiaries presented.
The following examples from among the most representative ECUs in the Alceste report support the interpretation of this theme:
UK Connect: provide information and support (to) (help) (everyone) (understand)
(aphasia) and its (impact); (champion) the rights of (people) with (aphasia) and
(communication) disability. (our) (vision) (is) a (world) (where) (people) living with
(aphasia) and (communication) disability (find) opportunity and (fulfilment). (our)
(mission) (is) (to) (improve) the (lives) of (people) living with (aphasia) and
(communication) disability, (equipping) (them) (to) re (connect) with (life).
Asthma UK: (our) values: (we) (will) ensure (fairness) (by) (challenging) (injustices),
(standing) (up) for (people) with (asthma) and (championing) those in (greatest)
(need). (we) (will) (advance) (knowledge) (by) (valuing) scientific and professional
(excellence). (we) (will) develop potential in the (people) (we) (help) (so) (they) can
(overcome) (barriers), and also in (our) staff.
The Otesha Project: (our) goals. (to) (tackle) (big) issues like climate (change),
(injustice) and (poverty) in (creative) (ways), starting with (our) own (lives) and actions. (to) (build) a community of (people) who are all (doing) the (same) (thing),
(to) (inspire) (others) (to) take (practical) (environmental) actions, and (to) have a bit of fun at the (same) (time).
The interpretation is further supported by looking at the most characteristic words associated with this class which included: “live” χ2 = 86, “people” χ2 = 39 “otesha”
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χ2 = 32, “aphasia” χ2 = 32, “world” χ2= 27, “prejudice” χ2= 25, “transform” χ2= 20,
“champion” χ2= 19. Words which were significantly absent from this class included:
“education” χ2 = -9 and “children” χ2 = -9. The picture that emerges by examining the ECUs and the characteristic words illustrates a sense of inspirational motivation behind the vision statements. It can be proposed here that these NGOs wanted to build communities and opportunities for their beneficiaries. In some NGO vision statements, there was an implicit sense of trying to draw human rights into the lives of their beneficiaries, or at least enabling them to reconnect with the framework.
The three NGOs in the sample that were most associated with this theme were The
Otesha Project, UK Connect and Daughters of Charity. Interviews were conducted with activists from all these NGOs during the second phase of the research. In addition, a representative from Haringey’s Women’s Aid also participated in the interview stage, this NGO being associated with both classes 1 and 4.
The Otesha Project arranged cycling tours for young people with the idea of engaging them in a mobile community which travels across the UK, stopping at schools and communities to perform Otesha ’s Morning Choices play, which aimed to promote social change and address environment themes in everyday lives.
Otesha also trained young employed people to suppo rt them to obtain “green” jobs.
The organisation’s website stated that ““Otesha” is a Swahili word that means
“reason to dream” or “to plant something and make it grow”.
75 The organisation stated a desire to “provid[e] training for young people that need a bit of a boost into decent work ”.
76 During an interview with an activist from the NGO, the organisation’s vision was represented as connecting individual young people to the mainstream by targeting those who were in some sense alienated from society.
This representation reinforced the themes of reconnection or connection in this cluster of vision and mission statements.
The proposed interpretation here of the core theme was further supported by the other two most characteristic NGOs in this class. Daughters of Charity was a
Roman Catholic congregation in London dedicated to “the service of people in need
75 http://www.otesha.org.uk/about-us.
76 http://www.otesha.org.uk/.
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who are carrying the hardships and poverties of our times”.
77 Most faith-based organisations were excluded from the analysis of West Bengal NGOs ’ vision and mission statements. This section proposes however, that one arm of Daughters of
Charity operated in a similar way to an NGO in terms of the services they provided and was included in the second case study. On the website, the organisation referred to a vision which stated a desire to tackle inequalities:
We are given to God, in community for the service of people in need who are carrying the hardships and poverties of our times … Love embraces social justice and we commit ourselves to work for social transformation to change the unjust structures that cause poverty.
At the time the research was conducted the organisation primarily provided welfare services, such as night shelter accommodation.
The third most closely associated NGO, UK Connect, provided services for and campaigns on behalf of those who had suffered aphasia, this being a communication disability that most usually occurs after injury or a stroke. It can be proposed that the organisation’s vision and mission statements can be characterised as having two threads: first, developing communication skills and rebuilding confidence and second, campaigning against discrimination against those with aphasia in relation to accessing human rights. This class maps onto the third component in the deployment of general human rights taxonomy. This class is characterised by “power over” strategies in activists’ accounts, portrayed as aiming to overcome discrimination faced by beneficiaries.
5.6.2. Class 4: Acute Social Welfare Services and Support
This section proposes that the theme underlying the vision and mission statements categorised under class 4 was associated with the provision of traditional welfare and support services targeted at families and the local community. The hierarchical classification diagram linked classes 1 and 4 together under a common theme.
Whilst these two classes shared visions relating to the provision of social welfare, the statements associated with class 4 differed in character from those clustered under class 1. The statements under class 4 contained descriptions of provision of support services rather than mentioning aspirations to overcome perceived causes
77 http://ukreligiouslife.org/about-vocation/a-day-in-the-life-of/a-daughter-of-charity.
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of deprivations or disadvantages. The following ECUs support interpretation of this theme:
Sunshine Charity: (work) together (with) (partners) to create easy (access) and
(support) for a range of (services), for (all) (parents) and (extended) (families),
(reach) out to those (parents) requiring additional (support).
999: our ofsted (registered) (staff) (give) the children (care), (comfort), play and a hot meal. (their) hard pressed (parents) (are) (given) (support) that is both practical and (emotional), and the (nursery) (allows) them a (few) precious hours to
(themselves).
Novas Scarman: we provide community (support) (services) to (over) 6, 000 people
(each) (year), (supporting) (some) of the most (vulnerable) and disadvantaged people in society. our customers (include) offenders, people (with) (mental) (health)
(difficulties), women fleeing (domestic) (violence), refugees and people (with) a
(drug) (or) alcohol dependency.
Alceste’s list of the most characteristic words associated with this class reinforced the proposed interpretation of the results. These words in cluded: “service” χ2 = 50,
“family” χ2 = 40, “support” χ2 = 36, “disabilit” χ2= 33, “mental” χ2= 31, “carer” χ2=
26, “advice” χ2= 22, “accident” χ2= 17, “distress” χ2= 17, “listen” χ2= 16. Words which were significantly absent from this class included: “education” χ2 = -13 and
“school” χ2 = -11.
These characteristic words indicated a functional and practical approach to vision and mission statements associated with this class. The three most representative
NGOs clustered under this theme were the 999 Club, Sunshine Charity and the
British Association for Adoption and Fostering. In the second phase, successful interviews were conducted with activists from the 999 Club, Sunshine Charity,
Home Start Haringe y and Hillingdon Women’s Centre.
The 999 club provided a portfolio of support services to the mentally vulnerable, those whose lives were affected by drugs and alcohol, vulnerable beneficiaries who were not registered with a GP or had literacy or language difficulties which prevented them from completing welfare application forms. The Sunshine Charity ceased functioning after text had been extracted from the website and an interview conducted with a member of staff. The organisation’s chief activity had been to
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provide child and nursery care in the community as well as to support parents seeking employment. The British Association for Adoption and Fostering’s website described its work as including family finding, campaigning and providing advice.
The NGOs classified under this theme provided acute practical programmes within local communities. At first glance, this class seemed of little significance to the study of the deployment of human rights. Later in the thesis, however, it will be proposed that the work of these NGOs could be viewed as a comment on the human rights framework itself. This class maps onto the first component in the general human rights taxonomy, which looks at the deployment of human rights as a recourse to rhetoric. This feeds into the literature on epistemic injustice by arguing that this concept can be extended to incorporate institutionally-based prejudices.
5.6.3. Class 2: Children, Youth and Adult Education Community
Programmes
Whilst class 2 in Alceste’s hierarchical diagram was clustered under branch 1, it formed its own distinct branch within it. The underlying theme of this class of statements is interpreted here as being associated with local children, youth and adult education programmes. NGOs associated with this theme aspired to integrate beneficiaries into local communities. The organisations also aimed to build a local sense of community. Themes of community activities are evident in the following selected ECUs:
Barnet Multicultural Centre: the three (groups) (were) (barnet) (african) (caribbean)
(association), (barnet) (asian) (old) peoples (association), (barnet) somali
(community) (group). (aims:) to (develop) (opportunity) (and) (participation) for the
(disadvantaged) (in) order to reduce their (isolation) (and) deprivation (and) to promote (integration) (and) inclusion.
Girl Guides: brownies is our (section) for (girls) (aged) seven to (ten). the (name)
(reflects) the world (of) (exciting) (opportunities), challenges (and) (fun) that is brownies. (girls) can (participate) (in) (a) (wide) (range) (of) (activities) at their
(regular) meetings, (and) at (special) (events), (day) trips, sleepovers, camps (and)
(holidays).
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Kids City: our (aims) to advance the (education) (of) (school) (age) (children)
(through) (providing) (recreational) (and) (educational) (activities) out (of) (school) hours (and) (in) (school) (holidays) so to (develop) their physical.
The most characteristic words associated with this class 2 included: “education” χ2
= 76 , “school“ χ2 = 75, “young” χ2 = 58, “communit” χ2= 37, “adult” χ2= 31, “girl” χ2
= 22, “holiday” χ2= 21, “opportunit” χ2= 20. Words which were significantly absent from this class included: “work” χ2 = -32 and “right” χ2 = -23. This analysis is significant for the development of arguments later in the thesis. Core themes identified in class 2 are split to form two distinct threads after being informed by the analysis of interviewee transcripts: visions that are associated with the empowerment of local communities and, more importantly, those that aim to provide opportunities to develop individual potential.
The three NGOs most representative of this class were Positive Mental Experience, the Girl Guiding and African Foundation Stone. Attempts were made to interview staff from these organisations but were met with only partial success with the Girl
Guiding organisation. More successful interviews were conducted with other NGOs classified under this theme and these included Kids City, Jewels Scholarship Fund,
Barnett Multicultural Society and Envision.
Positive Mental Attitude appears either to have ceased operation since the website was visited or is functioning under a different registered name. This organisation provided educational and skills development opportunities to young people and adults in London, particularly in the area of adult literacy. The website of the Girl
Guiding organisation stated that they:
[A]re active in every part of the UK, giving girls and young women a space where they can be themselves, have fun, build brilliant friendships, gain valuable life skills and make a positive difference to their lives and their communities. We build girls’ confidence and raise their aspirations. We give them the chance to discover their full potential and encourage them to be a powerful force for good.
78
The African Foundation Stone aimed “to promote a range of services aimed at different sections of the community to tackle underachievement, exclusion,
78 http://www.girlguiding.org.uk/about_us.aspx.
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unemployment and crime ”.
79 This class maps onto the second component in the general human rights typology which is characterised by community and cooperative NGO programmes. Some visions and missions statements extracted from the West Bengal NGO websites were classified under the theme of community programmes. They were characterised by the aspiration to enhance the collective wellbeing in the community. In comparison, the London NGO vision and mission statements in class 2 were orientated predominantly towards enhancing individual wellbeing within the local communities. The implications of this comparison in relation to the scholarly work on human development are considered in Chapter
Six.
5.7. London NGOs Branch 2: Political and Civil Rights NGOs (Class 3)
The theme of this class was interpreted as being a straightforward expression of traditional political and civil rights. The following ECUs represent three separate subthemes, these being: women’s rights; civil liberties; and single issues:
Rights of Women: we (seek) to (influence) (policy) by (undertaking) (original)
(research), (preparing) (responses) to (policy) documents from (government) and other (sources), (organising) (conferences) (on) (womens) (rights), and (holding)
(public) (meetings).
Justice: to (influence) (the) conservative (party) to (keep) (the) (faith) with (civil)
(liberties), to nudge towards acceptance of (human) (rights) and to (respect)
(democratic) (conventions). to (influence) (the) (party) associations of (lawyers). to
(influence) (the) judiciary to advance (human) (rights). to (influence) (lawyers) to take an (interest) in (matters) (relating) to (the) (rule) of (law).
Institute of Alcohol Studies: “and occasionally collaborate (on) (joint) (research) projects. we write occasional (major) (reports) and (research) papers, (most)
(recently) (the) 450 page volume (alcohol) in (europe) a (public) health perspective
(that) forms (the) (evidence) (base) (for) (the) (european) (commission) s (alcohol)
(strategy).
Words most closely associated with this theme included : “right” χ2 = 61, “public“ χ2
= 52, “govern” χ2 = 48, “justice” χ2= 46, “parliament” χ2= 34, “reform” χ2= 28,
“campaign” χ2= 28, “research” χ2= 25, “protect” χ2= 24, “legal” χ2= 21, “civil” χ2=
19, “democracy” χ2= 19, ? “women” χ2= 16, “asylum” χ2= 16. Words which were
79 See: https://en-gb.facebook.com/pages/Africa-Foundation-Stone-AFS/178318587884?sk=info.
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significantly absent from this class included: “people” χ2 = -59, “service” χ2 = -30,
“young” χ2 = -28 and “communit+ χ2 = -28. These words were taken as being typical of a Western-style political and civil rights discourse which conformed to the human rights hegemonic rhetoric.
The four NGOs in this sample that were most associated with this theme were
Hansard Society, Justice, the Ethnic Minority Foundation and the Institute for
Alcohol Studies. Interviews were conducted with staff from these organisations as well as from the Trade Justice Movement (the Women’s Institute).
The Hansard Society and Justice shared similar visions. Hansard aimed to:
[S]trengthen parliamentary democracy and encourage greater public involvement in politics. At the heart of our work is the principle that civic society is most effective when its citizens are connected with the institutions and individuals who represent them in the democratic process.
80
Justice aimed to promote access to justice, human rights and the rule of law which it achieved through research, education, lobbying and interventions in the courts.
The protection and promotion of political and civil rights either through the parliamentary or legal system was the underlying common theme of these visions.
The Ethnic Minority Foundation stated on its website that it:
[S]eeks to strengthen democratic values, reduce poverty and injustice in society, and address the g rowing inequalities in the world system … EMF works for structural change in order to increase opportunities for those who are the least well off politically, economically and socially. EMF invests in research, dialogue, advocacy and policy analysis to further these goals.
81
One interpretation of this theme would be that it represents the idea that democratic values act as a political tool to address inequalities. In a rather different manner, the
Institute of Alcohol Studies viewed their role as being:
80 Quote from website when accessed in 2011. Current website is at: http://www.hansardsociety.org.uk/about-us/.
81 See: http://www.emfoundation.org.uk/.
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[B]ased around helping to bridge the gap between the scientific evidence on alcohol and the wider public… and to advocate for effective responses that will reduce the toll of alcohol in society.
82
During the interviews, the organisation represented its focus as being on the human rights of individuals not to be affected adversely by alcohol. This section proposes that this example provisionally illustrates how the framework is moving beyond its boundaries, in this case by becoming a fragmented political tool to support a single issue. This observation is developed in Chapter Six during the discussion about the changing nature of human rights in relation to the original conception as an integrated indivisible framework.
5.8. London NGOs: Initial Thoughts about General Themes
With the exception of categorised under class 4, the mission and vision statements were generally couched in the specific human rights discourse associated with developing the potential of individuals. It can be argued that the human rights framework was perceived either as an unquestioned guiding set of principles that underpinned the NGOs’ policy and practices or a set of codes that were inspirational and aspirational. The NGOs in class 4, however, described being engaged in what intuitively might be considered traditional social welfare support provision. Themes such as overcoming prejudice, connecting beneficiaries and the objective of enhancing individual potential are developed in Chapters Six and
Seven in the thesis.
5.9. Analysis of Combined Case Studies Corpora
A final Alceste report was run after the corpora from the two case studies were combined. The aim of this was to establish whether any further distinctive features emerged which would provide further insights into the research question.
The Alceste analysis produced a classification with two distinct Branches containing seven classes with 75% of the ECUs included in the analysis (Appendix IV). The
London NGOs were predominantly associated with the first Branch and the West
Bengal sample with the second. This classification also supported the decision to
82 See: http://www.ias.org.uk/What-we-do.aspx.
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draw the interview samples from the original corpora because there was little overlap between the configurations except in one case described below.
There was, however, a slightly different ? classification arrangement of the classes within the West Bengal NGO Branch. The London NGOs most closely associated with class 2 included Justice, Hansard, the Women’s Institute, the Institute of
Alcohol Studies and the Ethnic Minority Foundation, whilst the Socio-legal Aid
Research and Training Centre in West Bengal shared a similar mission. It is proposed here that the NGOs in class 2 of the fused document shared a common orientation towards the pursuit of political and civil rights by campaigning and lobbying. The nature of class 2 mirrors that of class 3 in the London Alceste classification with the notable feature that it includes one of the West Bengal NGO,
Socio-legal Aid Research and Training Centre, as one of the organisations most closely associated with this class.
By examining the analyses of the West Bengal, London and the fused corpora
Alceste reports, it can be argued here that the two case studies in the research differed significantly in terms of visions and missions statements as follows: i. West Bengal NGOs were engaged in community based development and their specific goal was to enhance the quality of life for their beneficiaries as a collective. In many cases, the focus was on the desirability of enhancing group rights; ii. London NGOs campaigned for individual human rights and provided support to enhance individuals ’ quality of life by overcoming prejudice in mainstream society.
At first blush, these findings conform to an intuitive expectation that there would be a key difference in orientation given that these NGOs were operating in different economic development contexts. On the other hand, a more complex picture emerged from the interviews with activists from the two case studies about the operationalisation in situated contexts. Such accounts pointed to commonalities between the case studies which are explored later in the thesis.
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5.10. Selection of a Sub-Sample of NGOs for the Interview Phase
The second phase of the project involved a series of semi-structured interviews with
NGOs to elicit a more in-depth understanding of situated experiences of implementing their visions. The questions focused on the operationalisation of human rights and women’s interventions.
The Alceste report identified those NGOs most closely affiliated to each theme and ranked them in order of strength of association. This ranking guided the selection of NGOs invited to participate in interviews. On occasion, attempts at contacting
NGOs were unsuccessful for a variety of reasons. These included: the website had become defunct; staff were either unwilling or unable to participate; or, there had been difficulties with language. The selection also included organisations who claimed they ran women’s intervention programmes. Telephone interviews were conducted during the period June to December, 2011 with members of staff from 17
NGOs in each of the two case study sub-samples with representation across the
Alceste classes. The list of these NGOs by sub-sample and class are listed in
Appendix I. The position was reviewed after 34 interviews had been completed.
This review concluded that the interviews had contained a sufficiently rich diversity of views to enable the research materials to be analysed in a meaningful way later in the thesis.
The research materials from the two research phases are examined later in the thesis. The research analysis explored commonalities across, and variations between, the deployment of the human rights framework by NGOs in the two case studies.
5.11. Conclusions
The results in Chapter Five constitute a stage in addressing the research questions
summarised at the beginning of Chapter Four (section 4.1). These centred on how
NGOs in the case studies characterised the relevance of the human rights framework to their work. The first step had been to determine whether there was a meaningful structure which undergirded the selected vision and mission statements.
The Alceste analysis illustrated that this relevance could be represented in terms of different positions and these were structured according to coherent themes. As a
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consequence, it was possible to propose distinct types of missions and visions in both case studies. The extent to which human rights were relevant in these statements differed according to these types.
This thesis examines how NGO activists represent their organisations’ experiences in relation to the ability to operationalise th e human rights and women’s human rights frameworks. The transcripts of the interviews in the second phase of the study proved fruitful in developing insights gained from the Alceste analysis about the various ways in which NGOs claimed they deployed human rights. This thesis proposes that deployment of the two frameworks varied according to their perceptions of ability to deliver programmes.
This thesis also has a second focus: that being the representation of the deployment of women’s human rights by NGOs in the two case studies. It can be proposed that the Alceste analysis identified a distinct class in the West Bengal visions and mission statements that was defined by a desire to enhance women’s self-sustaining economic empowerment. This orientation was also characterised by a lack of desire to transform social structures in any radical manner. This theme reappeared in some of the interview transcripts and is further explored later in the discussion of activists
’ accounts of economic empowerment in Chapter Seven.
Further to this, the Alceste analysis identified the NGOs that were most associated with each class identified in the West Bengal and London reports. This enabled the selection of NGOs across the different themes for the second phase of the project.
The following two chapters focus on analysing the research materials from both the
Alceste reports and the transcripts of interviews with activists. The interview questions were selected to inform the research question and were based on the outcome of the literature review and the analysis of vision and mission statements.
Interviewees were asked the following questions and responses were probed according to the specific context: i. Could you describe what you see as being the main work of (NGO name)? ii. You have a website which has a section describing your vision and mission statement priorities. How did your NGO decide what these should be? iii. Who is your website aimed at?
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iv. Are any of your interventions particularly targeted at women? Is so, (or if not), why? v. When you plan your programmes, how much account do you take of the roles that women play, whether this be in the family or in the local community more generally? vi. How much impact do your programmes aim to have on these roles? vii. In your experience, how successful do you think your NGO has been in achieving this impact? viii. How relevant are human rights in the work that you do? ix. You mention the words (I will refer to the terms or concept they use, for example, “empowerment”, “gender equality”, “upliftment”) in your vision/mission statement. What do these mean in the context of the work that your NGO does? x. What are the main sources of your funding? xi. How much influence do your funders have on the work that you do?
The following two chapters flesh out the taxonomy of the deployment of human rights which emerged from the analysis of the research materials. The chapters examine the accounts of the deployment of the frameworks showing what features were identified as being significant before moving on to demonstrate that these were perceived as influencing activists’ accounts of organisations’ ability to operationalise the frameworks human rights and women’s human rights principles.
They also show how the thesis contributes to the scholarly literature in the area.
Conclusions in these two chapters form the basis for suggestions about further research which are developed in Chapter Eight.
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6. Chapter Six - Deployment of Human Rights
This thesis explores the operationalisation of the human rights framework at the grassroots level. The review of the literature offered in Chapter Two revealed the necessity of framing this process within an understanding of activists’ perceptions of agency in response to situated experiences in different socio-economic contexts.
The literature often l acks more than a cursory understanding of activists’ experiences of operationalising the framework on the grounds. As stated in Chapter
Two, this thesis seeks to correct this by offering one method of addressing this gap through an analysis of natural accounts of the deployment of human rights on NGO websites as well as the generated ones from the interviewees. The objective of this chapter is to flesh out the human rights taxonomy which emerged from the empirical analysis. This model comprises different depicted approaches to the deployment of human rights from the activists’ accounts and the extracted vision and mission s tatements from NGOs’ websites. This thesis contends that the taxonomy identifies a family resemblance conceptualisation of the human rights framework which is framed by activists’ perceptions of agency.
This thesis contends that the concept of locus of agency frames the taxonomy.
This concept, as discussed in Chapter Two, incorporates the characterisation of local institutional and stru ctural contexts depicted in activists’ accounts in two distinct ways. The first identifies a sense in activists’ accounts of an ability to shape the infrastructure supporting human rights. This is a form of internal locus of agency. The second characterisation centres on the deployment of human rights shaped in response to situated experiences of local socio-economic contexts. This overlying orientation represents constraints or challenges to the implementation of the human rights framework depicted in act ivists’ accounts. The accounts contained three distinct expressions of this underlying common theme, labelled as external locus of agency for the purposes of this thesis.
Each component of the deployment of human rights taxonomy is also associated with one of the two forms of patriarchal power bargaining strategies as described in
Sharp, Briggs, Yacoub and Hamed ’s (2003) work. These strategies can be applied to this thesis so that “power over” is used to describe a strategy depicted by activists who described organisations’ visions of transforming oppressive structures.
This compares with a “power to” empowerment approach in other activists’
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accounts. This described organisations’ programmes that were targeted at empowering beneficiaries so that they were able to gain greater freedoms by leading lifestyles according to their own choices.
This taxonomy informs and strengthens arguments in three distinct conversations within the broader scholarly literature. These discourses map onto elements within the taxonomy. Taken together, these conversations illuminate various aspects of the operationalisation of the human rights framework. The following summary points drawn from the concluding section of Chapter Two highlight how this thesis feeds into current specific discourses in the area: i) first, it unpacks the framing of activists’ agency in oppressive and nonoppressive contexts. It does so by developing a family resemblance conceptualisation of ability to operationalise the human rights framework; ii) second, the thesis feeds into the general debate about the extent to which human rights principles can be considered universal. The thesis considers how specific conversations in the literature about agency, knowledge and language would be strengthened by building a bridge between them. The thesis broadens the widely contested debate about universality by incorporating an understanding in activists’ accounts of the interweaving of co-constituting hegemonic frameworks in situated contexts; iii) third, this thesis provides an examination of activists’ accounts of tensions between the human rights framework which values the promotion of individual rights compared other hegemonic frameworks which place greater emphasis enhancing group rights. It is argued here that the human development paradigm could be expanded to incorporate a more fully developed understanding of community projects; iv) fourth, the thesis feeds into conversations about Western ideas of sustainable income generation projects. The thesis focuses on West
Bengal activists’ accounts of microfinance programmes that were
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represented as pulling beneficiaries out of local infrastructures by establishing programmes underpinned by Western-orientated norms and economic models. This orientation is compared with London activists’ accounts which represented organisations’ activities as aiming to push beneficiaries back into existing structures in society; v) finally, the thesis explores the implications of the hybridisation of the human rights framework within other global progress projects;
Chapter Two contained an outline of the four elements comprising the taxonomy of human rights and how these mapped onto conversations in the scholarly literature.
The objective of this chapter is to demonstrate how the analysis of the research materials fleshes out the components within the contexts of these three main conversations.
Activists were asked about their perceptions of human rights. Interviewees’ accounts contain their understandings of this framework in relation to the work of their organisations. The analysis of the research materials led to the construction of a taxonomy of the deployment of human rights comprising four components. The four elements comprising the taxonomy include the deployment of the framework as: i) a recourse to legitimate the claims made by those in the most marginalised communities in each of case studies; ii) a means to support “power to” strategies within community projects; iii) an infrastructure to support “power over” empowerment strategies; and, iv) a tool with which to maximise individual potential.
Each characteristic position is illustrated by examples selected from interview transcripts. Appendix I contains the Alceste report set of classes from which the
NGO was drawn. The interviewees are represented by codes which are based on the case study and class of each NGO.
The chapter concludes by summarising the main contributions that it makes to the scholarly literature and identifies themes that are taken up in the following chapter on the deployment of women’s human rights.
The following section fleshes out how human rights were characterised as underpinning the work of NGOs in the two case studies. It argues that the
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interviewees were engaged in representing their sense of agency in relation to social structure as much as the relevance of the human rights framework to their work. The analysis highlights perceptions of power as being a multidimensional concept. It also focuses on the relationship between these representations and perceptions of agency. This understanding is important as it has the potential to inform policymakers about how situated concepts of power shape activists’ responses and programmes. The following section will lead to a position where it is possible to produce a detailed summary of the taxonomy and its components. This summary is represented in Table 6-1 later in the chapter.
6.1. Component 1: Human Rights and Social Welfare or Charitable
Activities
The distinctive characteristic of the first element of the taxonomy is the function of the rights framework as a recourse to rhetoric to articulate and legitimise the claims of NGOs working in what were represented as marginalised communities. This orientation was most evident in activists’ portrayals of social welfare and charitable activities. These interviewees also represented the socio-economic infrastructure in local environments as not being sufficiently developed to sustain the human rights framework. In other words, these portrayals included depictions of situated experiences of socio-economic contexts presenting significant challenges to desired action.
6.1.1. West Bengal Case Study: Human Rights as a Recourse to
Rhetoric
This section refers to the Alceste classification scheme in Chapter Five and demonstrates how various themes contained within it can contribute to an understanding of this element in the taxonomy. It primarily draws on research materials from NGOs that were classified in class 1, that is, those categorised as providing social welfare. To a lesser extent it also considers activists’ portrayals from NGOs associated with other classes in the Alceste report who commented on social welfare programmes. One over-riding theme emerged from these accounts: the realisation of the most universal of human rights was predicated upon the availability of minimum economic resources. This is in line with Lipset’s (1959) position that sustainable socio-economic development is a key to supporting a
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democratic political system. This section argues that his theory can be extended to the requirements of a meaningful realisation of human rights.
Some interviewees depicted local communities as often lacking a minimal social and economic foundation to address the most basic human rights in a sustainable way. Activists characterised the primary objectives of programmes as the provision of welfare to enable beneficiaries to survive in the most deprived conditions. As one founder member of a West Bengal NGO observed:
The basic need is food, the basic need is shelter, the basic need is a mosquito net, the basic need is hygiene, the basic need is healthcare, the basic need is mother and child care. So what they are doing is, many times we have the experience but we have given them mosquito nets and raincoats and solar lamp but on many occasions they have sold it out for want of food for the pregnant women or food for a little child.….Human rights as you are pointing out is a brilliant idea, is a brilliant idea, but to be very frank we don’t have the resources. (WB class 4a 83 )
It is not possible to determine from the transcripts whether interviewees were aware of Sen’s (1999) human development position. The above excerpt from the transcript is aligned to Sen’s call for the prioritisation of poverty reduction. As previously stated, Sen (1999) suggested, for example, that the focus of development models should be to identify the best approaches to eliminate the most egregious injustices in an attempt to advance global justice. The following quote suggests that a member of staff from a class 3 NGO also shared a similar position:
Poverty is a problem you will appreciate that point. Poverty is tremendous particularly in our country. Tremendous. They are deprived of the minimum, they are not getting minimum advantages as city-dwellers. It is surprising. I was surprised to see that for drinking water the women members of the family they are coming some of them for long distances to get a pitcher of water, little girls also, little women also are carrying a huge lot of water in their pitcher traversing a long way. Minimum drinking water this is also a minimum human right. If we can provide basic needs and minimum income this can be done by proper development and also done by proper resource management and this can give the basic human rights. I imagine it in this way actually. (WB class 3a)
83 This indicates that the NGO was associated with class 3 in the Alceste analysis of the West Bengal
(WB) sample (see Appendix I) and the letter “a” is used to group quotes together for each NGO within a class. “L” is used to distinguish those NGOs that form the London case study. The code also indicates which class the excerpt was associated with in the Alceste analysis.
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An over-riding theme emerged from the analysis of a set of transcripts: the perception that egregious local poverty challenged the ability of NGOs to deliver services in a sustainable manner. Further, the NGOs claimed to aspire to achieve basic human rights. This thesis argues that the realisation of human rights was hampered by inequalities in the distribution of resources between rural and urban regions. The activists’ articulations suggested they perceived that the Indian government had failed to provide the institutional infrastructure in some rural communities with which to realise minimum human rights. It can be argued that if the portrayals were accurate representations, then they signalled that the state was failing in its duty to protect against violations of basic human rights. This is in alignment with Guerrina and Zalewski ’s position (2007) as stated in Chapter Six.
The following quote articulates a position that, despite perceived local economic and social challenges, the organisation aimed to provide a range of welfare programmes, such as healthcare and education:
Actually, we have 4 projects here. One is for HIV positive kids, and for mentally retarded children. Both of them are residential projects and we have an orphanage for orphaned and destitute children and a community project, that is, for education
… Successes? Yes, ma’am we have a few in the destitute and the home for destitute and orphan children, we have for those children over 18 years some of them are working in good organisations and some are working for us only in our organisation and for the HIV children they are all below 14 and staying in the residential home and they are going to drama school. (WB class 1a)
In the Alceste analysis, class 1 formed a separate Branch in the hierarchy, that is, it did not fall within the human rights-based development classification. On the other hand, some of the social activists in this section articulated a commitment to one particular core human rights treaty, the Convention on the Rights of the Child:
Ma’am we are working for child rights. It comes under human rights. Child rights. As you know we are working for child rights which are quite necessary. (WB class 1a)
This is an area where it would be fruitful to conduct further research to investigate activists’ perspectives of the deployment of the Rights of the Child. This particular
Convention was represented to be of significant relevance to the work of some of the organisations in this study. Themes from the interviews undertaken with NGO activists in West Bengal are in line with the work of Glasius (2007) and Shue
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(1980). These authors were convinced that some human rights, such as the right to food and other basic rights, were more significant than others. The objective of this thesis is not to form normative judgements about the significance of particular articles within the human rights framework. It does, however, claim that activists articulated different positions in relation to the relevance of the framework to their work. In this project, social agents working on the ground portrayed how the economic, political and cultural local infrastructure challenged their ability to implement their organisations’ missions. It can be argued therefore, that Donnelly’s
(1984) concept of tempered universality can be fleshed out by an account of different human rights outcomes that recognises the varying situated economic and institutional infrastructures. Further, it is contended here that the work of such scholars such as Glasius (2007) and Shue (1980) can be strengthened by the findings of this project that the human rights framework is represented as performing different functions according to varying perceived situated contexts.
The themes arising from research materials in this section also showed that human rights were particularly important to these NGOs in terms of providing a hegemonic language with which to express and share concerns. The interviewees in a subset of NGOs in the West Bengal case study expressed these in terms of a lack of
“basic human rights” which was a concept that linked their world with that of the interviewer in a meaningful way. In these accounts, the human rights framework was deployed as a rhetorical anchor to speak truth to power. The theme of this component, therefore, is a sense of an implicit criticism within the portrayals in relation to the perception of the government’s failure to provide sufficient infrastructure to support the operationalisation of even the most basic resources necessary for a dignified life. The portrayals lacked a sense that the human rights framework was viewed as a political tool to overcome the oppressive structures in their society. Rather, the primary function of human rights was as a recourse to rhetoric to articulate challenges to organisations’ desired actions in what were depicted as the most deprived communities. This theme is developed in the following section which considers the accounts of the NGOs in the other case study.
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6.1.2. London NGOs: Exposing the Trickle-Down Failure of the UK
Economic System
The distinctive theme that can be identified from a set of London activists’ accounts was the perception that economic benefits derived from a developed economy had failed to trickle-down to the most marginalised in society. These activists were also associated with the provision of welfare. Their accounts were characterised by a sense that their beneficiaries were unable to access basic resources necessary to live a dignified life. Human rights were described as being mainly beyond the reach of these beneficiaries.
The following quotation from a written response supports the idea that NGOs in this category were attempting to address deficiencies experienced by individual beneficiaries arising from the national and local economic models:
All we do is hopefully shot through with respect & compassion for the individual person, relating to them in a non-judgemental way. We are at heart practical hands on people who serve and work with people who are poor and vulnerable. Social transformation can be on this individual level – have I given this person self- respect…confidence in him/herself? Have I helped him/her to improve his/her quality of life? (L class 1a)
This quote illustrates not just the type of service that the organisation provided. It also exemplifies a portrayal of a sense of a failure within the prevailing social and political infrastructure to provide a life of dignity for the most vulnerable. In addition, this extract articulates a feeling that neither the NGO nor the beneficiaries had the ability to address deprived circumstances by influencing the policy-makers.
Instead, the organisation describes achieving social transformation by its treatment of individual beneficiaries.
The core theme underlying class 4 in the Alceste classification of vision and mission statements in this case study was interpreted as the provision of social welfare services and an aspiration to support families and the disadvantaged. The accounts of interviewees from this category supported this interpretation. It can be argued that the visions and mission statements reflect NGOs’ perceptions of a weakness in some aspects of the UK economic system. Based on the statements, it could be argued that this system was failing to provide the most marginalised with the
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resources needed to lead a dignified life. It is contended that activists’ in this category described their organisations ’ work as aspiring to help their beneficiaries to overcome barriers such as specific types of prejudicial injustice. This thesis argues, for example, that this aspiration can be explored more fully in relation to the human rights framework in these circumstances by incorporating an understanding of Fricker’s concept of epistemic injustice (2003, 2006 and 2007) which was referred to Chapter Two. There are two forms of this concept which can be characterised as types of prejudicial injustice that arise when either: i) an individual is not fairly regarded as a potentially serious source of knowledge (testimonial epistemic injustice), or, ii) when individuals are disadvantaged owing to the inability to express injustices because society lacks a conceptual framework with which to articulate such experiences (hermeneutic epistemic injustice).
The interviewees may or may not have been aware of the concept of epistemic injustice. This thesis argues, however, that the collective characterisation in activists’ accounts was that beneficiaries experienced barriers to receiving knowledge about rights. The following quote from one of the London case studies interviewees provides an illustration of how this form of injustice was perceived and represented:
In the sense that we believe that people have access to rights and they quite often don’t get it because the very system which is designed to give them the rights actually acts as barrier.
[Interview Question: What sort of rights are we talking about here?]
Something as simple as getting benefits for instance. The people we deal with on the whole, either can’t speak English, or if they do speak English and the majority can, they have got very poor literacy skills and the first thing they are asked to do by anyone is to fill in a form and the people who are meant to help them like the job centres don’t really want to help with that. So they are bit stuck so they get it wrong and they don’t get their benefits or whatever.
[W]e are actually reaching those people that a lot of othe r agencies can’t reach due to the nature of our organisation which is very much local, local to the area. Very much the same culture that live on the local estates. We deliberately employ local people. People who come to us are very nervous or deeply suspicious of bureaucracy and “professional” people who might be very well meaning but the
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whole language and culture puts them off. They won’t engage with but only through us we can refer them to other agencies who they will engage with. (L class 4a)
This section argues that what interviewees were characterising was a form of institutional epistemic injustice. In this case, this was represented as arising from rules that defined methods of access to basic rights but which also assumed everyone was fully able to utilise them. In this case, the interviewee defined rights as benefit rights. From this position, the institutional system may assume that everyone is the same and has a common understanding, but in practice it may discriminate against some individuals. The quote from the NGO above portrayed one of the objectives of the organisation as being specifically to campaign against cultural and institutional barriers to receiving knowledge about rights. The interviewee perceived that, in cases whe re the organisation’s intervention proved successful, beneficiaries were given access to the rights available to those in mainstream society. The interviewee also claimed that:
I think we are very successful in many areas particularly in terms of getting people into housing. Getting people their benefits rights, getting – we are actually reaching those people that a lot of other agencies can’t reach due to the nature of our organisation which is very much local, local to the area. Very much the same culture that live on the local estates. (L class 4a)
This activist represented the organisation’s mission as gaining the trust of beneficiaries as a prerequisite to connecting them with gatekeeper agencies who would be able to assess eligibility to access rights. The following excerpt from the interview transcript illustrates this position:
On the whole a lot of them have grown up with a deep distrust of adults and then a deep distrust of the people who are meant to help them and then this is the starting point. To win over that confidence is not a quick win-win thing and that – yes, there could be accusations of the creation of dependency but we get some people who come and sit in our centre and not speak to anyone for 6 months. (L class 4a)
The interviewees from this second case study described front-line activities, such as those illustrated by the quote, as occupying the majority of their time. These interviewees expressed aspirations to campaign with the aim of improving beneficiaries’ access to the human rights framework but claimed that lack of time and financial resources hampered efforts to do so.
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To conclude, this section argues that the over-riding theme of this component illustrates two particular ways in which external institutional structures constrained the agency of the NGOS and their beneficiaries: i) in terms of the failure of the UK economic model to trickle down economic benefits; and, ii) that i) was compounded by the failure of the model to take into account how the bureaucratic infrastructure set up to enable access to rights was itself acting as an unjust barrier to some of the most marginalised in society.
6.1.3. Comparison of Themes between the Two Samples
There was one over-riding theme that emerged from the accounts in both case studies in this component: that various forms of barriers prevented beneficiaries from accessing basic human rights. In the West Bengal case study these barriers arose from what w as perceived as the government’s failure to provide the supporting economic and structural infrastructure to protect against egregious violations of basic, and what were perceived as universal, human rights. The objectives of these NGOs were characterised as the provision of basic services to compensate for these deficiencies. Some of those in the London case study expressed similar visions and missions. In the London case study, the government was also perceived as providing an inadequate bureaucratic infrastructure to enable some of the most vulnerable groups from accessing basic human rights. A subsection of these interviewees portrayed their objectives in what can be interpreted as enabling marginalised individuals to overcome forms of epistemic injustice.
This thesis argues that this component represents situated infrastructures in local contexts as being insufficient to support the operationalisation of human rights in any meaningful way. It concludes that the function of human rights for interviewees in both case studies in this category was to act as a recourse to rhetoric to legitimate the claims made by those in the most marginalised communities.
Respondents in both the London and West Bengal case studies can be characterised by an orientation that reflects an external locus of agency. There were interviewees in both the West Bengal and London case studies who portrayed human rights as being important principles in their work. On the other hand, these activists perceived that local external forces severely constrained the ability to operationalise the framework. Some London interviewees portrayed described
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infrastructures which they perceived as hampering beneficiaries’ ability to receive knowledge about their rights. Whilst these barriers were perceived as depriving beneficiaries from receiving basic rights, there was a sense that they were not insurmountable. T hese positions would be in line with Uvin’s (2002) conceptualisation of engagement in terms of a rhetorical incorporation of rights in their work. This component in the taxonomy extends Uvin’s (2002) ideas by incorporating another dimension, that is, the framing agency in oppressive contexts from a non-Western perspective expressed in some a ctivists’ accounts from both case studies.
This thesis contends that this component most closely resonates with Madhok’s
(2007) understanding of agency which is to “look for ideas that lie behind action that might be a person’s ‘preferred preferences’ but which may not find their expression in action” (2007: 343) which, she suggests, can be demonstrated within speech practices. The framework’s language functioned as a means to express the core values within local contexts. The thesis concludes that the interviewees in NGOs classified in this component deployed the framework as a device to articulate failures by government or the economic system to deliver basic, and arguably, universal human rights to beneficiaries. In addition, activists portrayed their perception about the need to break down barriers to enable beneficiaries to voice concerns themselves.
The following two components in the taxonomy will show how Madhok’s (2007,
2013) and Madhok and Rai’s (2012) conception of agency can be developed by extending it to a greater range of situated experiences as portrayed by the activists.
6.2. Component 2: “Power To” Empowerment Strategies
It can be argued here that the distinctive approach of this category can be interpreted as a “power to” empowerment strategy (as in Sharp, Briggs, Yacoub and Hamed, 2003) to human rights. In the West Bengal case study, human rights were characterised as being deployed as an ethos which underpinned the visions of co-operative projects. The objectives of these programmes were depicted as providing beneficiaries with opportunities to participate in programmes which operated outside the situated power structures. This strategy feeds into scholarly work on human development by providing a nuanced interpretation of Sen’s (1999)
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work. It does so by expanding the understanding of human development to incorporate a conceptualisation of community-based group rights. This section feeds into the scholarly conversations which critique the Western-centric, liberal human rights framework for its focus on individual citizens rather than on group rights.
In comparison, the expressed aim of the London programmes in this category was to reconnect beneficiaries to the mainstream institutional frameworks. In other words, the London NGOs in this category were portrayed as aiming to push beneficiaries back into the world of Western cultural norms from which they had become dislocated. Some of the London activists gave accounts of programmes that were aimed at breaking down prejudice in society to enhance the status and agency of beneficiaries. It can be argued here that, according to this conception, human rights represented an aspirational set of principles. Once attained, this framework would afford beneficiaries greater opportunity to choose lifestyles. This can be understood as a “power to” strategy. This thesis argues that this objective needs to be supported by an individualistic social norm . The objective of activists’ programmes was expressed as being to empower individual beneficiaries so that they could access human rights more successfully.
6.2.1. West Bengal NGOs: Co-Operative Projects
This section develops Sen’s (1999) work by proposing that the concept of human development can be expanded to include “community human development” as an identifiable orientation towards the human rights hegemonic framework. In this category within the taxonomy the NGOs represented the human rights framework as underpinning community specific projects as a “power to” strategy. It could be argued that the most marginalised need legal rights, such as those enshrined in human rights principles, to promote their ability to construct their own individual life narratives which otherwise would be denied to them. Arguably, this can also apply to a basic demand of rights to basic sustainable community amenities and opportunities.
One group of activists characterised work which was targeted at two main objectives: addressing both social injustice and enhancing wellbeing for their beneficiaries. This group were clustered within both classes 2 and 3 in the Alceste
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analysis of the mission and vision statements of the West Bengal NGOs (see
Appendix I). These classes were grouped together under the human rights-based development branch in the report. The interviewees often described working in what were described as being amongst the most deprived communities. The over-riding sense gained from these portrayals was that activists felt they could exert little control or influence over local economic and institutional power structures. The activists’ accounts, however, contained few references to any objectives that were directed at tackling underlying unequal power structures. Rather, this group portrayed missions as attempting to achieve independence from oppressive local conditions. The expressed aim was to empower beneficiaries by enhancing collective, community-specific group rights.
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Typically, interviewees described missions as engaging beneficiaries in collective social action and reform in what was depicted as the struggle for enhanced wellbeing for communities. Beneficiaries, however, were characterised as “disabled” members of the society. Activists reported that their organisations strove to equip communities with tools to participate in this situated reform. This section hypothesises that, for these NGOs, human rights principles were explicitly viewed as a conceptual framework which would serve to underpin their mission to free those whom they considered were marginalised. The human rights framework provided the language with which to express their commitment to secure rights and equal opportunities for their beneficiaries. Rather than empowering the individual citizen, however, the framework was represented as underpinning visions of achieving sustainable community empowerment and group rights to tackle poverty.
The following quote from an interviewee illustrates this observation:
[NGO] is a non-profit, non-government development organisation committed to improving quality of life in West Bengal by securing equal rights and access to equal opportunities for all …. A complex range of issues impact on the ability of deprived communities to break the cycle of poverty. Tackling one issue exclusively will not result in long term positive and sustainable change. Interventions need to effectively address the multiple, connected needs of the community. ? [Website) Because our objectives and our mission is to ensure the quality of life. Without ensuring their human rights it is very difficult to ensure their quality of life” [Interview]. (WB class 1 and 3a)
84 That is, rights held by a group as a group rather than by individual members separately.
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The following quote by another activist exemplifies a similar approach:
The organization aims to play a significant role in augmentation of the livelihood opportunities of the people at the grass root level which leads to a sustainable future” [from their website]. “Poverty, under-development and under--nourishment is always against human rights of course [from the interview transcription]. (WB class
2a)
Whilst some interviewees referred to the relevance of human rights in their work during the course of their interviews, they characterised the missions of their NGOs in terms of achieving basic community rights and resources in the longer-term. The distinctive character of the approach is encapsulated in the expressed aspiration to foster independence from, as opposed to transformation of, what activists perceived as being oppressive structures in their wider societies.
Human rights-based development objectives were expressed in vision and mission statements and by interviewees. The activists in this cluster depicted perceptions of fractured social and political structures in local contexts. This section hypothesises that these fractured structures curtailed the organisations’ abilities to implement more radical “power over” strategies based on group rights which, it is contended here, would have the potential to achieve a more significant improvement in community wellbeing.
This section continues by examining activists’ perceptions of situated challenges to the operationalisation of the framework. A group of interviewees, for example, depicted the practical realisation of human rights principles as being impeded by what was characterised as a lack of adequately robust institutional and social structures within their communities. The following quote is taken from an interview with an activist from an NGO clustered in class 3 of the Alceste report who described challenges to the implementation of a government sponsored community programme. It exemplifies how NGOs described the need to negotiate entrenched forms of local injustices:
Interview Question: “Do you face any particular practical difficulties in getting these women involved in the rations project?”
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Response: “Many. When we first surveyed people door to door to find out who has been receiving – we had to first of all become aware that these women were not getting these rations …. At the same time there is a government programme 85 that is supposed to address their need and so when we started asking people if they have used this service that they started saying, some people said no, some people said we tried an d they kicked us out….Then there was local politics involved. The people who were appointed to these jobs often they got the job through political favours so, if you are going to do anything that challenges them, it’s like you are challenging the power of the political party that got them the job in the first place, then those things come into play. (WB class 3b)
In the extract above, the interviewee portrayed a sense of being constrained by political corruption. Other interviewees described other similar challenges as the following quote demonstrates:
I don’t know if you are familiar with the state of [could not identify] where there has been extremely violent conflict between the state and the tribal people and one of the people who wrote a report he is a physician who voluntarily came to work in the tribal areas nearly 25 or 30 years ago, and a few years ago he wrote a report about the atrocities by the state against the people and you know, after he was framed and jailed, I don’t know if you have heard of him, he is Dr B Singh. Recently he was released on bail but there are many other people in those jails for, without charged, those who have dared to speak against the government or who have resisted a government run deposition. (WB class 3b)
The above quote illustrates perceived constraints placed upon dissidents rather than the work of the NGOs, but it enriches the understanding of the local institutional infrastructure in which the organisation worked. The following quote demonstrates the perceived gap between the codification of legal rights and the failure of the state to institute a robust governance infrastructure to enable fair access to them:
The laws are all in the books. They are not implemented 100% at all, it is all advocacy. Sometimes the people with the power play power games, also pay money and bribe, you know. (WB class 3a)
The following series of extracts from transcripts depict the lived reality of operating within an external local environment characterised by an absence of robust
85 It is speculated here that the interviewee was referring to a programme arising from the Right to
Food Bill in India.
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institutional structures. The interviewees often contrasted this lived reality with standards contained within the human rights framework. A respondent from an
NGO in this category identified the perception of a lack of bureaucratic structures in the following way:
I am paraphrasing it. It is: ‘show me the man and I will show you the rule’. (WB class
4a)
And he continued to give a specific example as follows:
Orphanages. Recently, I will give a small example that will give you an idea. A gentleman from the US came down and called me and he wanted to come to our office. I told that you can come down and we can have a chat. He told he was interested in orphanages. I told that basically that the orphanages in India has turned out to a business centre. They fool people who are childless parents. They say, give us the money and we will give you the child without going into the any proper legal formalities or anything. He was taken aback. (WB class 4a)
Another NGO suggested that they faced an environment made chaotic by political forces:
Though however, the current political scenario in Jhargram (due to ultra-leftist insurgent groups) the area has become chaotic, and for the Society finding professionals to work there has become difficult. … (WB class 2b)
In the example below, the interviewee characterised what he considered a violation of child rights in cases due to a failure to issue birth certificates and so establish ci tizens’ identities:
We have the rights act….Then they say the child has the right to speak….
Participation service is the thing under the article the child has the right to have a birth certificate, half of the children do not have birth certificates, we have to advocate for the birth certificate, they are treated sometimes as refugees. The laws are all in the books. They are not implemented 100% at all, it is all advocacy.
Sometimes the people with the power play power games, also pay money and bribe, you know. (WB class 3b)
The theme of corruption spread to the characterisation of how some development projects within their communities were implemented. The following extract from the above respondent illustrates this depiction:
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The case is quite stark. You have a case where people are being forced off the land. People are being arrested if they resist. Even worse, people are being killed, their crops are being burned. The women are being abused. All these things are happening. It is extremely stark. Almost all of the tribal areas are facing this problem in some way or another. That’s what we are facing in tribal areas…almost all of them you will find, in some way or another, their rights are being denied. They may have a place to live but they do not have a title. They could be kicked out tomorrow.
They may not have identity cards. They may have e lectricity but it’s not legal.
Anyone came and call them, they can accuse them of being a criminal. I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that more than half of the people are under this kind of threat. (WB class 3b)
This framing of the implementation of some development projects in the most marginalised communities presents a picture of a lack of agency amongst beneficiaries to combat what are represented as violations. It also has implications for the agency of the NGO itself in terms of gaining trust from such communities.
Thee NGOs depicted perceptions of an inadequate bureaucratic infrastructure which they considered had a negative impact on citizenship. At its most extreme in the quotes above, such accounts suggest that institutional failures denied individual beneficiaries basic rights as citizens. Further, NGOs themselves expressed what they perceived was an inability of their beneficiaries to obtain citizen credentials from those who they perceived as gatekeepers to possession of citizenship. One manifestation of this, they claimed, was the lack of access to such documentation as identity cards, birth certificates and information. One NGO in this category (WB class 3b) also characterised an association between what they perceived was corruption and the right to information:
Our first major campaign was – we have a number of campaigns, anti-corruption, agriculture, equality. Anticorruption takes many forms, there’s anti-corruption as such and right to information. (WB class 3b)
This chapter develops the theme of the association between injustice and a right to information in more detail in the following section on London NGOs. At this point, however, there is a hint of this theme within the accounts of some NGOs in the
West Bengal sample.
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By exploring the collective representations of this group of NGOs, it is here hypothesised that these findings are in alignment with Chang’s (2010) position that the implementation of human rights principles is predicated upon the establishment of an adequate political and social bureaucratic institutional infrastructure. The findings of this project can inform conversations in wider scholarly conversations about political tensions involving the operationalisation of human rights as a
Western-centric project. It is hypothesised that the activists perceived that they were unable effectively to overturn oppressive power structures. In addition, it is contended here that the interviewees also represented the framework itself, with its focus on empowering the individual, as being of limited practical relevance because the situated context demanded a greater focus on group rights.
This section argues that the activists felt the need to become independent from oppressive power structures and what they characterised as the failure of the state to provide the appropriate governance infrastructure. This thesis proposes that activists’ objectives were to establish alternative structures to enhance independent agency for themselves and their be neficiaries. The NGOs’ visions did not align with
Marxian ideology of class-struggles nor did they appear to embrace the freemarket, economic growth strategies of neo-liberalism. Marxists would perhaps assert that, although these NGOs were part of the wider neoliberal project, they were in fact operating under false consciousness. The hegemonic neo-liberal perspective would suggest in response that this assertion was misguided and activists would be unable to succeed in implementing programmes without the other aspects of capitalist strategies. Activists situated challenges to their agency, and that of their beneficiaries, in the failure of the institutional and political institutional infrastructures rather than class-based struggles. The response to this perspective was to adopt what can be characterised as “power to” strategies rather than “power over” programmes and campaigns.
The argument about the deployment of human rights in this category can be developed most fruitfully not by considering whethe r activists’ expressed classbased political aspirations. Rather, it is suggested here that this thesis feeds into the work on human development by unpacking some aspects of the situated contexts which influence decisions on the ground. Activists’ perceptions of their organisations’ ability to deploy human rights and human rights-based development
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are central to understanding this influence. This thesis contends that activists adopted “power to” strategies that focused on a pragmatic approach, enhancing local community values, capabilities and freedoms within a framework that emphasised group rights. The situated context of what was articulated as legal and institutional infrastructural failures influenced how the framework was deployed to enhance be neficiaries’ standards of living.
Sen (1999) developed the human development paradigm as a critique of the economic growth model. Development economists became increasingly convinced that market forces were failing to provide a trickle-down effect to end poverty. Sen was instrumental in conceiving a human development approach based on practical reasoning in pursuit of identifying the most effective approaches to reducing the most egregious injustices arising from abject poverty.
Sen’s (1999) human development approach focused on enhancing human capabilities and freedoms and achieving decent standards of living, rather than pursuing a narrower objective of economic growth. Sen’s work, however, is directed at emancipating people so that they can freely pursue their own choices informed by their own values. It was mentioned earlier in the chapter that it is unclear from this project whether activists in the two case studies were aware of the human development orientation. It is, however, arguably a paradigm that best describes the orientation of activists in this category who focused on their visions to empower their beneficiaries in a way that could be termed community human development. The following quote illustrates how one interviewee represented one of their community cooperative projects:
We don’t create a disparity between men and women and generally we push communities together, men and women working together making it a better place for them, themselves where they live. So that’s the main agenda where we focus on and I think the fact that when we sell the produce initially before they get independent, we sell the produce for them as well and from the sales proceeds the money goes back into their own villages and we tell them that it is your own effort that the money is coming back to your village and they see it as an example and that helps them also much to think about themselves and they know that we have nothing, it is their own village, that we are not working only for ourselves but we are working as a group. So they get to launch that model and then we had a case where the group, the co-operative formed of the youth in one of the villages, so that
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they have started to give money to their own village from their own earnings they are earning today. So that has also helped us in a way. We work on the community at large working together as a unit, not men, not women. (WB class 3c)
This section has so far examined the missions of the NGOs clustered in this group by focusing on the representation of top-level visions. Class 4 in the West Bengal
Alceste report is most closely associated with this component. Not all the organisations clustered under that class were INGOs but common objectives underpinned their visions and missions. A ctivists’ accounts articulated bottom-up approaches to enhancing the well-being of the beneficiaries. One of the interviewees from an INGO, WB class 4b, was based in the West Bengal Office.
The participant characterised this organisation ’s work as being aimed specifically at community empowerment. This section claims that it exemplified a “power over” strategy with the aim of enhancing the beneficiaries’ ability to influence state-level institutions and power structures:
And in the Indian context this includes the Dalit communities, the indigenous people and the tribals and the Muslim community and these are more and more marginalised in the current context of increasing fundamentalism, religious terror and all that and we have women and children who live in these communities and people living in these communities and our long journey working with these communities has made us realise that there are certain community-specific rights which are being denied to these communities and as well as rights and entitlements as guaranteed by the various statutes, I mean the laws and the constitution of India and these rights lead to the basic needs that are human, that relate to the right to food and housing and dignity, identity, notions of education, health. And we work towards giving rights to these people, empowering these communities for these rights. (WB class 4b)
Another respondent from WB class 3 also described the organisation’s particular bottom-up approach to the operationalisation of their mission. The portrayal of the organisation’s approach combined a “power to” approach to programmes characterised by social action with other objectives more in li ne with a “power to” strategy. The interviewee, for example, characterised the NGO’s programmes as working towards motivating beneficiaries to become much more active citizens within local communities. This work was described as promoting social action. The
NGO described one of the organisation’s objectives as being to encourage such act ion which included the aim of “[m]obilising the oppressed to protest against
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social inju stice and atrocities inflicted by the oppressors by “involving people for mobilisation, organization, formation and strengthening of people's /
Women's/Chi ldren’s action groups” and to “[e]ncourage people to demand their rights for availing of basic amenities and opportunities from the state or local
Government administration
”. These objectives could be described as a “power over” strategy. The interviewee suggested that the organisation aimed to encourage beneficiaries to “generate their own community fund with a primary objective of developing the basic community infrastructure”. This is more in line with a “power to” approach.
These co-operative programmes were described as combining the objective of enhanced economic well-being and community solidarity with those of other NGOrun programmes that were specifically targeted at establishing women’s cooperatives. Such an orientation provides an example of a situated expression of
Sen’s (1999) human development paradigm but extended to incorporate the values of community programmes. This component identifies this approach, which is centred on co-operative programmes which aspire to enhance the quality of life within a collectivity. This approach is adopted as a response to situated experiences of perceptions of failure of the institutional infrastructure to address socio-economic injustices in deprived communities. This thesis argues that Sen’s conceptualisations would benefit from a more nuanced understanding of the constraints on citizenship and group-based agency. As the empirical findings suggest, Sen’s (1999) work would be strengthened by examining how individual capabilities can be broadened to encompass a more comprehensive understanding of community development.
The respondent above (from WB class 3c) perceived a particular challenge to the implementation of this programme as being the legacy that had been left by past communist rule of West Bengal. The interviewee characterised this as a lack of confidence amongst members of local communities. The interviewee claimed that this collective attitude had hampered efforts to persuade more members of the local community to participate in the co-operative undertakings. In the quote above, the interviewee linked the objective to ensure the quality of life with the prerequisite of achieving human rights. On the one hand, the human rights framework was being invoked to represent a requirement for delivering a good quality of life. On the
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other, the activists collectively articulated its limitations in contexts where the supporting institutional infrastructure was inadequate. The framework, however, provided the means by which to articulate what they considered were violations.
The framework provided a standpoint from which to criticise the existing institutional infrastructures.
The human rights framework was perceived as providing a set of expectations against which activists could articulate an array of the shortfalls in terms of acceptable standards and violations in relation to international codes and citizenship.
6.2.2. London NGOs: A Vehicle for Re-Orientating Beneficiaries
It is proposed here that the distinctive characteristic of this element is the deployment of human rights to underpin visions and missions characterised by the objective of re-orientating beneficiaries in relation to mainstream culture. This section describes two strands of the “power to” approaches in the interviewees’ accounts in this category: i) programmes aimed at empowering their young beneficiaries to challenge stereotypical attitudes towards disadvantaged groups and those of their peers; and ii) programmes that focused on providing networking opportunities, training courses or child care to enable beneficiaries to connect or reconnect with those in the local mainstream culture.
The interviewees in the London case study who were clustered under this component characterised programmes as being associated with community projects. By examining the representations of their work, it can be concluded that human rights formed an uncontested foundation which under-girded missions.
Therefore, it can be argued that human rights were consonant with these projects and interviewees were fully engaged with the f ramework’s objectives. To support this conclusion, this section refers to the analysis of the vision and mission statements outlined in Chapter Five. Class 2 in the London case study Alceste report was interpreted as being associated with local community projects dedicated to children and young people as well as the provision of adult education. Activists described working with local communities by establishing and maintaining projects which were targeted at challenging disadvantages, prejudices and social stereotypes.
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This type of work can be illustrated by the account of an interviewee working in a youth-orientated community project. The London headquarters of this organisation
(L class 2a), put forward a member of their staff who worked in a local community project based in Leeds as the contact. The interviewee described the programme as community action-based projects conceived and undertaken by local children.
These projects were supervised by adults attached to the organisation. The interviewee described the programme as follows:
[The organisation] is about them taking the lead, picking up an issue they really care about we want to work with what they are passionate about. Basically they [the children] can tackle an issue - it can be at the global level, national, local. They can make a difference within their local community. Some of them decide to set up a project in their school but there are not rules about developing a community project.
It’s more about taking community action, tackling a social or environment issue and some of them will be really, really ambitious and they want their voice to be heard in their country.
They put together a nice documentary that they could use to educate their peers in primary schools in their local community. We have a group who decided to run a campaigning event to raise awareness about homeless and they wanted to challenge the stereotype of homeless people. (L class 2a)
This quote illustrates how the representative from the NGO characterised its activity as inspiring young people to develop ways of challenging prejudices in local communities, in this case, about homeless people.
This “power to” approach was characterised as developing the potential of individual participants. It is surmised that the peers would also include the children involved in the community projects themselves. A secondary theme emerged in the accounts which can be interpreted as promoting the group rights of disadvantaged members of the local community.
This secondary objective, therefore, was in alignment with a “power over” strategy.
These strategies are discussed in more detail in the next section.
NGOs in this category, such as this, described how human rights were deployed by incorporating the framework within their staffing policy, terms of reference and volunteer recruitment policy. A member of their staff stated that “people who are going to work for us and work with us understand that discrimination attitudes, behaviour, comments, this is something we work on when we train volunteers and
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when we start working in schools with young people regarding equal opportunities”
(L class 2a).
A second NGO associated with this component described the organisation’s mission as providing child-care and training courses for the more disadvantaged parents within the community to enable them to take up employment. The interviewee suggested that the UN Rights of the Child formed “the core of everything we do. It is very big here” and continued by suggesting that:
You can look up on the internet what these are. It is quite interesting, the right to a name. But those are not those that affect us so much. But is in all our training and we – part of what the students have to do is to devise activities to do with the children that remind them of their rights or explore their rights in some way, refreshes that for them because we feel quite strongly that children ought to know what they are and be able to assert them elsewhere – ready through it.
The Training Centre runs accredited training, life skills, first aid, health and safety and food hygiene. Also it runs child protection courses and things like that and accredited diplomas in play work to level 2 and level 3 so our target group are those who have not had a successful academic career and who would be intimidated by returning to a formal academic institution or people who has come to the country with qualifications th at aren’t transferable here. (L class 2b)
This quote identifies the essence of the missions which represented the aims of empowering disadvantaged beneficiaries to participate in the local mainstream. It also highlights the importance of the UN rights of the Child, which is represented as informing how the work of the organisation is undertaken.
The interviewee from the third NGO represented the organisation’s mission policy as:
It is our duty to serve any person to come with a need. If we are not able to, we give them a reason why we are not able to. If we can we will give them the right contact, the right details for them to go into what they need. (L class 2c)
The interviewee characterised their work as being focused on providing networking opportunities for members of ethnic minority groups in their locality who were disadvantaged and isolated. The objective of the work was to enhance the ability of beneficiaries to connect with the local community.
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Based on the representations of this group of London NGOs, it can be argued that human rights functioned as an ethos which underpinned community projects which were directed at overcoming prejudice or disadvantages in the social structures of local environments.
6.2.3. Comparison of “Power To” Strategies
Both West Bengal and London NGOs in this category were engaged in community projects and expressed a common perception of the influence of external forces on their organisations’ programmes. These forces were perceived as curtailing the ability of organisations to implement human rights principles. This position reflects a conceptualisation of an external locus of agency. Activists from both case studies characterised the human rights framework as being conceptually important to visions and missions. It can be argued that this position could be viewed as a version of Uvin’s (2002) conceptualisation of a more in-depth engagement with human rights. Uvin suggested that the “add-on” position reflected the inclusion of some aspects of human rights as objectives of programmes. The results of the research here may feed into our understanding of the level of activists’ engagement with the framework. Activists portrayed aspects of the local socio-economic structures as challenging desired action and, consequently, curtailed the ability to engage fully with the framework.
The London NGOs in this sample characterised a position of what can be framed as “living human rights” which pervaded the way of operating that was identified in the organisations’ terms of reference. Their orientation was substantially in line with mainstream power structures, although they felt constrained to a certain extent by them. In comparison, the West Bengal interviewees represented the human rights framework as a vehicle to express violations of these rights. The framework itself could be viewed as inadequately serving the needs of the NGOs in these situated contexts because of the lack of an understanding of group rights. The sense gained from the activists’ accounts was that the human rights framework was of little practical relevance because of this perceived inadequacy. This became manifest in the activists’ accounts as they described programmes which had the objective of becoming independent of the mainstream by establishing co-operative projects.
Merry ’s (2006a) argument suggests that NGO activists are critical agents in the
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attempt to hold governments of nation-states and transnational corporations to account. It is argued here that the West Bengal NGOs in this sample, however, were pursuing an alternative strategy to human rights-based development which involved domestic frames of development practice. One area where the framework was of relevance was the expression of the commitment to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Further research would be fruitful in exploring the nuances of their operating strategies in more detail. Research could be focused on examining whether these NGOs attempted to translate local problems into conceptions of human rights or whether they were adopting domestic strategies rather than the more universal principles contained in the framework.
6.3. Component 3: Underpinning “Power Over” Empowerment
Strategies
The distinctive feature of this element within the taxonomy focuses on different approaches to “power over” empowerment strategies expressed in the activists’ accounts. The West Bengal interviewees stated that they were engaged in running microfinance projects whilst the London activists described the work of their organisations as campaigning to overcome institutional prejudice suffered by beneficiaries who had become dislodged from mainstreamed society. In both case studies, the function of the human rights framework was represented as underpinning the different empowerment strategies. The framework was represented not just as serving as a standard or norm undergirding NGO practice; it also took on characteristics of a political and practical tool with which to empower beneficiaries according to different types of strategic approach.
6.3.1. West Bengal NGOs: “Power Over” Strategies
The distinctive approach of the West Bengal NGOs in the previous category focused on how activists strove to become independent from existing power structures by establishing co-operative ventures. In this category, the activists portrayed the aspiration of reforming the political, cultural and economic power structures in local contexts. The West Bengal activists portrayed programmes in this component of the taxonomy as aiming to empower beneficiaries economically and also to enhance their status as active citizens who were able to participate more fully in democratic institutions. Chapter Two drew on work in scholarly debate
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to identify a range of tensions underlying human rights-compliant economic development empowerment programmes as a political project. This section unpacks aspects of these conversations by looking at different strategies portrayed by the West Bengal activists in response to situated experiences. It identifies the disjunction between aspirations to “power over” strategies underpinned by human rights and the adoption of modified approaches in response to situated experiences. This approach differs in nat ure from the “power to” community strategies which were described in in the previous section of this chapter because the activists described attempts to overcome what were perceived as the social and cultural power structures which impeded the implementation of programmes. This is in contrast with the second compo nent characterised by a “power to” orientation which characterised programmes which aimed at promoting independence from oppressive local socio-economic structures.
This project feeds into the conversations about processes of operationalisation of the hum an rights framework by examining representations of NGOs’ strategic choices. This thesis contends that Merry’s (2006b) theory of vernacularisation would be strengthened by a nuanced understanding of how NGOs represent choices between alternative and possibly conflicting strategies in order to achieve desired outcomes. It also argues that her account would be enriched by an understanding of social activists’ sense of locus of agency in relation to situated experiences of structural and institutional infrastructures. These, it is suggested here, have an impact on the choice of strategies. This argument applies particularly to those NGOs who represented their work as being engaged in human rightsbased development activity, particularly microfinance programmes. This theme is developed more fully in the following chapter which examines how the activists represented an association between economic growth schemes and women’s human rights.
As well as microfinance projects and sustainable development interventions, the
NGOs associated with this category described their missions variously as the delivery of disaster management programmes and sustainable green environment projects. These were occasionally combined with welfare provision such as healthcare services. The most common mission strategy described by activists is interpreted as being directed at pulling communities out of local cultural norms of
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living towards more Western hegemonic standards. This thesis argues that this targeted activity can be represented as a “power over” strategy in which the objective was to replace traditional community activity with more Westernorientated economic development models.
The section continues by examining the interviewees’ experiences of programme implementation in local contexts. Activists generally articulated a perceived disjunction between objectives of mission interventions and the prevailing traditional superstitious beliefs within their communities, for example:
We are trying to have a programme on women and child but you can understand that the biggest shake up in this type of project are that they are very superstitious.
They don’t want to go for an x-ray, they don’t want to go even for a little prick to see that whether their haemoglobin is right or wrong. (WB class 4a)
To counter cultural challenges to programme implementation, such as traditional superstitions, interviewees stated that their organisations ran human rights awareness schemes. Examples of these included sensitisation programmes, community plays and mass awareness campaigns. An activist from another NGO associated with this category described such a campaign as:
Organising people for mass campaign to abolish superstition, witchcraft practices, cultural exploitations and atrocities over the under-privileged poor, Dalits and tribals.
(WB class 3d)
In a similar vein, the main objective of another NGO in the cluster was portrayed as being to promote a “scientific attitude amongst mass people”. The activist from that organisation reported that:
We have to face so many challenges here you know. We took a soil sample and we found so many types of bacteria. We tried to convince people firstly – not to drink….We can be in some remote areas are there are such a thing called a witch.
We go there and fight these things and try to make people understand about these things. (WB class 3e)
This section argues that these quotes exemplify a strategy of pulling communities
“out of” traditional customs and norms. NGOs in this cluster perceived particular cultural practices as barriers to the implementation of programmes. Rather than trying to accommodate or assimilate situated traditional norms within programmes, activists articulated an aspiration to transform them. By examining the accounts of
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West Bengal NGOs, it is concluded that the activists regarded superstition as a false or unfounded belief system. This can be compared with the concept of prejudgement which, arguably, involves an assessment based on inadequate information or lack of reflection. These forms prejudice of will be examined in the following section, which focuses on the depicted work of London based NGOs.
In a similar vein other interviewees articulated perceptions of different forms of cultural impediment to programme implementation, for example, entrenched caste conflicts:
It was already a known fact that this was not going to be open to them so that they were not coming and in that particular village there had been caste conflict maybe
10 years ago but it was so violent that the effect was still there today. There are certain lines that people don’t cross and that is the only reason why there hasn’t been conflict again in the last 10 years but everybody knows that if you were to cross that line then you would have to pay the price. ….the centre that was supposed to serve the children from the age of 3 to 6 was only having children of certain castes enter and this has been so well established that people from the excluded castes were no longer even coming. … “I definitely wouldn’t say it has gotten better and I would not be surprised if there were evidence that it has gotten worse. (WB class 3b)
In the above quote, the interviewee articulated a perception that caste conflict had constrained the ability of the NGO to provide child welfare services.
Chapter Two referred to Robinson’s (2005) comment on human rights-based development. She described this form of practice as a normative framework which sets internationally agreed standards of development, accountability and institutional governance structures. The NGO interviewees in this component perceived that local governance structures were inadequate in relation to international standards.
These activists represented strategies that took the form of a “power over” strategy.
One particular theme amongst the NGOs, for example, was their perception of the prevalence of corruption within the bureaucratic institutional infrastructure and a lack of regulatory governance. The NGO, in a particular case, represented the organisation’s activities as sponsoring beneficiaries to study technology and
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medicine at a higher education level. The work of NGOs was represented as aspiring to empower the local community in terms of skills as well as enhancing the ability to overcome an inadequate bureaucratic institutional infrastructure.
The approaches of the NGOs in this category refer to the deployment of human rights serving as a standard against which to measure and vocalise violations against internationally agreed standards. The activists in this category claimed that they held local and national bureaucracy to account in terms of failure of infrastructure and the inhibiting effects of what were depicted as traditional cultural practices. Programmes were described as aiming to tackle impediments to missions related to the modernisation of community facilities as well as enhancing individual economic resources. The interviewees expressed some ambivalence towards human rights-based development projects which should have empowered beneficiaries but were represented as being susceptible to corrupting influences in some cases.
Some West Bengal interviewees described the human rights framework as underpinning the programme objectives but that it did not inform their practical actions. Some activists, for example, expressed an ideological commitment to the international codes. On the other hand, they implied that in practice their organisations deployed domestic codes. It can be speculated here that the articulated disjunction between commitment to human rights values on the publicfacing website and programme activity implied that the NGOs were attempting to resolve friction arising from the implementation of the framework. The NGOs, for example, might have been appealing to the West for fundraising purposes on their website. They might also have been appealing to the values in local communities in the practical implementation of their projects. It could, therefore, be argued here that the interviewee was describing a practice of adopting different strategies to engage with a variety of stakeholders. It is hypothesised here that in practice, the
NGOs considered that the Western hegemonic human rights framework could support only a limited ran ge of achievements. It could also be argued that activists’ accounts suggest that NGOs were acting in a pragmatic way in accordance with traditional norms and practices to achieve functional aims. This thesis speculates that NGOs were cautious about endorsing the framework too overtly within their
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communities because of the potential of being associated with the legacy of the colonial era in India.
6.3.2. London NGOs: A Vehicle to Overcome Institutional Prejudice
The distinctive approach to the deployment of human rights in this section focuses on the framework as a tool with which to rehabilitate beneficiaries into the mainstream bureaucratic infrastructure. Interviewees perceived inadequacies in the institutional infrastructure as a source of denial of full citizen rights to their beneficiaries. The human rights framework provided a “power over” vehicle which was deployed in missions to reconnect beneficiaries to the existing power and bureaucratic infrastructures from which they had become dislodged. The framework also provided the standard against which to measure and identify specific forms of injustice. The human rights framework was represented as a means to an end as well as an end in itself.
An interviewee in class 1 described the beneficiaries of the organisation as those who had suffered from aphasia, a stroke-induced communication disorder. The mission of the NGO was represented as providing support to beneficiaries as well as campaigning to overcome perceived barriers to their realisation of full citizenship rights. The interviewee considered that policy-makers in this area were gatekeepers to the access of rights, particularly those associated with being equal citizens in mainstream society:
I think is a real challenge because it means you have to be very clever in how you get your message across because people zone out before you have got through the information really.
[Interviewer: “How do you work round that then?]
What I try to do is, I try and I am a bit Machiavellian about it to be honest. In terms of doing a scattergun, what I try and do is pick out the people who I think are going to be the most influential and get more bangs for your bucks in terms of the conversations you can have and the impact you are going to effect.…they know what my agenda is and then I can give them practical information help them out and it will also have the effect of raising the profile and the needs of people with aphasia so that is how I do it with the sort of policy implementers. (L class 1b)
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NGOs in this category generally characterised campaigns as being aimed at influencing policy-makers and those gatekeepers who were viewed as having the means to grant beneficiaries access to mainstreamed rights. It is surmised that human rights were deployed as a force and a standard with which to engage gatekeepers. The framework was used to identify the inadequacies of the institutional infrastructures. It was deployed as part of a “power over” strategy to enhance the profile of the needs of beneficiaries, allowing access to mainstreamed rights. The interviewee (L class 1b) characterised the relevance of the human rights framework to their work as follows:
Disability rights is absolutely fundamental to everything that we do …. I know we were talking about human rights, and everybody is aware of disability rights, physical disability and how you have to have access for people with physical disability, but they don’t really think about communication access and barriers in terms of communication … you can dramatically increase the person’s ability to interact make decision, plan, become part of society again and so on. (L class 1b)
Based on the representations of activists in this category, it can be hypothesised that the common vision of NGOs in this category is of a reconnection of their beneficiaries to existing power structures in mainstream society. These power structures were conceived of as being underpinned by unimpeded access to human rights in society. The activists characterised their beneficiaries as suffering from some event or prejudice that had disconnected them from the mainstream and, therefore, full access to the framework. Specifically, the primary missions of these organisations were described as enabling the excluded to gain access to human rights by demanding equality before the law, procedural justice and democratic participation. The NGOs represented beneficiaries as facing a variety of barriers that prevented them from being fully engaged with democratic rights in society. The interviewees commonly represented their perception of human rights as a frame which enabled organisations to label what was unequal treatment and, therefore, to identify what action would be needed to connect beneficiaries to society and allow them to choose their preferred lifestyle.
The type of injustice that L class 1b campaigned to overcome can be categorised as a lack of recognition of the condition as a specific and distinct disability. This approach feeds into
Fricker’s (2003, 2006 and 2007) concept of hermeneutic injustice, that is, discrimination based on a lack of a conceptual framework or social
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representation. L class 1b’s beneficiaries were those suffering from a specific speech disability. The interviewee perceived that there was no generally understood concept of this condition. In other words, the activist represented beneficiaries as lacking the conceptual means to identify themselves as being eligible for certain rights. In this view, gatekeepers lacked the conceptual means to identify eligibility to accessing rights. The interviewee expressed this perceived position as:
I think a lot of it is relating to [condition] being a complicated disorder to understand.
So very few people have heard of it even though it is really very common. There are more people with [condition] than there are with MS in this country and yet people have not heard of it and do know what it is.
But I don’t think this is the case because even in situations when people with
[condition] are being assessed whether they are disabled or not to be able to claim benefits there is nowhere on the form that you can tick to say that you have a communication disability. And because they are not therefore seen to have a disability, none of the problems they have got which are purely communication can be seen as a reason for support and finance. So you do you see why it is difficult for me to answer because I don’t think that they should be positively discriminated against but that would be in an ideal world where they were supported and they were recognised that communication disability and sort of things that attend it are recognised b ut I don’t think that they are. (L class 1b)
This quotation illustrates several aspects of the speculated consequences of lack of a social representation of a specific disadvantage. It exemplifies how a lack of the concept is perceived as resulting in denial of full citizenship rights and agency. In summary, the work of L class 1b’s organisation can be characterised as being to empower beneficiaries by providing them with a literal and figurative voice with which to participate in mainstream society. This empowerment was viewed as a vehicle to enhance their ability to influence policy in the area of their disability:
My job particularly is trying to influence policy makers and policy implementers, the
Care Quality Commission (CQC) and again to track the impact of that is difficult.
….
So I got myself by various nefarious means on the committee (CQC) that was drafting the questions that were going to make up the survey and through doing that
I was unable to put in questions which were like is there a befriending service in your local authority, how many people with [condition] are there in your local authority, do you have communication access training for all of your staff.
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So there was no direct impact on people with [condition] but it raises the awareness of service providers to the fact that there is this hidden group of people within the realms of a stroke of population who it now turns out that because they have done the surve y actually have worse provision…and that the majority of the stroke of population do not get a brilliant service. So through doing that it alerted the commissioners to the fact there is a group of people who need services. (L class
1b)
This quote also illustrates the aim of achieving equality for their beneficiaries in terms of access to services compared with those experiencing other forms of disability.
It can be argued that institutional prejudice exists if gatekeepers to rights are not sensitive to the way that beneficiaries attempt to access them or where codified rights are too inflexible to adapt to ensure equal access. The following written quote from an activist working in another organisation in this category also exemplifies this position:
Having said all that, however, legislation is very hard to change – other influences, can be heard more than we can be – e.g. monetary; influential people; the status quo, etc. Even when you have an M.P. on your side so to speak and he/she tables a motion i n the Commons, the government can simply time it out and thus it doesn’t even get an airing! They say there are more important matters to be dealt with! (L class 3a)
It can be concluded that, drawing on the activists’ accounts, the common aim of
London NGO campaigns in this category can be represented as aiming to overcome what was perceived as institutional prejudice and the injustices that flowed from what they represented as a credibility deficit. In other words, the interviewees claimed that the objective of the organisations was to empower individual beneficiaries by ensuring their voices were viewed as being as credible as others in mainstream society. This was viewed as enhancing the ability of beneficiaries to participate within society.
The NGOs in this category perhaps aimed to enhance the capacity of their beneficiaries in terms of empowering them to access their rights. They did so by campaigning against forms of epistemic justice to enable beneficiaries to gain access to human rights amongst other entitlements. It can perhaps be concluded
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that these NGOs aimed to push their beneficiaries back towards the human rights framework from which they had become dislocated as a result of this injustice.
6.3.3.
Common and Contrasting “Power Over” Themes
Both the West Bengal and London NGOs accounts reflected a position of external locus of agency in relation to the dynamics of forces in their environments. The distinctive position in this element of the taxonomy is the deployment of human rights where there is an institutional infrastructural barrier to the practical realisation of the framework. The NGOs characterised the function of human rights in terms of empowering their beneficiaries to overcome these barriers.
Interviewees associated with this category from the London case study perceived their role as enablers, pushing their beneficiaries back into to the existing structures in society. These activists perceived the human rights bureaucratic infrastructure as beyond the reach of beneficiaries due to what was framed as epistemic injustice. In comparison, staff in the West Bengal NGOs described a perceived lack of adequately functioning social and political bureaucratic institutional infrastructures.
Situated experiences of these perceived inadequacies were portrayed as challenging the ability to enhance beneficiaries’ quality of life. It can be argued that the activists aimed to pull beneficiaries out of these local infrastructures by establishing programmes underpinned by Western-orientated norms and economic models.
It can be suggested that NGOs from the two case studies associated with this component deployed “power over” strategies in response to situated experiences of the institutional infrastructures. The West Bengal NGOs ran programmes with the aim of transforming power structures based on traditional local community cultural norms. These “power over” programmes had absorbed concepts and objectives from the human rights framework and were aimed at creating access to Western ideas of citizen rights. In comparison, the London NGOs in this category also ran awareness campaigns whose aim was to influence those represented as gatekeepers to rights. The aim was framed as changing the power structures to enable beneficiaries to gain access to mainstreamed rights. Programmes were represented as being directed at overcoming prejudicial impediments to the access of rights.
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Uvin’s (2002) conceptualisation of engagement can perhaps be enriched by incorporating a position which recognises the desire for full engagement with the human rights framework but this is inhibited by activists’ perceptions of challenges to desired action.
Drawing on the activists’ representations, both West Bengal and London NGOs it is contended here that they were attempting to bring human rights into the lives of their beneficiaries. NGOs suggested that they were active campaigners or advocates, that is, they spoke on behalf of beneficiaries or others who were perceived to be powerless to change the way society viewed and valued them.
Missions were described as being to take action to ensure that community, society and decision makers heard the beneficiaries’ voices. A commonality underlying their programmes was the view that the human rights framework is the standard with which to measure the current citizen status of their beneficiaries.
In summary, the West Bengal activists described institutional barriers to desired action. Human rights were perceived as serving as a standard which undergirded sustainable income generation projects; these were presented as a vehicle to pull communities out of cultural norms and towards more Western hegemonic standards. Activists described visions as aiming to transform oppressive structures.
London activists also represented their organisations’ work as overcoming institutional barriers but portrayed the aim of pushing beneficiaries back into the world of cultural Western norms from which they had become dislodged. Human rights, in these cases, acted as a vehicle to challenge prejudice in bureaucratic structures and influence gatekeepers. This discussion applied Fricker’s (2003,
2006 and 2007) concept of hermeneutic injustice, that is, discrimination based on a lack of a conceptual framework or social representation to enrich an understanding of this type of prejudice. Fricker’s (2003, 2006 and 2007) concept of epistemic injustice is developed in Chapter Seven in relation to the function of human rights as a universal political tool.
6.4. Component 4: Beyond the Universal Human Rights Framework:
Hybridisation
Gearty (2008) reflected upon the question of how human rights principles could be integrated as a set of sustainable unified goals to underpin the work of those acting
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on behalf of the most marginalised. He suggested that there appears to be, for example, a potential paradox between aiming to address the more egregious manifestations of oppression within grassroots communities in developing countries and yet simultaneously serving the global neoliberal political project. Drawing on the representations of NGOs in the case studies, it is proposed here that the distinctive feature of this category is the function of human rights as a strategy to form a bridge between the local communities and the wider global discourse. The activists’ accounts articulated the perception that organisations were deploying the hegemonic human rights framework by moving beyond an understanding of it as a universal framework comprising inalienable, interdependent, and indivisible principles.
This section focuses on activists’ accounts which portrayed the function of human rights as a bridge between the ideas contained within global justice movements, state-level justice institutions and policy-makers as well as members of local communities. NGOs in this category described the visions and missions in terms of developing beneficiaries’ citizen identities within a national and global context. This thesis feeds into the cultural-relativism debate by arguing that the process of hybridisation articu lated in activists’ accounts starts to challenge traditional dichotomy in the literature between the universal and the particular. The hybridisation model can be seen as absorbing and reconstituting aspects of both sides of the debate into new forms of value frameworks.
The strategies invoked a “power over” deployment of human rights in relation to structural and institutional infrastructure at the national and international level. In contrast to the other three elements, the accounts of NGOs in this category articulated the perception of an ability to shape these infrastructures rather than be shaped by them. It can be argued here that this position represents an internal locus of agency. The activists portrayed the mission as enhancing this quality in beneficiaries.
6.4.1. West Bengal NGOs: Linking Local Communities to Global
Justice Movements
The group of West Bengal NGOs clustered under class 4 were mostly International
Non-Governmental Organisations. The common mission in the activists’ accounts
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can be characterised as transforming local and national societal forces to eliminate poverty and empower individuals. In addition, the missions included the objective of forging sustainable bridges between local communities and broader global justice movements. The discourse on the organisations’ websites was in alignment with the language of human rights frameworks. This section argues that these NGOs operated with a pronounced internal locus of agency invo lving a “power over” strategy. Activists had a sense of power to shape or influence external infrastructural power structures.
The following quote from an interview with one of the NGOs in this case study illustrates the idea of an internal locus of agency where human rights provided the language which framed their objectives:
Many of the issues of dispossession have trans-national dimensions and require engagements beyond the boundaries. We work towards building people to people contact, solidarity and linkages across countries of the south and various movements in the north to make governments and institutions accountable and to pu t people’s issues at the centre. (WB class 4b)
On the website the NGO claimed that its vision is: “[a] world without poverty, patriarchy and injustice in which every person enjoys the right to life with dignity”.
These quotes illustrate the global reach of the vision and how this combined social justice with a human rights-based approach to accountability. The interviewee claimed the organisation was active in constructing the infrastructure to hold governments accountable for w hat they term “dispossession”. The vision of another
NGO in this category, (WB class 4c), incorporated the objective of creating citizens whose agency was linked to large-scale global movements. According to their website, WB class 4c is an institution that aims to promote positive social change by investing in social entrepreneurs. The organisation’s goal is expressed as
“facilitat[ing] an alliance of marginalised communities that will empower the poor and excluded to claim their rights as Indians and global citizens”. (WB class 4c website):
We are in the midst of a rare, fundamental structural change in society: citizens and citizen groups are beginning to operate with the same entrepreneurial and competitive skill that has driven business ahead over the last three centuries.
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People all around the world are no longer sitting passively idle; they are beginning to see that change can happen and that they can make it happen.
The result of this transformation will ultimately be a world where all individuals will be able to spot challenges, address them, and improve their lives. Rather than a tiny percentage of the world controlling the wealth and making the decisions that affect our lives, every individual will be empowered to determine his or her own future. (Taken from the website of WB class 4c)
The activist represented the organisation’s objective of striving to shape what they termed a competitive citizen sector. On the website, the INGO claimed that they encouraged social entrepreneurs in their programmes to become “change-makers” in their role as citizens of the world. It is concluded here that this programme incorporated elements of the human rights-based development framework, particularly the ideas of accountability, empowering an individual to determine his or her future, and having an inalienable right to a life with dignity. It also reflected an entrepreneurial orientation. This approach can be characterised as providing the tools to empower social actors and individual beneficiaries in terms of forming these bridges to global initiatives. This approach appears to be more in alignment with a
“power over” approach, that is, power over what was perceived to be oppressive and undemocratic existing structures in local communities. The organisation expressed a vision of “transformation” of power structures, but the distinctive feature is that it situated its mission within global movements to tackle poverty and resource inequalities.
One INGO respondent described the organisations’ priorities as supporting community-specific projects. The longer-term visions of the organisation were portrayed more in terms of building links with different bureaucratic and institutional levels in India:
We also recognise because of joint learning with these communities that there are also linkages with different processes that are happening at different levels. In particularly the state, the government and the various other players, the society as a whole – the vast dynamic in the Indian context. We empower the community so that it can participate in the decision-making. (WB class 4b )
This particular aim was described as being in the longer-term. The interviewees associated with this component characterised local communities as lacking basic
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welfare resources. Dean (2007) argues that welfare rights have become relatively marginalised and human rights actors in the international community have failed to implement an inalienable right to a life free of poverty. He suggests that international NGOs have been particularly active in promulgating political and civil rights, but have shown less willingness to become involved in campaigning for welfare provision. Some of the representations of interviewees in this cluster of
NGOs are not consistent with Dean’s (2007) view that the international community agenda has yet to deliver the economic resource trickle-down. Some INGO activists, for example, represented their organisation’s work as receiving donations which were invested directly in community projects, for example.
It is likely, however, that this social change movement was more in alignment with a
Western-orientated economic growth model because of the emphasis on individuals operating according to a business model within competitive markets. Merry (2006a) suggested that NGOs operated as agents of the neo-liberalist agenda and, therefore, that the main focus of effort was unlikely to be directed at challenging this model. The activists’ accounts were in line with this suggestion in that the aims of
NGOs were represented as being to increase the governance infrastructure and accountability in deprived communities, these being traditional human rights-based development objectives. The emphasis in the activists’ accounts was focused on a strategy to empower beneficiaries to enable them to participate in the international business agenda. The form that this participation took in the activists’ accounts, however, was the objective of empowering beneficiaries to operate with the same entrepreneurial and competitive skill as those that had, in their view, driven business ahead over the centuries. The activists’ missions were characterised as introducing the relevant skills in local contexts particularly to achieve greater access to community-specific rights.
In response to Merry’s (2006a) discussion, it cannot necessarily be inferred, however, that they were predominantly following a neo-liberalist agenda. This section argues that interviewees characterised the priority of their missions as being to address both the most egregious local social and economic injustices. The approach could be interpreted as a hybridisation of the economic growth model and social welfare approaches. To broaden the concept further this approach constitutes an interweaving of co-constituting Western, liberal hegemonic
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orientations and national local hegemonic frames. This conclusion encapsulates a well-established form of hybridisation. This process is endemic in moral hegemonic frameworks; for example, colonial and liberal frameworks have always operated in this way and even forms of anti-colonial and subaltern resistance, including through vehicles of emancipation, tend to absorb and reproduce aspects of that which they resist as part of their political logic. This resonates with the work of Nadarajah and
Rampton (2014) which focused on hybridity as a solution to the crisis of forms of peace. This thesis argues that the practical solutions expressed in activists’ accounts reflected the hybridisation between different hegemonic frameworks, not in a derivative way but one that was non-reducible to its component aspects.
This thesis feeds into the universalism debate by arguing that this understanding of how hegemonic frameworks change in response to each other challenges the traditional dichotomy between the universal and the particular. This conversation can be developed further by considering other examples of hybridisation in the activists’ accounts. Walby (2011) suggested that the feminist movement was undergoing hybridisation with other global projects. The following chapter focuses on various aspects of the deployment of women’s human rights and refers to themes in activists’ accounts about the future direction of feminism.
6.4.2. London NGOs: Political and Civil Rights
The distinctive approach to the deployment of the human rights framework in this section focuses on the promotion of political and civil rights. This orientation incorporated a moderate “power over” approach. The London NGOs characterised objectives as directed at achieving a moderate reform of what were perceived to be the prevailing power structures. In the Alceste report of vision and mission statements, the London NGOs most closely associated with this section were clustered together under class 3. These NGOs included Hansard, Justice, The
Ethnic Minority Fou ndation, the Institute of Alcohol Studies and the Women’s
Institute.
The written responses by L class 3a and L class 3c to the interview questions mirrored the contents of the mission and vision statements on their websites although the responses described certain aspects of the work in more detail. For example, one of the NGOs in this category stated that:
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A central aspect of our policy work is promoting international human rights standards in UK law. This includes non-discrimination on grounds of gender. We have undertaken considerable work in the past on improving the UK’s equality laws.
(L class 3a)
The [class 3c NGO] is the UK’s leading non-partisan political research and education think tank. At the heart of our work is the principle that civic society is most effective when its citizens are connected with the institutions and individuals who represent them in the democratic process. We aim to strengthen parliamentary democracy and encourage greater public involvement in politics. Our parliamentary research programme includes legislation in this area [human rights] [see Law in the
Making and Making Better Law ] and our digital democracy programme has a vital international dimension. (L class 3c)
Activists’ accounts articulated the objective of enhancing beneficiaries’ ability to participate more actively in political institutions. The interviewees claimed that the organisations strove to increase beneficiaries’ abilities to influence political decision-making processes. It can be concluded that these NGOs aimed at enhancing the legal infrastructure and institutions of the prevailing social order.
Given that their written answers were consistent with the vision and mission statements on their websites, there is little other material with which to supplement my discussion in Chapter Five.
At the heart of the visions of the NGOs which were concerned with the promotion of political and civil human rights was also a deeper sense of progress. An example was, for example, that of L class 3c’s digital democracy programme. These NGOs were not limited to implementing human rights principles. It could be concluded here that the NGO desired to have an impact on the human rights framework itself.
In addition, one could take the work L class 3d, a single-issue organisation, as also illustrating how human rights principles are moving beyond a bounded framework.
The post-modern idea of fragmentation might be drawn upon to explain how an integrated, indivisible abstract framework is used to support single issues. The activists represent the organisatio n’s role as being “based around helping to bridge the gap between the scientific evidence [substance] and the wider public… and to advocate for effective responses that will reduce the toll of [substance] in society”.
86
86 See: http://www.ias.org.uk/What-we-do.aspx.
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During the interviews, the organisation represented its focus as being on the human rights of individuals not to be affected adversely by the substance.
6.4.3. Common and Contrasting Themes between the Two Samples
The distinctive commonality of the accounts of NGOs in both samples in this category was the sense of an internal locus of agency. The discourse of the West
Bengal and London NGOs associated with this element in the typology was couched in the universalistic language of human rights concepts and focused on enhancing the identity of their beneficiaries as active citizens. The accounts of the
West Bengal and London NGOs articulated a position of full engagement with human rights principles in terms of Uvin’s (2002) conceptualisation.
The organisations in both case studies characterised their work as incorporating the objective of facilitating beneficiaries’ abilities to participate in influencing the institutional infrastructures in their respective countries. The London NGOs also focused on enhancing their own ability to shape these structures. NGOs in both the
London and West Bengal sub-samples characterised their work as either participating in the transnational justice movement or at least suggested they aspired to do so. Arguably, human rights functioned as a political tool which supported the more moderate “power over” strategies of organisations in this case study. This tool supported the objectives of the West Bengal NGOs to enhance the beneficiaries’ ability to contribute to democratic decision-making with the objective of transforming local power structures. In comparison, the framework supported the
London NGOs’ aims to enhance beneficiaries’ abilities to engage in democratic participation.
To enrich the understanding of the work of INGOs in India, an interview was conducted in 2011 with Meghna Abraham, Policy Coordinator of the Economic,
Social and Cultural Rights Team, who was based in the London office of Amnesty
International. The issue of universality of rights was also discussed. Ms. Abraham suggested that human rights should not be perceived as imperialist projects as their ideas were very much based on, for example, Indian philosophy, rather than vested interests. She suggested that they were subjected to culturally relative implementation: “human rights can be seen as the floor, and the area between that and the ceiling is the room for interpretation”. She described human rights as a
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framework which allowed flexibility for interpretation. She suggested that there were certain rights, such as freedom from torture or discrimination, where there was no room for dissent. Other aspects of the framework, however, were subject to debate and a cultural-relative interpretation. She referred to the work of Donnelly (1984,
1989) whom, she argued, recognised this flexibility. The universal challenge was not the acceptance of rights, she thought, but their implementation. Ms. Abraham considered that there were new issues surrounding human rights other than the theoretical debate about their universality. These were centred on how to make the framework relevant, particularly their implementation in states with different paradigms of social order. She suggested that China used human rights in its constitution, but the challenge to the framework was to build strategies of implementation that were relevant as legitimate tools to support struggle in all forms of nation-state government.
Buil ding on Ms Abraham’s comments, it is argued here that, although Liberal democracy might have originally underpinned the human rights framework, it may not be the ideology that is most compatible with the new social order paradigms 87 as global power shifts away from the global North. This thesis argues that human rights as a political transformative tool might increasingly become subject to culture specific translation as alternative government paradigms gain the ascendency during these global power movements. This interview also informs the conclusions about the hybridisation process discussed earlier in this chapter. Future research projects would be needed to understand how the human rights framework responds to new power structures emerging in the global order as power shifts from West to
East. There is already some support for the idea that certain social agents are looking to influence the framework with the idea of catching the zeitgeist of international developments as in the case of WB class 4b, for example.
6.5. A Taxonomy of the Deployment of Human Rights
This chapter has so far focused on the details of activists’ representation of the deployment of the human rights framework to their work and visions. The following table is a representation of the different outcomes which emerged from the empirical analysis of the operationalisation of the framework according to various
87 How does, for example, liberal democracy fit in with countries where Islam is a major element or totalitarian states, such as China, which have high rates of economic growth?
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perceptions of challenges to desired action. The table below summarises the features in local contexts that were portrayed as significant in the operationalisation of the human rights framework. It is framed by the locus of agency which describes different perceptions of oppressive and non-oppressive socio-economic local infrastructures. The model does not comprise quantifiable dimensions. The four components within the taxonomy have been constructed from themes within activists’ accounts. They comprise a family resemblance of orientations framed by perceptions of agency. The table can also been seen as a hierarchical classification of representations of the deployment of human rights.
At the most detailed level of analysis, the final column in the table summarises representations of the function of the human rights framework by activists in the
West Bengal and London case studies within each component. For example, the third set of representations in this column describes human rights in West Bengal as a vehicle to pull communities out of cultural norms toward more Western hegemonic standards. This compares with the London activists who described the framework as a vehicle to push beneficiaries back to these cultural norms after having been dislodged from mainstream society.
The second and third columns group the case studies according to a higher level summary of the deployment of human rights in activists’ accounts. These columns comprise the core of the components of the taxonomy. In the example above, West
Bengal and London activists represent their organisations’ visions as deploying human rights to support “power over” empowerment strategies. These visions were also described as being challenged by socio-economic barriers in situated contexts.
The first column in the table describes the two strands of locus of agency. The first three components in the taxonomy, for example, were themselves grouped together by perceived socio-economic contexts that challenged desired action.
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Table 6-1: A Taxonomy of the Deployment of Human Rights and Agency
Locus of Agency
Activists’
Perception of
Socio-
Economic
Contexts
Represented NGO
Activity
Representation of the Function of Human Rights
Framework
External
This form of agency centres on activists’ deployment of human rights. This agency is shaped in response to situated experiences of local socio-economic structures.
This overlying orientation represents perceived challenges to the implementation of the human rights framework depicted in activists’ accounts.
Component One
Local infrastructure too deprived to enable human rights to gain purchase.
Social Welfare
Provision or
Charitable Activities.
West Bengal: A recourse to rhetoric to legitimise the claims made by those in the most marginalised communities.
London: A recourse to rhetoric to expose how the trickledown failure of UK economic system fails some of the most marginalised in society.
Component Two
Socio-economic contexts provide barriers to the implementation of human rights.
The Deployment of
Human Rights to
Support NGO
“Power To”
Empowerment
Strategies.
West Bengal: Provides a language with which to express and construct vision and mission statements with the objective of establishing co-operative projects. Activists perceive they are too powerless to overcome existing power structures. The objective of programmes is to become independent of existing power structures.
London: As an ethos which underpins the operation and objectives of community projects. Human rights acts as a vehicle to overcome prejudice or social disadvantage
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Locus of Agency
Activists’
Perception of
Socio-
Economic
Contexts
Represented NGO
Activity
Representation of the Function of Human Rights
Framework
Component Three ?
Socio-economic contexts challenge the operationalisatio n of human rights.
The Deployment of
Human Rights to
Support NGO
“Power Over”
Empowerment
Strategies.
West Bengal: A standard for development, especially sustainable income generation projects. As a vehicle to pull communities out of cultural norms and towards more
Western hegemonic standards. Empowerment by transforming oppressive structures.
London: As a norm for rehabilitation into the mainstream infrastructure. As a vehicle to push their beneficiaries back into the world of cultural Western norms from which they had become dislocated. Human rights as a vehicle to challenge prejudice in bureaucratic structures and influence gatekeepers.
Internal
This form of agency identifies a sense in activists’ accounts of an ability to shape the infrastructure supporting human rights.
Component Four
Activists portrayed the ability to engage in large scale social improvement and growth projects. They felt empowered to operate in local contexts.
NGOs are connected to global social justice and progress projects.
They are engaged in maximising individual potential.
West Bengal: A link between local communities and the broader global justice movements.
London : Political and civil rights to promote a more active participation in political institutions.
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6.6. Conclusions
Chapter Two examined differences in understandings of agency in the scholarly literature and provided an account of the concept of the locus of agency. Chapter
Six focused on the distinct perceptions of agency, diverse positions in relation to the deployment of human rights and the role of social representations of injustice which were key themes in activists’ accounts. The taxonomy of the deployment of human rights identified different situated experiences involved in operationalising the framework on the ground.
This chapter informed and strengthened arguments in three distinct conversations within the broader scholarly literature. These contributions mapped onto elements within the taxonomy to form an overall picture of the relationship between the operationalisation of human rights and perceptions of agency. The conclusions drawn from this chapter will bring into focus how this thesis feeds into the three current specific discourses in the area, these being i) the framing of activists’ agency in oppressive and non-oppressive contexts; ii) the extent to which human rights principles can be considered to be universal; and, iii) conversations about the role of activists in providing the most vulnerable citizens with a voice to overcome injustice.
The thesis feeds into conversations about the framing of activists’ perceived agency. The taxonomy was framed by the conceptualisation of a locus of agency.
This concept identified a family resemblance of associations between human rights and agency in activists’ accounts. The taxonomy was founded on activists’ responses to situated experiences of the local infrastructures and the operationalisation of human rights. Representations of locus of agency in what was depicted as oppressive contexts were manifested in three distinct components in the taxonomy. Activists in both case studies who described organisations working in the most marginalised communities perceived that different forms of barriers prevented beneficiaries from accessing basic human rights. Local infrastructures were too weak to support the human rights framework and activists described their organisations’ programmes as dedicated to supporting what were perceived as universal basic human rights required for a dignified life. In such institutional contexts, activists represented the deployment of human rights as a recourse to rhetoric, that is, a vehicle to identify aspirations and visions.
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A second component in the taxonomy also incorporated a perception in activists’ accounts of a sense of powerlessness in response to a lack of robust institutional and social infrastructures. Activists associated with the first category portrayed a focus on providing social welfare and acute survival rescue services for the most vulnerable beneficiaries. Those in the second category depicted interventions to enhance collective and community specific enhancements to the quality of beneficiaries’ lives. This incorporated notions of collective social action to reinforce community solidarity. Human rights were represented as underpinning these visions and many activists highlighted the relevance of Rights of the Child as being core to their organisations’ missions. The London activists characterised social action to reinforce community solidarity by operating programmes to break down prejudice against the most disadvantaged in local communities. The West Bengal activists did so by creating co-operatives with the objective of becoming independent from oppressive power structures.
The empowerment strategies of NGOs classified under the second component were cha racterised as being “power to”. In this project, this empowerment was manifested at the community level by providing beneficiaries with more opportunities to lead lifestyles according to their own choices. A “power over” strategy characterised the activists’ portrayals of visions and missions which were associated with the third component of the taxonomy. Activists from the two case studies associated with this component deployed “power over” strategies in response to situated experiences of the institutional infrastructures. The West
Bengal activists described “power over” programmes which had absorbed concepts and objectives from the human rights framework. Organisations’ microfinance projects were represented as targeted at pulling women participants out of contexts characterised by traditional norms. The schemes were depicted as orientated towards overcoming oppressive economic, social and cultural local contexts. In comparison, the London organisations’ objectives were portrayed as overcoming prejudicial impediments to rights.
The final component in the taxonomy was characterised as being framed by an internal locus of agency. Activists’ accounts were couched in the universalistic language of human rights concepts and focused on enhancing the identity of their beneficiaries as active citizens. The organisations in both case studies
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characterised their work as incorporating the objective of facilitating beneficiaries’ abilities to participate in influencing the institutional infrastructures in their respective countries. The London NGOs also focused on enhancing their own ability to shape these structures.
This thesis contends that Madhok’s (2007, 2013) and Madhok and Rai’s (2012) understanding of agency could be strengthened by expanding it into a model which represents a resemblance concept of agency. The components within the taxonomy represent different positions of the deployment of human rights in activists’ accounts. This family of resemblances is bound together by the concept of locus of agency which describes the relationship between perceived agency and experiences of situated infrastructures. This thesis informs and strengthens conversations in the scholarly literature about the operationalisation of human resources by incorporating understandings of activists on the ground.
The thesis also feeds into human rights discourses that are centred on the extent to which the framework can be considered to be universal. The human rights framework represents the universality of basic human rights and fundamental freedoms. The UDHR represents the framework as comprising inalienable, interdependent, and indivisible principles. Butler (2000) has been a notable critic of the universalist position by proposing that dominant principles of justice, including human rights, reflect hegemonic culture and power structures. Donnelly’s (1984,
1989) position is that of tempered universality, this is a form of weak cultural relativism which recognises a fundamental universality of basic human rights but also a need to allow for limited cultural variations.
Activists’ accounts contained references to the importance of human rights to the organisations’ work, either as an inspiration, an ethos or as part of a “power to” or
“power over” empowerment strategy. In activists’ accounts there was broad consensus on the universality of basic human rights in line with Phillips’s (2010) contention that there are certain non-negotiable basic rights or equalities that must be respected. The West Bengal activists’ accounts also incorporated portrayals of strategies deployed to overcome tensions between situated experiences of local cultural traditions and human rights frameworks. This thesis argues that activists portrayed strategies which absorbed and reproduced aspects of competing
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hegemonic frameworks to produce a hybrid framework. This thesis, therefore, broadens the widely contested debate about universality by incorporating an understanding in activists’ accounts of the interweaving of co-constituting hegemonic frameworks in situated contexts. This thesis explores the implications of the hybridisation of the human rights framework within other global progress projects in the following chapter.
This thesis feeds into conversations in a third discourse, this being the role of activists in providing the most vulnerable citizens with a voice to overcome injustice.
It focuses on the associations in activists’ accounts between the role of NGOs, human rights-based concepts, and speech practices in oppressive and nonoppressive contexts. This thesis contends that the relationship between agency, knowledge and language , as represented in activists’ accounts, strengthens these scholarly discourses. In some accounts beneficiaries were characterised as experiencing barriers to receiving knowledge about rights. This thesis argues that interviewees characterised a form of institutional epistemic injustice. Links between representations of non-Western forms of agency in the form of speech practices and epistemic injustice are developed in the following chapter which focuses on wo men’s human rights.
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7. Chapter Seven: Deployment of Women’s Human Rights
Chapter Seven explores portrayals in activists’ accounts of the operationalisation of the women’s human rights framework on the ground. The literature in Chapter
Three revealed the necessity of understanding activists’ perceptions of the ability to operationalise women’s human rights and gender equality visions in response to local socio-economic structures. This chapter draws on the themes arising in
Chapter Six but the focus shifts towards examining how activists characterised women beneficiaries and the programmes targeted at them. The chapter argues that different representations of the function of women’s rights can be identified within a taxonomy which is framed by these perceptions which arose from the empirical analysis
This model informs and strengthens arguments in four distinct conversations within the broader scholarly literature. These discourses map onto elements within the taxonomy. This identifies the association between types of women’s programmes depicted in activists’ accounts and the representation of women beneficiaries. The taxonomy is framed by different perceptions of agency in relation to situated cultural, economic and institutional infrastructures. The following summary points are drawn from the concluding section of Chapter Three. They state how this thesis feeds into four current specific discourses: i. it feeds into conversations abo ut women’s agency in the most marginalised local contexts. It does so by examining how women’s human rights provide the concepts and framework with which the oppressed can contest injustice.
This thesis contributes to the general debate about the extent to which human rights principles can be considered universal. It contributes to the conversation by examining activists’ representations of women’s human rights as a political tool. The analysis is in alignment with the literature on states’ obligations to fulfil international obligations in this area; ii. the thesis feeds into discourses centred on gender essentialism and women’s citizenship. It unpacks activists’ accounts of programmes represented as supporting women victims of violence in domestic environments. It examines how activists framed the relevance of human rights to programmes that were represented as tackling violence against
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women. The thesis develops an understanding of the implications on gender essentialism for these programmes; iii. the thesis unpacks activists’ accounts of women’s economic empowerment programmes. The examination identifies a disjunction expressed in these accounts between objectives of women’s economic emancipation and wellbeing. The thesis argues that scholarly critiques of women ’s empowerment programmes could be strengthened by understanding specific aspects of activists’ perceptions of beneficiaries; iv. the thesis feeds into conversations about the future of feminism. It explores those activists’ accounts which include themes associated with the hybridisation between human rights and other global progress projects.
The concluding section to this chapter will focus on how the examination of the research materials contributes to and strengthens global discourses existing in the literature about women’s agency, knowledge and human rights language. It does so by building links between them.
As in Chapter Six, the analysis is primarily based on the interview transcriptions with the aim of developing and illustrating the elements within the taxonomy. The organisations who claimed to run programmes directed at women beneficiaries formed a subset of the original case studies. Broader categories are drawn within this second taxonomy compared with the first model to reflect these limitations.
Activists were asked about their perceptions of women’s human rights and gender equality. Interviewees’ accounts contain their understandings of these principles.
The analysis of the research materials led to the construction of a taxonomy of the deployment of human rights comprising four components. The four categories identify different perceptions of agency that were described as influencing the operationalisation of women’s human rights and development principles. The first three positions centre on the relationship between perceptions of external locus of agency and deployme nt of the women’s human rights framework. The first of these three positions in the taxonomy was based on the analysis of the West Bengal activists’ accounts. The distinctive characteristic of this component is the perception of local contexts as inhibiting the promotion of women’s human rights. The second
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element of the taxonomy was formed by the analysis of activists ’ accounts in the
West Bengal and London case studies. These interviewees portrayed the local cultural and institutional infrastructure as constraining the ability to operationalise programmes targeted at supporting victims of domestic violence. The relevance of human rights was perceived as providing the language with which to express injustices in these cases. The third element of the taxonomy identifies the function of women’s rights as emerging from the articulated interplay between empowerment schemes and perceived agency. The final category within the taxonomy is distinguished by an internal locus of agency which focuses on portrayals of programmes and campaigns that were aimed at maximising women’s individual potential.
Each component in the taxonomy is illustrated by anonymised references to excerpts selected from the research materials. The interviewees are represented by codes which are based on the case study and class of each NGO. The organisations participating in this phase of the project are listed in class in Appendix
I. ?
An analysis of the research material highlights certain commonalities in the way that clusters of NGOs portrayed women’s human rights, empowerment and gender equality programmes. The analysis focuses on the perceptions of activists’ accounts about the gendered nature of power as being a multidimensional concept.
It also focuses on the relationship between these representations and perceptions of agency. Common themes centred on characterisations of types of local socioeconomic structures that were perceived to challenge the organisations’ abilities to deliver programmes. The following sections examine each component within the taxonomy of the deployment of women’s human rights portrayed in activists’ accounts. This will lead to a position where it is possible to produce a detailed summary of the taxonomy and its components. This summary is represented in
Table 7-1 later in this chapter.
7.1. Component 1: Governments’ Failure in their Duty to Protect
Women against Violations
The distinctive feature of this element was the representation of local social contexts as being highly deprived and threatening beneficiaries’ basic human rights.
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Interviewees described how they viewed these contexts as hampering the delivery of programmes targeted at women beneficiaries.
The first component of the taxonomy primarily drew upon themes emerging from the analysis of West Bengal activists’ accounts. A sub-group of these respondents represented the organisations’ activity as the provision of what were described as various services associated with basic universal human rights as defined by Phillips
(2010). Phillips (2010) contended that there were certain non-negotiable rights or equalities that must be respected. As stated in Chapter Three, examples of abuse of these included: harm, particularly irreversible violation of bodily integrity; reversible but grossly harmful forced marriages; inequality and the absence of conditions which enabled individuals to choose their lifestyle. These interviewees characterised local contexts as resulting in violations of these rights.
Correspondingly, activists’ perspectives also focused on challenges that beneficiaries experienced in accessing them. Activists characterised their organisations’ primary objectives as removing beneficiaries from coercive or threatening social environments. Activists operated in contexts characterised as inadequate to sustain women’s human rights as well as gender equality.
During the course of interviews, activists were asked about understandings of women’s human rights and gender equality in the context of the work of their organisations. One respondent in this category (WB classes 1 and 3b) characterised the women’s human rights framework as underpinning the work of the organisation. The interviewee perceived human rights as being a set of objectives, such as equal opportunities, non-discrimination, and cultural and political rights. This conceptualisation was in alignment with standard human rights principles. The organisa tion’s work was described as including the rescue and rehabilitation of women, amongst other programmes targeted at their female beneficiaries. Further examination of this account centred on understanding the association between the perceived relevance of human rights and the representation of programmes.
The activists associated with this component within the taxonomy represented the work of organisations as providing welfare services targeted at women beneficiaries. The activists’ organisations were those primarily classified under
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theme 1 in the West Bengal Alceste analysis. The equivalent theme in the London
NGO report was associated with class 4. This orientation is examined under the following section which looks at activists’ accounts of support for those described as victims of domestic violence. Phillips (2010) was concerned about the potential to essentialise women victims of crime as hapless “captives of culture” in need of paternalistic protection. West Bengal interviewees in this category described female beneficiaries as being destitute women and street-orphan girls. The work of organisations was articulated as being the removal of these beneficiaries from these contexts and then supporting their rehabilitation. The following transcript excerpt illustrates this interpretation:
We have a community project there with women and we have another project. We are launching that project because, due to funding problems, we want to do it properly. The thing is with HIV positive mothers….We have a girls’ home, I told you, that is a destitute residential home. Some of the girls are working, as I told you, are working with us and we have rehabilitated some of them. (WB class 1a)
Another interviewee associated with this component described the organisation ’s work as establishing a home for destitute girls, running programmes for HIV positive children as well as setting up orphanages. The activist claimed that human rights, particularly child rights, and the concept of gender equality were important for their work but without elaborating further on the relevance of these for the organisation.
Activists’ accounts contained a common vision of working towards providing the foundation for beneficiaries’ survival. Interviewees depicted women beneficiaries as those whose lives were determined by the interplay of social and economic structures over which they had no control. Organisations’ objectives were portrayed as rescuing women beneficiaries from coercive environments and empowering them with the ability to make choices about lifestyles. Arguably, the human rights and women’s human rights frameworks operated as utopian concepts underpinning organisations’ visions but without gaining real purchase in their day-to-day operations.
Local contexts of other women beneficiaries were described as being less physically oppressive. Activists, however, expressed concern about a psychological form of coercion that was perceived as a form of human rights
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violation. The following excerpt from an interview script illustrates this particular perspective:
I think that the need of human rights, it is very much needed because you see if is not from the side of or our organisation we are working. It is not a problem. But you know m a’am, the society we are serving has got many, many problems and so sometimes it happens it that we want to help some families but they do not like to take the help. Rather they try to make problems for their women children you know.
In that case I think that human rights is violated because everyone has some rights in society and one of them is the freedom of the personality. (WB class 1b)
This interviewee characterised the family circumstances of some beneficiaries as:
[S]till dominated by the medieval thought, you know, that males should earn and when women have attained the age they should get married. They should make family. They should raise children. What is the use of giving them education because ultimately they are going to go to the kitchen work in the family? (WB class
1b)
At first glance, these two extracts from the activist’s interview transcript could be interpreted providing an essentialised view of women beneficiaries. This theme of the extracts was that the activist perceived women beneficiaries as hapless victims of the local culture. It is, however, suggested here that alternative interpretations should be considered. The first is related to a methodological observation that the individual NGOs within the case studies were selected to match an overall component category. In other words, it could be suggested that an essentialised view of women beneficiaries was used as a basis upon which to categorise interviews. To counter this claim, it is the case that themes had been developed from the initial Alceste report as well from the coded interview transcripts. A second claim could be made that respondents anticipated what the interviewer expected to hear in terms of reproducing cultural stereotypes. The counter to this is that common themes emerged from a range of different interviews; these were taken at face value given their consistency in the absence of contradictory evidence.
These collective representations are also in alignment with Chang’s (2010) position that the implementation of human rights principles is predicated upon the establishment of an adequate political and social bureaucratic institutional infrastructure. Interviewees also articulated the view that a lack of opportunity to
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live a life free of coercion and constraints was just as serious an injustice as poverty. The common perspective was that these injustices denied women beneficiaries access to human rights.
This section has focused on presenting activists’ perspectives about how external oppressive structures violated human rights. These power structures were represented as being associated with the interplay of socio-economic and cultural forces. In addition, the interviewees also characterised what was perceived as oppressive power arising from an inadequately robust local bureaucratic infrastructure. This was one of the conclusions asserted in Chapter Six. The respondent from WB class 3b in this category described the organisation’s food ration programme within the local community and the ability of women beneficiaries to participate in the programme. The following is an excerpt from the transcript:
When we first surveyed people door-to-door to find out who has been receiving – we had to first of all become aware that these women were not getting these rations. It wasn’t because anybody came to office to say there was a specific problem. We were already doing work of a welfare nature, distributing, weighing children, and identifying the poorest families and then distributing food to the families where children were suffering the most severe malnutrition. At the same time there is a government programme that is supposed to address their need and so when we started asking people if they have used this service that they started saying, some people said no, some people said we tried and they kicked us out….
Then there was local politics involved. The people who were appointed to these jobs often they got the job through political favours so, if you are going to do anything that c hallenges them, it’s like you are challenging the power of the political party that got them the job in the first place, then those things come into play. (WB class 3b)
This extract illustrates the characterisation of women beneficiaries as victims of perceived political irregularities. They were represented as being passive, not voicing any concerns about the lack of rations in a proactive way and seemingly unable to respond to more forceful forms of exclusion from the project. The activist articulated the perceived failure of the government to ensure good governance of its own ration programmes. The women beneficiaries are characterised as powerless in the face of inadequate governance and bureaucratic infrastructure. It is possible that the programmes were in some way connected with the Right to Food campaign
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in India which was later instituted as a $20 billion National Food Security Bill passed by the Indian Government in August 2013. The activists’ accounts provide an important insight involving the disjunction between objectives of a human rights compliant-objective and its operationalisation on the ground.
In a similar vein, other interviewees from NGOs in this category articulated the aspiration of working towards gender equality but also expressed the constraints faced in attempting to implement programmes underpinned by this ideal. For instance, one interviewee characterised the NGO’s work in the area of gender equality as follows:
Yes, we can deliver them, but I would say that as we see them, you need to fight a lot. It is not within one day or two days, you know. It is a system. It is a process.
Women’s equality is not seen properly. (WB class 3a)
Guerrina and Zalewski ’s (2007) conclusion, as cited in Chapter Three, was that there was a wide gap between the rhetoric and the realities of women’s lived experience of human rights. These authors drew attention to the contestation of women’s rights in countries around the world and the fact that governments sometimes failed to fulfil their international obligations in this area. The realities of the social milieu characterised by the West Bengal interviewees highlighted the importance of the role of activists’ situated experiences on policy-making.
The activists’ representation about the lived experience of their own, and women beneficiaries’, local contexts included: extreme poverty, sexual exploitation, oppressive patriarchal households and caste power structures, as well as political obstruction. This thesis argues that the infrastructure was insufficiently developed to enable women’s basic human rights and gender equality to flourish in the environments depicted by the interviewees. In other words, the conclusion is in alignment with Guerrina and Zalewski ’s (2007) position and is also similar to the argument made in Chapter Six. It is speculated here that activists perceived that the state was failing in its duty to protect women against violations of basic human rights and oppressive external forces.
In terms of the wider global justice implications of these violations, Sen (1999,
2009) emphasised, for example, that the focus of efforts should be targeted at
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finding practical ways to eliminate these types of injustices. He stressed that the cause of poverty was multi-layered and included economic, social and political factors. Sen (1999, 2009) emphasised the role of human rights as a tool to hold states to task and the MDGs as a practical measure to achieve them. The activists’ accounts were in alignment with the body of literature in the area. It situates this theme within a family of representations so a more complete picture is constructed regarding this orientation in relation to other components within the taxonomy. The final chapter will develop an idea of how further research should be directed at developing the family resemblance of components into a dimensional model which could be used as a tool to measure across situated experiences.
The following section considers a different but related category of agency under the constraint of external forces that NGOs depicted as constraining the agency of their women beneficiaries.
7.2.
Component 2: Women’s Human Rights as a Political Tool: Focus on Domestic Violence
The distinguishing feature of this element within the taxonomy was the deployment of women’s human rights in programmes described as supporting female victims of domestic violence. The analysis feeds into scholarly conversations about the essentialisation of women victims of crime and the framing of these types of human rights violations. It does so by unpacking activists’ accounts of the social and cultural structures that lead to these violations and the types of support offered to women beneficiaries. It links these themes to activists’ perceptions of the ability to operationalise women’s human rights in response to intersectional power struggles.
Themes arising in this analysis point to the deployment of women’s human rights as a political tool. This category in the taxonomy drew upon the perspectives of activists in both case studies.
This section explores activists’ accounts of programmes that were described as supporting female victims of domestic violence. It examines how interviewees framed situated experiences of what were perceived as oppressive structures.
These were perceived as influencing the ability of organisations to implement human rights-compatible missions and also of beneficiaries to benefit from them.
The NGOs associated with this category were typically classified under the Social
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Welfare theme in the Alceste analysis report of West Bengal NGOs associated with class 1 and class 4 in London NGOs. It was argued in Chapter 4 that these classes contained visions which expressed aspirations to provide a range of social welfare services as well as support for families and the disadvantaged.
This section examines the framing of domestic violence programmes in activists’ accounts. This exploration concluded that there were two main themes arising from representations of this in the activists’ portrayals. These can be summarised as: i) comparing how violence against women was framed as a “women’s issue”; and, ii) contrasting perceptions of beneficiaries either as powerless victims or as more active women who would benefit from programmes that would enhance their sense of agency.
This section compares activists’ perspectives on the relevance of human rights to their work in this area. It links these with their perceptions of situated agency. This project feeds into the scholarly conversations in the area particularly
Fricker’s (2003, 2006 and 2007) work on the concept of epistemic injustice. It strengthens this conception by applying it to themes arising f rom activists’ accounts to provide an insight into how women’s human rights were deployed on the ground.
In order to do this, the discursive framing of domestic violence as a “women’s issue” is examined from the perspective of the two case studies in turn, starting with the accounts of those working in London NGOs. The interviewee from one London
NGO (L class es 1 and 4a) portrayed women beneficiaries’ experiences of domestic violence in the following terms:
Some women still have very chaotic lifestyles or they don't have a lot of control over what they do so we might be working with them….Because women certainly are not used to, they are not very good at taking choices or making their own priorities because this is just not a choice they have been given bef ore…. And that boldness can put you at higher risk so we certainly think that it is one of our responsibilities to make them aware of how that risk will change should they choose to leave they are effectively putting themselves in greater risk although that is what needs to happen in the short term and then we work with them about how that might be better”. (L classes 1 and 4a) [quote a]
I think it also means that in terms of women's perceptions of themselves more broadly it impacts on how the women make changes in their lives so sometimes we encounter women who, for example, their perception of the risk that they live with is
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not very accurate…we do have to challenge women where we think it is appropriate. (L class 4b) [quote b]
The interviewee also desc ribed the organisation’s services for those presenting themselves as victims of domestic violence. These included: legal advice, a drop-in service for information and guidance on a daily basis, as well as self-development courses. The respondent stated t hat one of these courses, “What About Me?”, was funded by the National Lottery. The interviewee portrayed the objective of this course as being directed at addressing multiple problems such as domestic violence, mental health problems and isolation. It aimed, the interviewee claimed, to provide women with an enhanced opportunity to gain employment and secure voluntary positions. The interviewee described human rights in terms of a backdrop to the life of the organisation’s work. During the interview, the activist stated that certain individual freedoms were important priorities in the organisation’s vision, for example, “the right to identify your own self and your own choices about employment” as well as fertility rights and “the ability to live as a person with dignity and respect” (L classes 1 and 4a). The respondent characterised women beneficiaries’ enjoyment of rights as being at least partly controlled by the perpetrator of the violence. In other words, the domestic power structures were articulated as constraining women beneficiaries’ ability to act freely.
The transcript extract labelled [a] contains the interviewee’s articulation of aspects in situated contexts that influenced benefici aries’ lifestyles. An important observation was that some women could be placed at increased risk from participating in the programme. The interviewee characterised some women beneficiaries as leading a chaotic lifestyle. In such circumstances the activist considered that the beneficiary would need to be supported to develop the confidence to address coercive aspects of the situated environment. The interviewee speculated that this change of approach and behaviour would potentially place the participant in greater danger in that context. This observation feeds into the conversations about associations between the objective of empowering a victim and the additional risk this might incur, at least in the short term. This is in alignment with Madhok’s (2007) conclusion that Western conceptualisations of individuated agency in neoliberal discourse fails to recognise the risks attached to performing transgressive acts as cited in Chapter Two. It can be argued that this association can be broadened out in its application to provide an
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understanding of aspects of empowerment programmes in both Western and non-
Western contexts.
Few activists’ accounts, however, referred to the potential disjunction between a vision of empowerment and the potential risk to beneficiaries in practice. Further investigation could be directed at examining the relationship between visions relating to women’s empowerment within the Western hegemonic framework and perception of risk to the beneficiary in different types of coercive environments.
Such investigation should also focus on producing a more nuanced understanding of NGOs’ perceptions of ability to deliver services.
It was a feature of interviews with activists from both case studies that programmes were described as being targeted at victims of domestic violence who were characterised as being female. This thesis argues that what might be represented and framed as a “women’s issue” could, given the prevalence of male perpetrators of domestic violence in the UK, and indeed India, be more accurately framed as a
“men’s issue”. Domestic violence has previously been framed as a “men’s issue” elsewhere.
88 The thesis feeds into conversations about the perception of the role of women’s human rights, not only as a tool to address violations in domestic situations, but also in terms of how activists frame visions related to interventions in this area. Interviewees focused on the importance of individual freedoms, and reported that human rights represented a general framework which acted as a backdrop to their work. Their accounts however, contained few references to the role of women’s human rights as a practical tool to address coercive patriarchal power structures within the household. Rather, the L classes 1 and 4a respondent characterised the strategy of encouraging women to leave the coercive environment. Without addressing the “male issue” that is male violence, however, the perpetrator would then be free to act in a similar manner in a future relationship.
An interviewee from another London NGO in this category represented forced marriages as a sensitive topic but, in comparison, positioned the organisation’s work within the wider cultural and societal structure. The activist appeared to represent forced marriages as being situated within a frame which incorporated a
88 See, for example, Katz (2011).
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wider perspective of gender issues within local communities. The interviewee appeared to represent the organisation’s work as being targeted at coping with the essentialisation of the role of women within cultures as much as the potential violation of human rights associated with forced marriages. The respondent in this category referred to their perceived relevance of women’s human rights to their work as follows:
With [a specific forced marriage] project it was a sensitive topic again so we attracted some negative views as well from these communities because people see forced marriages like part of their tradition and religion but actually it is not true it is not any part of any kind of religion. …Yes, gender equality, especially women’s rights is almost the core of what we are doing here. The women’s project is the most developed in the Foundation. (L class 3b)
The interviewees in the West Bengal NGOs associated with this category also portrayed a picture of the interaction between community empowerment objectives, cultural influences on the implementation of programmes and situated outcomes of interventions. One interviewee from this category commented that:
Now, the men who have a violent, who are thinking we are making empowerment to the women now that women are starting going out of the house now that women are earning money so they feel that’s now you know she controls me. They have that pressure. But now after a lot of our programmes over the 10 years, initially it was very difficult, but now that men know what it is, that men some of them still have the problems. Recently we had a 45 year old man getting married to a 14 year old girl and we stopped the marriage. We stopped the marriage, the whole community they threw the groom out of the community. (WB class 3b)
The above quote illustrates an orientation that depicts the mobilisation of a community against a marriage that would be illegal because girl children in West
Bengal are not eligible to marry until they are 18 years of age. Another NGO, WB class es 1 and 3b, described their services which included “legal aid for women and children and als o backward classes, minorities…and we also provide free legal aid for victims of domestic violence or victims of sexual harassment and also in cases of child rights like child custody and other things ”. The range of services that the
NGOs described providing in this area included campaigning, legal aid and rehabilitation centres. Whilst the WB classes 1 and 3b organisation described
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providing legal aid, others portrayed an institutional environment that challenged the success of bringing cases to justice.
The West Bengal interviewees tended to characterise the source of violence against women as arising from the interplay of cultural, caste and patriarchal systems. They referred to specific forms of violence such as honour killings, trafficking of women, eve-teasing, child prostitution and sati. The following quote exemplifies the representation of violence towards women as being associated with traditional practices in the household:
Say in cases of domestic violence we have found there are some traditional practices in the family and other things, that sometimes stands in the way … I think certain systems, they are practised within the family and maybe the in-laws ? want them to be followed by the, what do you call, daughters-in-law or somebody like that and she may not take readily to kind of practices that that are going with the particular family. So such disturbances comes at times and also sometimes what you say, domestic violence is taken as the prerogative of the husband in certain families so those kinds of area we sort out by counselling them or through our counsellor, or social workers or we take it to the court of law ultimately. ([b] (WB classes 1 and 3b)
Chapter 5 discussed SardarAli’s (2008) question about whether legal rights really offer anything to women in the context of the Alceste analysis of vision and mission statements extracted from the website. This section returns to the question because quote [b] positions the reported programme objective of facilitating recourse to legal rights within the context of situated experiences. These experiences were defined by the perceived influence of the interplay between existing cultural, caste and patriarchal systems. In quote [b], a key phrase is that of the representation of domes tic violence as “a prerogative of the husband in certain families”. The organisation’s objective was represented as being to assist individual women with legal cases rather than tackling the collective injustice to women arising from local cultural and social power structures.
In response to Sardar-Ali (2008) and after examining the research materials, it is speculated here that reframing violence as a collective “men’s issue” would inform the fr aming of women’s legal rights. This thesis argues that the West Bengal activists, as compared with those based in London NGOs, were framing violence
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against women as if it were a “men’s issue”. These interviewees characterised the cause of violence against women in the home as arising from the patriarchal structure in some families reinforced by cultural norms. On the other hand, these activists framed the help the organisation offered to individual women as if they perceived domestic violence as a “women’s issue”. The activists’ accounts highlighted a disjunction between the source of abuse arising from patriarchal power structures, this being perceived as a “men’s issue”, and traditional “women’s issue” programmes to support women victims of domestic violence.
The WB classes 1 and 3b interviewee did perceive that legal rights would offer recourse for individual women. Legal codification, however, represents just one aspect of a broader view of the functional outcome of the women’s human rights framework. Reframing certain injustices against women would also reposition the role of legal rights within a wider understanding of the human rights framework. It could be contended, for example, that violence can be represented as being at the nexus of an intersectional network of power struggles. It is speculated that linking this form of rights abuse to the framing of a range of other issues would also act as a compass with which to debate, inter alia , women’s essentialism and citizenship; cultural relativism with respect to women’s human development and capabilities; epistemic injustice; and women’s group rights.
This section argues, therefore, that the examination of activists’ accounts of programmes targeted at victims of domestic violence has led to two different but related speculations about framing this type of human rights abuse. First, it was speculated here that women’s human rights might prove more effective if domestic violence w ere reframed as a men’s issue. Second, that the concept of violence would serve as an effective compass to reframe other forms of women’s human rights concerns.
89 As cited in Chapter Three, Bovarnik (2007) suggested that universal human rights proved to be an ineffective tool in the pursuit of eradicating violence as conceptualised under CEDAW in the case examples she researched.
She suggested that this was because of the different way that the issue was conceptualised in different contexts. She recommended that future development in this area should focus on the common goal of being free from violence. Also as
89 An embryonic idea of this suggestion was discussed during a presentation of a paper by a US scholar at the American Political Science Association Annual Meeting (August, 2013)
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previously cited, Lloyd (2007) suggested that treating violence within traditional liberal individualist terms concealed the different power structures that produce conditions of viol ation of women’s human rights. This thesis argues that these scholarly conversations would be strengthened by examining activi sts’ perspectives of the disjunction between power structures and human rights compliant programmes established to deal with local violations. It is also argued here that these conversations would be further strengthened by situating violence at the heart of the intersection of different power struggles within a broad context. The thesis argues here that legal rights are not enough to ensure women’s emancipation: activists’ accounts contained the perception that the framework needed to be complemented by a political dimension.
Gearty (2006) suggested that the current reconfigured version of human rights would be better characterised as a human values framework. This position would also be in alignment with Phillips’s (2013) view that it is only within a political community which reaffirms universal values that a conceptualisation of human rights and equality acquires significance. She contends that what is human is political, and human rights and equality form a fragile consensus for reaffirmation.
In other words, Phillips (2013) suggests that equality and human rights are political commitments. This section argues that the framing of violence against women is as much a political representation as it is a cultural one. The implication of this assertion i s that the women’s human rights framework would be most effective as a tool to combat violence against women if the emphasis were placed on establishing mechanisms to deliver collective assent. Activists’ accounts portrayed a sense of aiming to support individual beneficiaries against a backdrop of intersecting power struggles. If the Western hegemonic women’s human rights framework has become one that represents core values, then this thesis argues that it is likely these principles would need a political community to reaffirm it and a robust legal infrastructure to enforce it.
Whilst violence against the person is a criminal act, the activists portrayed a characterisation of violence against women which identified a context containing both political and cultural features. Domestic violence as represented in the West
Bengal transcripts, as a prerogative of the husband in certain traditional family structures, is a form of injustice that perhaps required collective assent to overcome
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it. Legal codes alone were not sufficient to overcome this form of injustice. The themes in this section lead to the speculation that women’s empowerment in developing countries is only likely to be realised when women are part of collective movements which aim to transform oppressive power structures. This would also apply to the more complex power structures which some activists described as involving the more senior women in the household who reinforced what was perceived as coercive household structures. This thesis argues that the representations of domestic violence in the West Bengal transcripts can also inform the scholarly work in the area of other forms of injustice.
One activist, WB classes 1 and 3b) (see quote [b] above), characterised what he perceived as domestic violence as being part of traditional cultural practice. The interviewee was, it is argued here, making a specific evaluation about how such behaviour towards women in the household was viewed within that culture. This evaluation perhaps reflected the cultural norms within some families where violence against women was not considered to be either domestic violence or an abuse of their rights. Such representations imply that, in these perceived cases, there is a lack of a conceptual apparatus of “domestic violence” within specific situated contexts. This position is in alignment with Fricker’s (2003, 2006 and 2007) definition of hermeneutic epistemic injustice, which arises when individuals have no conceptual framework with which to express the injustices they are suffering. The inference that can be drawn from the interviewee’s account is that, until there are more effective mechanisms with which to deliver universal collective assent to human rights as a value system, domestic violence in specific contexts is unlikely to be tackled as a violation of rights. Once the assent is achieved, however, women who are represented as victims of such abuses will have access to the language of universal human rights principles with which to express experiences. This thesis argues that Fricker’s (2003, 2006 and 2007) conceptions of epistemic injustice can inform Gearty’s (2006) argument about function of human rights language which, he suggests, provides NGOs with a voice to represent the concerns of the most marginalised. It is argued here that an understanding of this function needs to incorporate representations of local value systems and how these interact with the function of the human rights language in terms of representing concerns.
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Spivak ’s (1988) work was cited in Chapters Two and Three. She suggested that the subaltern suffers from what she terms as epistemic violence. This conceptualisation describes the process whereby subalterns are deprived of a voice and agency because any effort of resistance is not recognised unless it is expressed within the hegemonic discourse. This section argues that Spivak’s work could be expanded by incorporating Fricker’s (2003, 2006 and 2007) conceptualisations of epistemic injustice as well as Madhok’s (2013) ideas of agency in oppressive contexts. Each of these three contributions to the literature can inform each other. It is argued here that all three scholars are addressing the position of the most marginalised citizens in relation to hegemonic power structures.
It is suggested here that these ideas can be drawn together under the aegis of the expanded concept of epistemic violence where the elements include: i) the need to recognise the position of the powerless in relation to hegemonic frameworks; ii) the idea of resistance to it as being a form of non-Western agency; and, iii) the availability of concepts with which the most marginalised can express their experiences and preferences for alternative action. This reconfigured concept of epistemic injustice can be applied to the accounts of the West Bengal respondents in this category to illuminate their perceptions of agency in relation to social and cultural power structures. The expanded concept of epistemic violence can be applied to the quote from the respondent above WB classes 1 and 3b, for example.
If violence against women in the household is represented as a prerogative then it leads to the conclusion that this is an accepted practice in some contexts rather than being conceived of as a violation. The victims of the practice were characterised as being powerless in relation to the traditions which were reinforced by the more senior women in the family. The victims were represented as attempting to resist the treatment but would eventually become senior women in the family who would collude with the practice against more junior members of the household. The activist described the work of the organisation as intervening in some households, however.
In comparison, the interviewees in the London case study who claimed to be engaged in supporting female victims of domestic violence were equipped to conceptualise the abuse in terms of legal and human rights violation. These interviewees perceived human rights and gender equality in terms of legal rights for women. In some cases, women’s human rights were characterised as underpinning
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the functioning of organisations. One interviewee characterised this as “[w]e just do it. W e don’t think about it very much” (L class 4b). The interviewee from L classes
1 and 4a represented practical gender equality objectives as forming part of their mission. The activist claimed that the organisation aimed to turn passive recipients of services into active participants in the wider society. This characterisation of the organisation’s work can be interpreted as trying to provide a springboard to launch the women beneficiaries back into the mainstream and reconnect them to the human rights framework from which they had been dislodged. The organisa tion’s work was not represented as dealing with the wider issue of men’s violence towards women as a “men’s issue”. The interventions were described as being targeted at women beneficiaries as individuals. The focus was on empowering women beneficiaries to deal more actively with any inequalities encountered as a result of adverse power structures in the future, whether these challenges were within the household or wider society.
Earlier in the section, it was speculated that women in developing countries would benefit from being part of collective movements which aim to transform oppressive power structures. In the UK, an example of a developed country, there are collective moveme nts and campaigns operating within women’s rights discourses which attempt to tackle domestic violence.
90 Examining themes from the activists’ accounts, it can be speculated that the most effective collective movements directed at tackling violence against women would combine several complementary objectives. These would include: i) addressing patriarchal power structures; ii) reframing violence against women as a men’s issue arising from patriarchal power structures; iii) addressing the legal implications of such human rights abuse; and iv) establishing mechanisms with which to deliver collective assent. Whilst the aim of this thesis is not to contribute to normative discourses, it can be argued that a fruitful line of future research would be directed at examining the processes involved where male behaviour which is represented as problematic is often framed as a “women’s issue”.
This section has considered agency in situated contexts that activists depicted as being coercive and described how they perceived their organisations’ role in empowering women beneficiaries to overcome what was portrayed as violence
90 For example the Women’s Aid, National Domestic Violence Helpline.
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against them. The examination of activists’ accounts in the following section focuses on a different set of situated contexts. It concentrates on activists’ accounts that represented the work of organisations as being targeted at supporting women beneficiaries to overcome different types of barriers to the realisation of their human rights.
7.3. Component 3: Gender Responsibilities and Rights: Focus on
Economic Empowerment
This thesis feeds into scholarly feminist conversations about gender responsibilities.
The distinctive feature of this section is the theme that West Bengal activists’ accounts represented a growing distortion between gender responsibilities and rights. Women beneficiaries were characterised as becoming increasingly responsible for the economic empowerment of families but this was not perceived as being matched with a commensurate increase in men’s inputs or in women’s personal wellbeing, agency and freedoms. Activists characterised this mismatch as leading to a greater exploitation of women. This was perceived as being manifested in terms of increased workload burdens and participation in microfinance projects.
The microfinance pr ojects were represented as subsuming women’s personal wellbeing, rights, agency and freedoms . The accounts also characterised what was perceived as two symbolic essentialised gender roles of women’s role as model citizens. Women were characterised as upholding traditional family roles within the household and simultaneously symbolising the regeneration of India’s economy.
Activists characterised the deployment of women’s rights in economic empowerment schemes as being too weakly institutionalised to be an effective tool in enhancing women’s quality of life.
This section is structured by discussing each of these themes before concluding that women’s human rights need to be strengthened by forming an alliance with other progress projects in order to enhanc e women’s wellbeing more effectively.
This category within the taxonomy predominantly identifies the orientations amongst those West Bengal NGOs who described their work as involving microfinance and income generating projects targeted at women beneficiaries. This exploration continues by considering one of the more significant findings, that is, the
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contrasting temporal dimensions which emerged from the way the interviewees represented the organisations’ work.
Some West Bengal activists represented the o bjective of women’s empowerment in what might be described as an essentialised depiction of women as guardians and economic developers of society. One respondent represented this portrayal as:
“[e]mpower a woman, build a society. Empower a man: build the individual” (WB class 3a). This respondent portrayed a view of women’s empowerment as follows:
A woman is empowered when a woman is given a job and she is given choices.
Then what will happen is that she makes the house, she builds the house. She can build a society she believes she can build a village. And who will she builds she will develop the children and the family, her family. She will be empowered and her children will be empowered. She will be empowered on rights issues. Someone will be empowered on the right and they will be given an opportunity for them to think to concentrate and do the work, for the house as well as for the society. She will build a house and she will build a society. (WB class 3a)
Another interviewee represented girl-children beneficiaries as symbolising the regeneration of India’s economy:
Because of lack of education, they may not be getting their facilities because they are not aware, because education is the main constant, and if they get their education and they know why it is important they can enjoy the facilities and the next generation will have a changed and better life and they can enjoy it so the sensitisation for the society to change in a sustainable manner.
You see ma’am with regard any programme we sensitise this community why girls’ education is important. It will change not only the individual family but will change the complete society if a girl in a society – both are equally important. (WB class 2c)
Some West Bengal interviewees represented the organisation’s economic growth programmes in terms of an extended temporal dimension across generations. This approach compared with London activists’ accounts, which depicted women’s empowerment programmes as being much more directed at reconnecting the individual to the mainstream society in the present time. The London respondents, for example, characterised the timeframe of women’s programmes as being in the present or near future. Part of the timeframe was represented as trying to identify cycles and patterns within an individual’s life that were possibly leading to
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vulnerability 91 in coercive environments. The previous element of the taxonomy focused on domestic violence as a separate area for discussion. An interviewee whose account was referred to in that context can be used to illustrate this particular timeframe:
[A]nd we do have people who have been on a domestic violence awareness courses and child protection courses in order that they get a better understanding of the patterns and that can be quite powerful because that making sense of it can be quite helpful when it has been a very long term pattern of being in a particular role.
(L classes 1 and 4a)
The representation of empowerment programmes being targeted at individual women beneficiaries was perhaps in line with what might be expected from a developed country characterised as exhibiting an individualistic social norm. The empowerment of younger women was also represented as being focused on the individual within society. A small NGO, L class 2d, for example, described the work of the organisation as being to support a few young women characterised as being financially deprived with the aim of helping them through a university career. They depicted their beneficiaries as those who were particularly at risk from falling into prostitution.
Most London activists in this category described the organisation’s work as not being specifically targeted at women beneficiaries, however. These interviewees described a common perception that women beneficiaries outnumbered men because of particular characteristics, such as age or responsibility for child-care duties.
In comparison the West Bengal activists portrayed women beneficiaries as not so much working in microfinance projects for their own betterment but for that of future generations. This section argues that these activists also perceived themselves as agents in the creation of intergenerational economic and social capital. This perception is derived from the running of economic growth programmes. Women participants in microfinance projects were characterised as bearing the burden of this work. This work was undertaken in addition to their traditional household duties.
91 This is much in alignment with Miller’s (1979) psychoanalytic scholarship on child abuse and mistreatment and cycles of violence.
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Respondents suggested that women did so in order to shape and enhance the agency of future citizens. This intergenerational perspective was absent in the accounts of the London interviewees, however. In India, gender attributes correlate with biology to a far greater degree than in the UK. Gender role characterisations of men and women are divided much more according to biology in the West Bengal accounts.
The theme of women symbolising both historical cultural traditions and simultaneously the regeneration of the Indian economy extended beyond a temporal dimension. It can be argued that this association was perceived in terms of the essentialised role of women and the country’s national identity. National pride, the instrumentalisation of women and an economic disenfranchisement of men were interweaving themes of these representations. This depiction contrasts with the symbolic representation of women as the paradigmatic subject around whom welfare services are designed. The activists’ accounts pointed to the disjunction between the role of women as placeholders representing paradigmatic figures and yet in practice often being denied both economic power and access to welfare.
The interviewees characterised the source of this instrumentalised representation of women as arising from women’s ascribed role as model citizens. In this role, women were characterised as being more responsible, credit-worthy and diligent compared with men. They were also depicted as having a greater propensity to spend earnings generated from microfinance projects on their family in what was considered to be a responsible way. In comparison, men were represented by activists as having a tendency towards laziness and being irresponsible with money. The NGO from WB classes 1 and 3c characterised this as follows:
In tribes, the money goes to the men, they used to waste their money on drink in this community. But womenfolk - when we are providing them with earning opportunities, presenting them with many livelihoods options we find that they maintain families in a nice way. And so the money now goes to the women. (WB classes 1 and 3c)
This section argues that this respondent depicted an essentialised and instrumentalised characterisation of women. Earlier in the chapter it was proposed
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that the reframing of violence against women in terms of “men’s issues” would be beneficial in terms of strengthening programmes aimed at tackling this abuse.
Conversely, perhaps, such a reframing would not be so fruitful in gender responsibilisation disc ourses. The typecasting of men, as represented in activists’ accounts, was associated with the exclusion of men from microfinance schemes.
Interviewees also represented how this essentialisation of men provided what was characterised as the justification of women being doubly burdened with the responsibility of household duties and income generation.
The West Bengal interview transcripts contained perceptions of how women’s involvement in microfinance schemes had challenged what was characterised as a gender division of labour. One interviewee portrayed this aspect of the organisation’s income generation programme targeted at women participants as follows:
It was so difficult, when we asked them to do the block making, block making is the old culture which is dying in India and this is the textile block making and other block making, wooden blocks making, designing and all that. So the men’s said that his men’s job you are not to not to do. They told the woman not to do. It is a men’s job and you are not going to do this and you are not going to learn this trade. This was the first boycott but then this woman did do it and now there are 10 women and now we have 30 women who know how to carve blocks who are making blocks, who are sending to England. (WB class 3a)
This excerpt from the transcript contains several themes that are unpacked in the following discussion. The first is the representation of block making as a dying cultural tradition that is framed as a “man’s” job. Women are characterised as not only displacing men in the role of worker but are represented as actively injecting new approaches to the process. In addition, women were represented as participating in a global market. This framing of economic activity could also be extended to an analogy of India emerging as a global economic power. Further, it is contended here that it was doing so in a way that reached out to the global world but retained resonances of a traditional cultural background.
Other activists who described thei r organisations’ work as being involved in similar projects also characterised the objective as being to increase women’s agency in a variety of ways. The website of one NGO in this category (WB classes 1 and 3a)
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articulated one of the programmes’ aims as running self-help groups for those whom they depicted as destitute women in their community. These projects were described as an important “platform for both income generation as well as increased engagement in various aspects (social, cultural and political) governing their lives”. Some interviewees differentiated between what were described as microfinance projects on the one hand and income-generating programmes on the other. As one interviewee said:
The women coming into our purview and we do a lot of programmes for them, a lot of incomegenerating programmes … we do not do micro-financing projects but we formed family-based groups, as I told you earlier, family-based groups and tried to motivate them to save a certain amount of money of theirs and t ake loans. … we ask them to save their money, some money from their earnings and then they can take loans from that money and do some income generating programme and give it back to their funder. That is their fund, they manage their fund completely. (WB classes 1 and 3c)
According to this interviewee, the organisation supported around 600 self-help groups involving a total of 10,000 women. He described the work of the NGO as linking these groups with banks. He claimed that the organisation supported beneficiaries by providing financial and technical input to enable women to run their own businesses and reap some monetary benefit. The respondent reported that the beneficiaries also participated in some of the development processes dealing with social issues such as dowries and child rights.
The work of another West Bengal NGO was represented as establishing a microfinance project based around a federation of self-help groups supported by counselling services. The activist claimed that this approach had transformed what was characterised as forms of constraint upon women’s agency in the household.
The following excerpt from the activist’s interview transcript describes the formation of federations of women’s self-help groups:
So earlier it was a very difficult task and sometimes they were not allowed to go out of the family. But now it is not the only tool we are using because, through the selfhelp group now we are also forming a federation, that is, of women. All women managed organisations and sometimes some of the women leaders are taking responsibility for the counselling … in the family level where there is a problem or something like that. (WB classes 1 and 3a)
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The interviewee from WB classes 1 and 3a depicted women developing leadership roles within a supportive community. Another interviewee engaged in microcredit schemes also represented the additional role as one which increased women’s empowerment in local communities:
We have a strong group of women who are empowered who are registered in the state cooperatives and they get loans to do business. …. The women never used to come out, they may have four or five children. (WB class 3a)
This thesis argues that activists’ accounts can contribute to the general understanding of the operationalisation of human rights-based development. It is proposed here, however, that future research should be undertaken to understand women beneficiaries’ perspectives to establish whether they consider engagement in these programmes as emancipatory or as the source of an additional burden.
The interviewee from WB classes 1 and 3a suggested that they were not directly working with human rights but it was an aspect of their ethos that “every human being has some of the rights because whenever they are also belonging in the society the people have some rights”. Further research would prove fruitful if it examined beneficiaries’ perspectives. It should be directed at examining whether beneficiaries consider that a more collective interpretation and implementation of h uman rights would be more effective at enhancing women’s quality of life in economic empowerment projects.
West Bengal interviewees, however, also represented a view that was in line with the idea that solely pursuing an economic growth development model was problematic in terms of enhancing an indi vidual woman’s economic quality of life.
Activists ’ accounts contained contrasting perceptions of women’s role in these economic empowerment projects with their role in domestic situations.
Interviewees characterised households as dominated by traditional patriarchal systems. Okin (1998), however, suggested that older women reinforced gender inequalities within households in non-industrialised states. Arguably, human rights will have a chance to flourish only when gender relations within the public and private spheres are able to be discussed and negotiated. The interviewee from WB class 4b described this in gender relations terms:
That is the purpose of changing the relations and empowering the women and at the same time developing this understanding with the women. To change gender
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relations and at relations at work. That is the purpose of changing gender relations that is how we empower women and at the same time thinking of developing this understanding with the women to change gender relations like in the division of labour and all that, having equal wages. (WB class 4b)
A particularly fruitful line of exploration in any further research would be to explore the relationship between women’s negotiated entitlements, the division of responsibilities within the household, and activists’ objectives involving emancipation. These aspects of women’s agency can be characterised as different forms of empowerment. As cited in Chapter Three, Sardar-Ali (2008) suggested that in Asian cultural contexts most women rely on entitlements embodied in family relationships which do not have their equivalents in equal rights language or human rights-based development. From a more Western-centric perspective, Raday (2002) suggested that CEDAW regulated the conflict between culture and gender equality by affirming that equality trumps patriarchal practices that conflict with gender equality. Engle (2005) suggested that women in different economic and social conditions might consider that economic empowerment trumps cultural inequalities.
In a similar vein to Mad hok, Phillips and Wilson’s (2013) conceptualisation of
Western and nonWestern agency, the activists’ accounts contain different perspectives of what constitutes wom en’s agency. Activists’ empowerment strategies may have been shaped according to these perspectives. Sharp, Briggs,
Yacoub and Hamed ’s (2003) work, for example, would suggest that some women would perhaps have more to gain by engaging in a “power to” strategy within existing patriarchal gender systems. Whilst Enloe (2000) suggested that, as household social relations are infused with power, it would be helpful to have a more indepth understanding of the impact that women’s empowerment schemes such as microfinance projects characteristically have on gender relations in the family. As Madhok, Phillips and Wilson (2013) suggested, the focus should not necessarily be on who has agency, but what work it does. In the context of this research, perceptions of the functions of agency reflected judgements about what strategies enhance wellbeing.
This thesis has argued that there was a theme in activists’ accounts which highlighted perceptions of a relationship between the discursive framing of gender privation and the diversion of attention from other factors more pertinent to gender
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disadvantage. It can be argued that this framing focused on the narrow vision of economic empowerment rather than tackling women’s deprivation which arose from the gendered social, political and economic infrastructure in local contexts.
As cited in Chapter Three, Keating, Rasmussen and Rishi (2010) viewed microfinance projects as being forms of neoliberal projects dressed up as feminist emancipation. The activists’ accounts represented the microfinance and microcredit schemes as enhancing beneficiaries’ lives in a manner which can be characterised as a form of action-based agency in line with a Western-centric ideal of independence and self-reliance. Wilson (2013) and Madhok, Phillips and Wilson
(2013) consider these approaches to represent the instrumentalisation of women by removing them from the collective struggle to overcome structural inequalities.
In comparison, London activists described the organisations as targeting women beneficiaries as individuals rather than being as a means to furthering some alternative vision. In this depiction, the activists perceived their organisations’ efforts as being targeted at enhancing the quality of life for individual beneficiaries or close families. This compared with a more instrumental perception of women
Indian beneficiaries who were represented as being a collective means to an end.
Wilson (2013) suggested that the World Bank’s slogan of “Gender Equality as
Smart Economics” epitomised the instrumentalisation of poor women. Wilson
(2013) suggested that the self-sufficiency approach of empowerment in the neoliberal model was focused on social mobility within a hierarchy. This deflected attention away from challenging the existing power structures. The project feeds into debates about whether Western economic growth models conflict with the attainment of gender equality and human rights. The section continues by fleshing out issues in this debate before concluding that an alternative view of the relationship between women’s human rights and economic growth programmes emerged in the activists’ accounts.
Activists’ accounts can inform the nature of the relationship between women’s economic empowerment and the implications for gender equality. For example, one activist considered that gender equality was “essential to every aspect of development”. Another interviewee, WB class 3a, described gender equality as one of the aims of human rights and something the organisation aimed to deliver.
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In practice, beneficiaries may not consider that participation in economic empowerment schemes increases wellbeing if it increases their burden of household duties. Unless the human rights institutional infrastructure is robust and an individualistic norm is established, women beneficiaries might consider that a better empowerment would be to collude with the existing patriarchal structure or collective cooperative schemes. A ctivists’ accounts pointed towards a nuanced and complex relationship between women’s agency within their households and participation in microfinance projects. Economic empowerment was not represented as compensating for the perceived growing distortion between responsibility and rights. It is not that the activists explicitly represented their organisation’s position as that of prioritising economic empowerment over women’s rights. As referenced in Chapter Two, Gearty (2008) suggested that the idea of human rights is susceptible to being distorted to facilitate other non-human rightsbased ends. This thesis argues that this vulnerability can be more coherently understood as responses to perceived ability to implement the human rights framework and of their beneficiaries to enjoy them.
If Enloe (2000) represented the “personal is political”, then it can be argued that human rights should form a political tool with which to deliver women’s participation and empowerment. The question is, however, whose political struggle would this be serving? This question is raised about political struggle principally in relation to two reasons: i) ii) in the first case where activists consider themselves as actors who pull women towards individual agency. Without the ideological infrastructure supporting individualist norms, the individual beneficiary would be drawn back into a state of communal agency; and convincing women to take on what might be an additional workload seems to serve a neoliberal purpose and could be problematic in terms of enhancing a n individual’s quality of life. If the framework can be viewed as a political tool which enables beneficiaries to speak truth to power, then women’s human rights is grounded in political struggle.
This implies that it is necessary to understand the dynamics involved in the perception of this struggle in order to inform a study of the relevance of the human rights and women’s human rights frameworks to social
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activists working at the grassroots level. Human rights and women’s human rights must be of practical use to those engaged in the work of
NGOs rather than merely a recourse to rhetoric. It can be argued here that the frameworks need to be supported by a robust institutional infrastructure.
The following examines the association between gender equality, women’s human rights and agency. As cited in Chapter Three, Pateman and Hirschmann (1992) conclusion suggested that demanding that women’s specific attributes are taken into account to achieve equal citizens’ rights would condemn them to a lesser status. Human rights would be the tool that activists would deploy to identify wo men’s rights to participate in society on equal terms and their empowerment struggle is to realise this right. The quote from the interviewee above (WB class 4b) suggests that the right to participate on equal terms in the economy is recognised at least by some activists but without appearing to understand that women’s equality in practice would require their specific attributes to be accommodated. It can be speculated that an alliance between human rights, social democracy and feminism would enable the activists in the West Bengal organisations associated with this component to make progress towards their visions of wom en’s empowerment and equality. This stance would be in line with Walby’s (2011) discussion about the future of feminism.
This theme is developed further by considering how activists characterised their attempts to overcome what were perceived as disjunctions between empowerment and equality in situated contexts. It does so by arguing that these represented attempts were forms of hybrid solutions deploying different strategies and frameworks. In some accounts, for example, activists characterised a disjunction between visions and practice that arose from often competing demands to establish projects where the cultural traditions were based on alternative value norms. These can be characterised as i) developing an infrastructure to support the economic liberalisation within the context of the globalisation agenda; and ii) more welfareorientated missions to enhance the quality of lives. Interviewees claimed that, in these circumstances, the organisation developed hybrid projects combining the market effectiveness orientation of economic empowerment with an approach containing aspects of a social democratic welfare within local communities, such as provision of education and health-care.
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This thesis argues that a theme emerged from the West Bengal interview transcripts which can be interpreted as a perceived lack of collective representation in microfinance projects. This observation is in line with activists’ perception that the microfinance projects were not established as developments for feminist objectives of social transformation. It could be argued that, in practice, these projects were a manifestation of the changing forms of social equality arising from national economic policy and globalisation. This thesis argues that an examination of activists’ accounts of local microfinance projects leads to the conclusion that the projects could be reformed to engage women’s solidarity; this would then have more purchase in challenging dominant gender power structures. Walby (2009) suggested that the means to achieve different conceptions of progress are contestable. She listed examples of such conceptions as: high personal income, human wellbeing including Sen’s idea of human development and capabilities, equality and human rights. Walby (2009) claimed that neoliberalism and social democracy were the most currently relevant projects to attain these progress goals.
Walby argued that social democratic projects delivered limited economic growth but they also included components that supported human development and capabilities more effectively. She (2009) contends that the alliance between feminism and social democracy is more likely to deliver regulated working time and the public provision of services such as health, education and childcare. As Walby (2009) suggests, this alliance between the two components arises from the transformation of the gender regime from a domestic to a public manifestation. The themes running through the interview transcripts that described the operation of microfinance projects are in line with Walby’s (2009) argument that the agenda of human rights offered more rhetorical than practical support. This thesis argues that human rights based development is too weakly institutionalised to resolve a disjunction expressed in some of the activists’ accounts. This disjunction focused on portrayals of the organisations’ practical attempts to achieve gender equality whist prioritising economic growth. This reflected activists’ perceptions that missions related to reducing income poverty had been over-emphasised compared with the broader visions of enhan cing beneficiaries’ wellbeing. This section compares the characteri sation of women’s empowerment and gender equality programmes by the interviewees in the West Bengal and London case studies that were classified in similar ways by the Alceste analysis. It argues that the symbolic
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implications of different frames when applied to a range of different human rights and human rights-based development concerns feed into conversations about how to strengthen policy-making in the area of the operationalisation of human rights.
This thesis argues that scholarly debates would be enriched by understanding activists’ perspectives about the interweaving of different instrumental representations of women and how these influence the operationalisation of women’s human rights. Women were represented by West Bengal activists as working for the development project, the pride of the nation and for future generations.
The concluding chapter, Chapter Eight ?, incorporates a discussion of how this debate can be incorporated within the future investigation of global progress projects and hybridisation with major international social development projects.
7.4. Component 4: Internal Locus of Agency
The distinctive feature of this element within the taxonomy was the prevalence of a vision of empowering individual beneficiaries to maximise their potential. This orientation was observed primarily within a group of accounts from the London case study. These organisations were classified within class 3 which was themed as expressing a Political and Civil Rights orientation. Activists represented their organisations’ work as being in pursuit of developing the individual potential of their beneficiaries . The following extract from one organisation’s website illustrates this particular approach:
The main purposes of the Women’s Institute organisation are to enable women who are interested in issues associated with rural life, including arts, crafts and sciences, to improve and develop conditions of rural life, to advance their education in citizenship, in public questions both national and international, in music, drama and other cultural subjects and in all branches of agriculture, handicrafts, home economics, health and social welfare. (L class 3e)
The organisations’ objectives focused on enhancing women beneficiaries’ ability to make lifestyle choices and to participate in political decision-making. The overriding theme emerging from the interview transcripts was the sense that activists were driven by a sense of an ability to exert influence on external forces in the environment. The founding member of L class 1c from the London case study
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represented the organisation’s activities as encouraging women beneficiaries to become involved in apprenticeships, this being an area that was represented as traditionally male. These activities were set within a context of a sustainable green agenda with the emphasis on inculcating a sense of engagement with global social justice issues. The interviewee described the organisation’s vision as being to inspire beneficiaries to become engaged with global social justice issues as part of their personal development. The following is an excerpt from the interview transcript:
[W]hat is really interesting is one of the new programmes that we are doing is about green jobs and the construction industry and so we are thinking apprenticeships are really interesting because obviously 99% of construction apprentices are men and
99% hairdressing apprentices are women and the pay is really different. So we are having a lot of conversations about how to encourage women to take this up and how do we target them in a specific way …. we teach workshops on power and privilege we definitely talk about gender. (L class 1c)
Other London NGO activists characterised the organisation’s work as being related to global justice issues. The vision of one such organisation was characterised as inspired by an underlying motivation to empower the individual woman beneficiary in terms of influencing policy in areas such as green energy. The NGO’s motto was
“Inspiring Women”. The following extract from their website illustrates this inspiration:
[The] Chair...was at the action. She said: "[our] members have been passionate about preserving and protecting the environment since the [organisation’s] inception in 1915, which has never been more important than it is now. The government needs to stop playing roulette with our green energy policy and start listening to our demands for a greener future for Britain. (from the website 92 of L class 3e)
It could be argued that an alternative to the conceptualisation of “women’s empowerment” in the context of an internal locus of agency would be the involvement of individual women beneficiaries in certain types of projects. These projects can be characterised as hybridisations of individual human rights with global social justice issues. Climate change would be an example of such an issue.
92 From: http://www.thewi.org.uk/campaigns/news-and-events/current-news-and-events/green-isworking
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Interviewees predominantly described such programmes as being inspirational and undertaken with a prevailing sense of fun and excitement.
Attempts to hold interviews with the sub-sample of NGOs in this category either were unsuccessful or were truncated. The vision and mission statements extracted from the organisations’ websites, however, also contained the common theme of developing individual potential. The Alceste report highlighted the following ECU from the Girl Guiding vision and mission statement as being of significance in terms associated with the classification: brownies is our (section) for (girls) (aged) seven to (ten). the (name) (reflects) the world (of) (exciting) (opportunities), challenges (and) (fun) that is brownies. (girls) can (participate) (in) (a) (wide) (range) (of) (activities) at their (regular) meetings,
(and) at (special) (events), (day) trips, sleepovers, camps (and) (holidays). (Girl
Guiding)
The interviewee from the L class 3e organisation depicted human rights underpinning the organisation’s vision and mission. Beneficiaries of both the Girl
Guiding and L class 3e organisations were being portrayed as women and girls who already enjoyed access to a full range of human rights principles. The deployment of the framework can perhaps be characterised as a form of human rights-based personal growth. Furthermore, this form of empowerment is, arguably, codependent upon an individualistic norm in society characterised by a robust human rights infrastructure.
This form of deployment would also be dependent on an infrastructure that supported NGOs’ gender equality aims and objectives. The representative from a
London NGO, L class 3c, described gender equality as being core to the organisation’s ethos. The interviewee claimed that the organisation had campaigned for gender equality in politics in conjunction with the Fawcett Society, the Electoral Reform Society and the Centre for Women and Democracy. The activist represented the organisation’s work as follows:
A central aspect of our policy work is promoting international human rights standards in UK law. This includes non-discrimination on grounds of gender. We h ave undertaken considerable work in the past on improving the UK’s equality laws.
(L class 3c)
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The NGOs represented the framework as inspiring women beneficiaries and underpinning visions of promoting individual women’s growth. This illustrates the promotion of human rights in contexts that can be characterised as supporting an internal locus of agency.
7.5. Conclusion: Relationship between Women’s Human Rights and
Agency
This section has described how the examination of activists’ accounts formed the basis of the taxonomy which identifies the various positions of the deployment of women’s human rights within the accounts of the interviewees. The taxonomy is framed by the representations of perceptions of agency in relation to situated experiences of institutional and social structures. Gendered essentialist views of women beneficiaries provided a common theme within this family resemblance model of the deployment of women’s human rights and empowerment programmes.
The distinct components of the taxonomy represented activists’ evaluations of the framework in terms of underpinning women’s empowerment and gender equality visions and missions. The first three components incorporate the characterisations of the local economic, cultural and institutional structures as being too weak to support these objectives. This weakness, which could be represented as one interpretation of Gearty’s (2006) idea of delocalisation, had led to women beneficiaries working for the economic betterment of the nation, their families and future generations rather than their own empowerment. The fourth category represented the objective of maximising the potential of women beneficiaries in infrastructures that more strongly supported the individualist norm and objectives of a Western hegemonic framework. These four outcomes are represented in the
Table 7-1 which depicts the taxonomy of the deployment of women’s human rights.
7.6. A Taxonomy of the Deployment of
Women’s Human Rights
The chapter has so far focused on the details of activists ’ representation of the deployment of the women’s human rights framework and women’s empowerment to their work and visions. The following table is a representation of the different outcomes of the operationalisation of the framework according to various perceptions of challenges to desired action.
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Table 7-1 below summarises the features in local contexts that were portrayed as significant in the operationalisation women’s human rights. It is framed by the locus of agency which describes different perceptions of oppressive and non-oppressive, socio-economic local infrastructures. As in the first taxonomy outlined in Chapter
Six, the model does not comprise quantifiable dimensions. The four components comprise a family resemblance of orientations framed by perceptions of agency.
The table can also been seen as a hierarchical classification of representations of the deployment of women’s human rights.
At the most detailed level of analysis, the final column in the table summarises representations of the function of human rights and women’s human rights frameworks by activists in the West Bengal and London case studies by each component. For example, the second set of representations in this column describes human rights in West Bengal as a potential political tool to underpin a political community which reaffirms universal values. Activists portrayed the source of violence against women as arising from the interplay of cultural, caste and patriarchal systems. Their accounts characterised the ineffectiveness of human rights to protect women against such violations within these situated contexts.
Themes within the accounts could be interpreted as identifying a need to create a political community to reaffirm a commitment to address this violation. This compares with the London activists who described human rights as a backdrop to the work of the organisation. The aim of the organisations was represented as empowering women to enjoy a dignified life.
The second and third columns group the case studies according to a higher level summary of the deployment of wome n’s human rights in activists’ accounts. These columns comprise the core of the components of the taxonomy. In the example above, West Bengal and London activists represent their organisations’ visions as deploying human rights to empower women beneficiaries to take action to remove themselves from coercive private spheres. West Bengal activists’ accounts contained a disjunction between the vision and the effectiveness of programmes on the ground.
The first column in Table 7-1 below describes the two strands of locus of agency in a similar way as in Table 6-1, the taxonomy of the deployment of human rights.
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Table 7-1
: A Taxonomy of the Deployment of Women’s Human Rights Agency
Locus of Agency
Activists’
Perception of
Socio-Economic
Contexts
Represented NGO
Activity
Representation of the Function of Human Rights and
Women’s Human Rights Frameworks
External
This form of agency centres on activists’ deployment of human rights. This agency is shaped in response to situated experiences of local socio-economic structures. This overlying orientation represents perceived challenges to the implementation of the human rights and women’s human rights frameworks depicted in activists’ accounts.
Component One
Government’s failure in its duty or protect women against violations of basic human rights.
Rescuing women beneficiaries by removing them from coercive or threatening environments.
West Bengal: A yardstick of the failure of the state to fulfil its international obligations in relation to violations of basic universal human rights.
Component Two
Private sphere perceived as coercive and threatening.
Empowering women beneficiaries to take action to remove themselves from coercion, for example, from domestic violence.
West Bengal: As a potential political tool to underpin a political community which reaffirms universal values.
London: Represented as a core set of values ? in organisation s’ work.
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Locus of Agency
Internal
This form of agency identifies a sense in activists’ accounts of an ability to shape the infrastructure supporting human rights.
Activists’
Perception of
Socio-Economic
Contexts
Represented NGO
Activity
Component Three ?
Distortion between gendered responsibilities and rights.
Economic empowerment schemes.
Representation of the Function of Human Rights and
Women’s Human Rights Frameworks
West Bengal: Economic enhancement schemes were represented as subsuming women’s personal wellbeing, rights, agency and freedoms.
Component Four
Activists felt empowered to operate in local contexts.
Maximising individual potential.
Hybridisation with global progress projects.
London: In pursuit of maximising the individual potential of women beneficiaries. Hybridisation with global progress projects.
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Table 7-1 is discussed further in Chapter Eight which considers how further research using different research designs could develop potentially develop this taxonomy. It is possible that other underlying significant concepts would emerge which would map onto these components or it is possible that new orientations to the deployment of women’s humans rights would be revealed.
7.7. Conclusions
The conclusions drawn from this chapter incorporate themes from Chapter Six.
These include three current specific discourses in the area of human rights, these being i) the framing of activists’ agency in oppressive and non-oppressive contexts; ii) the extent to which human rights principles can be considered to be universal; and, iii) conversations about the role of activists in providing the most vulnerable citizens with a voice to overcome injustice. This chapter refers to these themes and develops the m in the context of the representation of the deployment of women’s human rights in activists’ accounts. The conclusions in this section focus on discussing how this thesis feeds into the four current specific discourses in the area identified at the start of the chapter.
The first component of the women’s human rights taxonomy is characterised by the representation of the framework in local contexts which activists represented as being deprived. Activists’ accounts focused on perceptions of the inadequacy of the frameworks to support anything other than survival programmes. Human rights were depicted as being ineffective in these contexts other than functioning as a recourse to rhetoric. Activists’ visions contained the idea of the necessity of recognisin g beneficiaries’ entitlement of basic, universal women’s human rights.
These contexts signalled perceptions of the state as failing to fulfil international justice obligations. In other words, activists perceived that the state was violating the human rights entitlements of its citizens (see Guerrina and Zalewski ’s, 2007).
The second component in the deployment of women’s human rights taxonomy included a discussion on how the oppressed beneficiaries contest injustice. This thesis cited Spivak’s (1998) concept of epistemic violence whereby the most marginalised are deprived of agency and voice because any effort of resistance is not recognised unless it is expressed within the hegemonic discourse. This thesis argues that this conceptualisation can be expanded incorporating Fricker’s (2003,
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2006 and 2007) conceptualisations of epistemic injustice. The activists’ accounts portrayed situated examples of a lack of a conceptual framework with which to express injustice. These examples reflected the cultural norms within some West
Bengal families, for example, where violence against women was not considered to be either domestic violence or an abuse of their rights. There was a lack of a conceptual apparatus of “domestic violence” within these specific situated contexts.
Whilst Spivak was writing from a postcolonial studies perspective, the examples in this thesis represent the concept of epistemic violence from the perspective of a non-Western hegemonic framework. This thesis argues that the concept of epistemic violence applies to forms of a lack of agency in response to both non-
Western and Western hegemonic frameworks. This thesis proposes that the idea of epistemic violence can link together women’s agency, knowledge and human rights language to inform the scholarly literature in the area of women’s empowerment, particularly in marginalised contexts. The thesis argues that the concept of epistemic violence can be expanded by incorporating Madhok’s (2007,
2013) and Madhok and Rai’s (2012) arguments in relation to speech practices which reflect preferred preferences in response to oppressive contexts. A conceptual apparatus is needed in order to express these preferred preferences. It could be argued that, whilst these authors were critiquing the action-bias in development, the notion of types of agency in oppressive contexts is one that can be developed to apply to a range of different contexts.
The thesis feeds into the global discourse on gender essentialism in conversations about violence towards women and girls. The thesis argues that domestic violence can be conceived of as an intersectional power struggle in relation to patriarchal structures. Activists’ accounts contained gender essentialised representations of women as victims of culture or as leading lifestyles that put them at risk of this form of violence. This thesis argues that what might be represented and framed as a
“women’s issue” might, given the prevalence of male perpetrators of domestic violence in the UK and indeed India, be more accurately framed as a “men’s issue”.
Male behaviour which was represented as problematic was often framed as a
“women’s issue” in activists’ accounts. The thesis focuses on the current representations of violence against women rather than speculating on the historical antecedents for this propensity. On the other hand, the thesis does argue that violence could act as a compass for considering the intersectionality of women’s
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power struggles in relation to patriarchal structures. It is speculated that gender, class, ethnicity, age, and sexuality form intersections that are associated with different risks of becoming victims of violations of human rights. Oppressive contexts, described by groups of activists, contain physical and psychological threats to accessing a range of human rights entitlements, for example. Excerpts from activists’ accounts illustrated these forms of threats, particularly those in the three components of the taxonomy which were different forms of external locus of agency.
The third component focused on the representation in activists’ accounts of a growing distortion between gender responsibilities and rights. Women’s human rights in development projects were perceived not have been safeguarded in a consistent way, accord ing to activists’ representations. These themes resonate with
Chant’s (2007, 2008) work on the feminisation of poverty. Women beneficiaries in the project were characterised as becoming increasingly responsible for the economic empowerment of families but this empowerment was represented as leading to a greater exploitation of women. This was perceived as being manifested in terms of increased workload burdens in terms of participation in microfinance projects. This thesis feeds into the responsibilisation conversations by describing activists’ accounts of the influence this perceived outcome had on the organisations’ programmes. The thesis speculates that activists’ represented organisations’ responses to the disjunction between economic empowerment and greater exploitation. This thesis argues that future research should be directed at investigating whether building strategic collective coalitions was effective in enhancing women beneficiaries’ wellbeing and empowerment. Women’s human rights in economic empowerment schemes would surely be strengthened by facilitating a hybridisation between economic growth and social democracy. Walby
(2011) describes human rights as containing a minimal component of equality and themes in activists’ accounts were in line with this contention. Activists’ accounts contained few references to gender equality. It can be argued that such a hybridisation would promote the enhancement of economic empowerment and also women’s wellbeing by incorporating practices which support the representation of women and minority groups.
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The fourth and final component of the deployment of women’s human rights taxonomy represents a position where activists represented their organisations as incorpor ating elements of a hybridisation between women’s human rights and global progress projects. This element illustrates the promotion of human rights in contexts that can be characterised as supporting an internal locus of agency.
The conclusions drawn from this chapter developed themes from Chapter Six and introduced discussion about activists’ deployment of women’s human rights. A taxonomy of this deployment was developed which was both informed by and informed four debates in the scholarly literature. The discussion in the chapter focused on dimensional concepts which underpinned the components in the taxonomy, such as universalism, essentialism, individual and group rights as well as Western and non-Western conceptions of agency. Further research, however, could potentially discover that, rather than a binary opposition between two poles within each dimension, three-way, or greater, oppositions were possible. The following chapter, Chapter Eight, develops the idea of these concepts by proposing that further research could be directed at developing multi-dimensional models of the deployment of the human rights framework and women’s human rights framework.
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8. Chapter Eight: Conclusions and Areas for Further Study
The thesis sought to explore a relatively undeveloped area regarding the operationalisation of the human rights and women’s human rights frameworks in local contexts. It explored this area by examining activists’ representations of how these frameworks are deployed in different situated local contexts and their perceptions of the challenges to desired action. The main question this project sought to answer, therefore, was: how do social activists working in NGOs characterise their operationalisation of abstract human rights principles at the grassroots level? To answer this question the thesis drew upon the extracted content of the websites of samples of West Bengal and London NGOs as well as interviews with a sub-sample of activists in these case studies. Taxonomies of the depicted deployment of human rights and women’s human rights emerged from the empirical analysis framed by accounts of challenges to desired action.
This chapter revisits the research question in more detail and discusses how future research could develop these findings. It could, for example, focus on whether a multidimensional model of the deployment of these two frameworks could be developed and how this could be achieved. The chapter continues by considering how this thesis has advanced the scholarly debate on the operationalisation of human rights and explores how the thesis has provided a foundation for proposing a methodology for further research by taking a more interdisciplinary, mixed methods approach. Discussion of these ideas for further research within the context of the limitations of the project’s research design follows in the sections below.
8.1. Revisiting the Objectives of the Thesis
The thesis compared accounts of organisations’ deployment of human rights in two countries at different stages of development. Two taxonomies on the deployment of human rights and women’s human rights on the ground emerged from the empirical analysis. The components within these taxonomies were fleshed out in Chapters
Six and Seven. These models form analytical frameworks which identify features of situated socio-economic contexts that were of significance to the activists in the operationalisation of the human rights project. Features within the taxonomies ’ components contributed to specific understandings of the human rights and women’s human rights frameworks. These elements were mapped onto aspects of
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four scholarly debates which focused on concepts which can be viewed as dimensional in nature. These included: universalism, Western and non-Western forms of agency, essentialism and individual and group rights. Tables 8-1 and 8-2 below map the components in the human rights and women’s human rights taxonomies to these concepts as far as the limitations of the research permit, given the small number of interviewees. Components can map onto more than one set of concepts. Each set of concepts could map onto more than one component within the same taxonomy. Acti vists’ perceptions of agency were a significant factor in each component and, therefore, internal and external locus of agency is included in each element.
The tables summarise activists’ accounts of their NGOs activities. They also show the extent to which human rights and women’s human rights were represented as being relevant to their organisations’ work. The section then maps these functions onto the debates and the dimensional concepts in the literature.
Table 8-1: Taxonomy of the Deployment of Human Rights Outline
Component
Represented NGO Activity and Function of Human
Rights
Debates/Dimensional Concepts
Component One Social Welfare Provision or
Charitable Activities / Human rights deployed as a recourse to rhetoric in the most marginalised contexts.
Universalism-Cultural Relativism
Western and Non-Western
Conceptions of Agency (External
Locus of Agency).
Component Two The Deployment of Human
Rights to Support NGO “Power
To” Empowerment Strategies.
Individual - Group Rights
Western and Non-Western
Conceptions of Agency (External
Locus of Agency).
Component Three The Deployment of Human
Rights to Support NGO “Power
Over ” Empowerment
Strategies.
Essentialism-Non-Essentialism
Western and Non-Western
Conceptions of Agency (External
Locus of Agency).
Component Four NGOs are connected to global social justice and progress projects. They are engaged in maximising individual potential.
Universalism-Cultural Relativism
(challenged by Hybridisation)
Individual - Group Rights
Western and Non-Western
Conceptions of Agency (Internal
Locus of Agency).
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Table 8-2: Taxonomy of the Deployment of Women’s Human Rights Outline
Component
Represented NGO Activity and Function of Human
Rights and Women’s
Human Rights
Debates/Dimensional Concepts
Component One Governments’ failure in their duty to protect women against violations of basic human rights.
Universalism-Cultural Relativism
Western and Non-Western
Conceptions of Agency (External
Locus of Agency).
Component Two Women’s Human Rights as a
Political Tool: Focus on
Domestic Violence.
Essentialism-Non-Essentialism
Western and Non-Western
Conceptions of Agency (External
Locus of Agency).
Component Three Distortion between gender responsibilities and rights: focus on economic empowerment.
Essentialism-Non-Essentialism
Western and Non-Western
Conceptions of Agency (External
Locus of Agency).
Component Four Maximising individual potential. Hybridisation with global progress projects.
Individual - Group Rights
Western and Non-Western
Conceptions of Agency (Internal
Locus of Agency).
The overall goal of examining and, in some cases, expanding the dimensional concepts outlined in Tables 8-1 and 8-2 was to explore the extent to which they could illuminate how human rights were experienced and practiced as a universally applicable schema in the work of NGOs.
It is argued that NGOs’ approaches to the deployment of the human rights and women’s human rights’ frameworks can be represented by the various components within the two taxonomies. The idea of dimensionality of the concepts reflects Donnelly’s (1984, 1989) examination of the end points of the universalism – cultural relativism dimension with negotiated intermediate positions which he describes as tempered universalism. Further research using the same design but involving more case studies would potentially reveal other significant concepts which would underlie more fully developed dimensional models. Such research would also need to explore the extent of association between the dimensional concepts. The research would potentially discover that, rather than a binary opposition between two poles within each dimension, three-way, or greater, oppositions were possible. The next stage in
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developing and refining these models would be to undertake further research which employs systematic methods of investigation to produce an analytical framework.
Such future research could be directed at developing a more quantitative understanding of the range of dimensions undergirding components within the taxonomies of the deployment of human rights and women’s human rights.
This thesis speculates that there is a wide variation in terms of relative contributions of situated emphasis on the four concepts undergirding the two taxonomies that emerged in the empirical analysis: universalism, essentialism, agency and group or individual rights. These concepts could be developed into inter-related dimensions along which situated experiences of the deployment of human rights could be measured. The aim of developing multidimensional models would be to provide a practical tool to guide policy makers in the area of the operationalisation of human rights frameworks. This could be achieved by creating summaries of data using multidimensional correspondence analysis. It would be theoretically possible to represent graphically different types of approaches to the deployment of human rights and women’s human rights. This would then allow NGOs to be clustered in correspondence spaces. Such a dimensional analysis approach would generate models with which to inform policy-makers and a tool to compare across situated experiences. A dimensional approach could potentially strengthen Uvin’s (2002) notion of NGO engagement with the human rights framework by incorporating measurable elements in relation to the dimensional concepts. Situated experiences of NGOs could thus be located within each continuum to measure the deployment of human rights and women’s human rights according to significant socio-economic features. However, it is acknowledged here that dimensional concepts which are themselves contested would be difficult to quantify and this is an aspect of the methodology that future research designs would need to address which is beyond the scope of this thesis.
It can be argued that a more refined analytical framework would provide not just a practical tool for policy makers as previously discussed. It would also facilitate a deeper scholarly understanding in the academic community of how and why NGOs differ in the evaluation and representation of human rights frameworks. It would offer a methodology to explore variations in operationalisation practices by focusing on the perceptions of activists and how these interact with local institutional
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contexts. The models would provide a comparative method of assessing how these perceptions influence human rights and women’s human rights framework outcomes. It would also provide a device to encourage activists to focus on their role in a broader engagement with the two frameworks. A multi-dimensional model approach would also provide a comparative tool with which to focus on crosscultural challenges to the implementation of human rights and women’s human rights in local contexts across time. It could facilitate the targeting of incentives to maximise the impact of the operationalisation of human rights and women’s human rights .
A multidimensional model would, it can be concluded, form a scholarly basis for a tool to understand different accounts of organisations’ experiences in relation to the operationalisation of the human rights and women’s human rights frameworks. The objectives of the research question have been revisited in this section. The next section discusses how the results emerging from the empirical analysis advance the debate surrounding the operationalisation of human rights.
8.2. Advancing the Debate on the Operationalisation of Human Rights
The thesis maps the depicted process of the operationalisation of the human rights and women’s human rights frameworks onto different outcomes and perceptions of situated agency. As discussed in the previous section, one way of framing the empirical analysis is to view activists’ representations of the operationalisation of human rights and women’s human rights by using dimensional concepts to draw out significant features from the overall picture.
These features which are identified in the components in each of the taxonomies represent the disjunctions in activists’ accounts between grassroots experiences and visions which incorporated human rights inspired or compliant objectives. This disjunction calls into question the institutional nature of the human rights framework.
This is because respondents’ representations of their organisations’ ability to operationalise human rights-compliant visions were filtered through situated experiences of local challenges. The effective implementation of the human rights framework was represented as being subject to cultural peculiarities. In other words, the thesis revealed disjunctions in activists’ accounts between human rightscompliant objectives and the operationalisation of the human rights and women’s
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human rights frameworks on the ground. The following examples highlight specific aspects of these disjunctions in relation to the four debates and their associated dimensional concepts. They show how the thesis advances the conversations in these areas.
The first dimensional concept is centred on the debate about the extent to which human rights principles can be considered to be universal. The thesis concluded that activists in both case studies characterised the human rights framework as a device to legitimate the demands for basic universal human rights made on behalf of beneficiaries in communities represented as being most marginalised. In both case studies the only recourse that activists perceived they had in the most deprived communities where the state was not fulfilling its international obligations in relation to violations of basic universal human rights was the rhetoric of human rights. It can be argued, however, that the process of hybridisation described in activists’ accounts was challenging the dichotomy of the universal and particular.
There is, for example, discussion in the thesis about the extent to which activists represented tensions between rights and cultural values in situated contexts. That is, activists’ accounts in the research provide an understanding of the interweaving of human rights with other local value frameworks. The thesis explores the implications of the hybridisation of the human rights framework with other hegemonic frameworks. It applies Nadarajah and Rampton’s (2014) ideas on forms of hybridity in the field of international relations and peace studies. Activists’ accounts described approaches to their work that reconstituted and assimilated what they understood as aspects of human rights and wom en’s human rights frameworks with local hegemonic frameworks. The reconfiguration appeared to be non-reducible to the original elements as exemplified by the hybridisation of the economic growth model and social welfare approaches, discussed in Chapter Six.
In addition, the thesis developed Walby’s (2011) discussion of the hybridisation of global progress projects which include human rights and feminism, by contending that this would be fleshed out by understanding activists’ perceptions of the processes involved in the operationalisation of these frameworks.
The second dimensional concept underlying the taxonomy was that of perceptions of agency in oppressive and non-oppressive contexts. The concept of agency in oppressive contexts drew on Rotter’s (1954) idea of locus of control to form a
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concept of locus of agency. Locus of agency incorporates the idea of types of responses to desired action in local structural infrastructures. It contains two strands of agency. External locus of agency was found to comprise a family resemblance of three components in both taxonomies and internal locus of agency framed the fourth component in each. The thesis, therefore, fleshes out the relationship between perceptions of agency and deployment of human rights frameworks in terms of general approaches.
At the more specific level, this thesis exami ned activists’ depictions of programmes described as supporting women beneficiaries who had suffered domestic violence.
This thesis argues that violence as a concept is very fluid: some activists portrayed this human rights abuse in terms of psychological terms arising from cultural norms.
Activists depicted a disjunction in situated contexts between the legal framework and the recognition of domestic violence as a women’s human rights abuse in practice on the ground. Fricker’s (2003, 2006 and 2007) notion of hermeneutic epistemic injustice was extended to incorporate activists’ representations of beneficiaries who lacked concepts to articulate this practice. This thesis also argues that Spivak’s (1998) concept of epistemic violence can be expanded to incorporate
Fricker’s (2003, 2006 and 2007) conceptualisations of epistemic injustice. This expanded concept can be applied to activists’ accounts of different cultural and institutional challenges organisations experience in promoting beneficiaries’ access to the human rights and women’s human rights framework.
The third debate focuses on the dimensional concept of individual and group rights.
It is argued here that policy-makers would also benefit from an understanding of situated tensions arising from the promotion of individual rights within the human rights framework compared with those cultural traditions that are centred on collective or group rights and entitlements. Duties of the state in respect of the human rights framework lie with individual citizens. Themes in some activists’ accounts portrayed cultural contexts that recognised group rather than individual rights at the grassroots level. The thesis has argued that the discussion would be strengthened by examining how concepts of individual capabilities in Sen’s (1999) work can be broadened to encompass a more comprehensive understanding of community development.
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The fourth dimensional concept, that of essentialism, underlay activists’ framing of beneficiaries of programmes targeted at supporting female victims of domestic violence and women’s economic empowerment projects. The thesis examines the extent to which this framing was characterised by essentialised perceptions of women beneficiaries in both case studies.
The thesis focused on the how this concept underlay the tension in West Bengal activists’ accounts between organisations’ practical attempts to achieve gender equality and prioritising economic growth. This reflected activists’ perceptions that missions related to reducing income poverty had been over-emphasised compared with the broader visions of enhancing beneficiaries’ wellbeing. It has been speculated here that policy-makers in the area would benefit from a measure of situated representations of women’s essentialised roles in society by developing multidimensional models of the deployment of human rights and women’s human rights as discussed earlier in the chapter. The findings of this thesis feed into conversations about gender responsibilities and women’s rights. Human rights and women’s human rights were also represented as political tools with which to underpin a political community which reaffirms universal values. This is in line with Phill ips’s (2013) view that what is human is political. The thesis develops this idea by combining it with the contention that activists’ gendered framing of these beneficiaries was as much a political representation as it was a cultural one. The thesis has argued that the implication of this argument is that the framing of women’s empowerment within both types of programmes targeted at women beneficiaries will need to reflect this political element. The thesis has argued that the function of human rights will need to address and be influenced by the interaction of the feminist political struggle and the underlying essentialist representations of the role of women in local contexts.
The thesis thus provides a foundation for proposing a role for future research aimed at constructing a model which could be used by policy-makers and the scholarly community to assess situated experiences of the operationalisation of human rights and women’s human rights frameworks. It does so by considering the relationships between abstract ideals and codified articles, perceptions and agency and salient features in local contexts. This thesis is positioned within specific discourses in the global literature located in the sociology of human rights and cross-cultural feminism about activists’ deployment of the human rights and women’s human rights frameworks. Moreover, this thesis has made a contribution towards the
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understanding of the deployment of human rights from a sociological perspective. It has done so by forming a bridge from this discipline to concepts within postcolonial studies, feminist political theory, international relations and development, and crosscultural feminism. It has also argued that future research is also to be directed at forming interdisciplinary bridges to contribute to a broader understanding of scholarly debates and strengthen policy-making in the area.
Furthermore, it has been argued that adopting a broader interdisciplinary approach in future would enable the research question to widen its perspective. As reported in Chapter Six, Meghna Abraham of Amnesty International was interviewed about the organisation’s implementation of the human rights framework. She suggested that the continuing challenge to the human rights framework was to build strategies of implementation of abstract principles and to make them relevant tools to support struggle in all forms of nation-state government. Future research could use a dimensional model of the deployment of human rights to track the changing relevance of the human rights framework in response to the predicted rise of new social order paradigms as power shifts from the Global North to the Global South
Gearty (2008) argued that the framework has survived because of its inherent flexibility and ability to adapt according to the prevailing social justice norms. It has been argued that further research should be directed at understanding how activists deploy human rights and women’s human rights frameworks as they adapt to other global progress agenda and power structures. It might be concluded, for example, that the future trajectory of the human rights framework will be determined by how the current hegemonic human rights and women’s human rights framework form new hybrid paradigms as these interact with future political power orders.
The thesis has also argued that further research should give thought to the framing of issues investigated in response to the human rights debate. In Chapter Seven, it was speculated that reframing certain injustices against women as violence, whether this is physical or psychological, would reposition the debate. Centring future investigation of women’s human rights where violence is represented as being at the nexus of an intersectional network of power struggles would act as a compass to enhance interdisciplinary approaches to the subject.
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8.3. Limitations of this Research
The research design generated materials which were analysed in relation to the research question. The limitations of this approach are now discussed with a view to proposing the implications for future research.
This research focused on two case studies, that is, samples of NGOs in West
Bengal and London. Such a restricted focus allowed the thesis to propose an initial map of the territory of significant features in the deployment of human rights and women’s human rights from the perspective of those on the ground. The narrow focus on two specific case studies, however, means that the specific research findings may not be generalisable to the wider NGO community. On the other hand, the research methodology itself would mean that further case studies would be able to map onto the two taxonomies that emerged in this project though perhaps in different ways.
This thesis used women’s human rights as a lens to bring to life the cultural complexities involved in the implementation of a political struggle with a distinctive set of entitlements. This focus enriched the examination of the research question as demonstrated, for example, by the discussion about the activists’ essentialised representation of women beneficiaries in Chapter Seven. It also fleshed out a deeper understanding of the relationship between a ctivists’ representations of perceptions of agency and desired action in relation to programmes targeted at women beneficiaries. On the other hand, this specific focus may also lead to the speculation that the findings may not be generalisable to the implementation of other UN human rights conventions, for example, the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Further research which incorporated other Conventions might also draw out different dimensional concepts that map onto the two taxonomies in this thesis.
The objectives of the research were revisited in an earlier section of this chapter. It was argued that further research based on systematic methods of investigation is necessary to develop the two taxonomies. The aim would be to generate theories testable by hypotheses by conducting a systematic investigation of the deployment of human rights frameworks. Additional quantitative data would facilitate the generalisability of findings and provide more robust models of the deployment of frameworks in response to perceptions of challenges to desired action. It is also
263
argued that this further research would need to incorporate a larger number of case studies drawn from countries with a more diverse range of development profiles. It would also need to focus on a fuller range of the human rights Conventions to build multidimensional models of activists’ deployment of human rights in general. It can be argued that the ultimate aim of further research would be to produce a single, multidimensional model of the deployment of human rights.
Future research designs could also combine a systematic quantitative investigation with an ethnographic approach with the aim of enriching concepts. This methodology would form the basis of a more systematic, quantitative investigation.
Research materials in the second phase of the project were gathered during telephone interviews with staff in sub-samples of NGOs in the West Bengal and
London case studies. These elicited accounts that produced a variation of positions in relation to human rights and women’s human rights frameworks. These supplemented the analysis of extracted natural accounts on the publicly accessible websites. Both the Alceste reports and the interviews generated materials that produced categories which formed the components in the two taxonomies which emerged during the empirical analysis. The approaches in the two phases of the research, however, potentially led to less nuanced understanding of activists’ accounts that could have emerged if an ethnographic design had been employed.
The objective of future research would be to enrich and expand the concepts underlying the taxonomies by using this additional qualitative methodology.
As a matter of speculation, future studies in the area would benefit from an ethnographic methodology which would facilitate the gathering of more contextual information. Hine suggests that:
[i]n its basic form ethnography consists of a researcher spending an extended period of time immersed in a field setting, taking account of the relationships, activities and understandings of those in the setting and participating in those processes. The aim is to make explicit the taken-for-granted and often tacit ways in which people make sense of their lives (Hine, 2000:4-5).
An ethnographic approach would thus provide a more in-depth understanding of situated experiences of the deployment of human rights. Future research would benefit from the strength of the methodology’s naturalism by eliciting accounts
264
within local settings. An ethnographic design would also enable the research question to be extended to ask beneficiaries themselves about their perceptions about the extent to which interventions had resulted in sustainable changes in their lives. Future research should be directed at building on the taxonomies arising from this research by supplementing understandings with a more enriched set of coded concepts and categories. Examining the topic from different perspectives and methodological approaches would also indicate whether or not proposed taxonomies in this research were robust.
Chapter Two cited Messer
’s (1993) contention that anthropologists could contribute to the understanding of human rights by examining how their principles were expressed by different cultures. Fieldwork undertaken within this discipline could also contribute to the understanding of the deployment of human rights frameworks.
Messer (1993) and Goodale (2006) both refer to the American Anthropological
Association’s (AAA) struggle with issues arising from a stand-off between universality and cultural relativism. The AAA originally dismissed the universality of human rights and concluded that any such conceptions were culturally relative.
Goodale (2006), however, suggests that anthropologists can contribute to research on human rights conceptions. He concludes that “Anthropology has an important part to play…in suggesting ways in which human rights can be reframed so that their original purposes, those embodied in documents like the UDHR, stand a better chance of being realized” (2006: 485). Chapter Two cited Tsing’s (2005) contention that the universal binds individuals to the global stream of humanity. She refers to the creation of universals within a cultural dialogue. The thesis argues that the taxonomies could be developed to compare and measure across cultures to assess changes in local practices in terms of the deployment of human rights across time.
Another objective of future research would be to undertake a study to explore whether the taxonomies could function as a subject-specific pathway through existing scholarly work using the concept of agency as an organising structure. The concept of agency is often debated within discipline-specific areas such as political theory, psychology, sociology and political science, for example. The thesis proposes that using agency as a central concept would create a more interdisciplinary understanding of the underlying structures of key topics in this research.
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Text-mining software, such as Alceste, is a method of examining research materials related to a particular topic and would be an appropriate tool to expose structures underlying an interdisciplinary approach. The package can be used to identify commonalities of themes underlying a topic from both within a single source or across different sources, such as interdisciplinary materials. As discussed in
Chapter Four, however, text-mining has advantages but only provides results which need interpreting within the context of the more systematic quantitative and qualitative designs outlined earlier in this chapter.
8.4. Conclusion
Chapter One referred to the fact that some scholars, such as Gearty (2008) suggest that the latest development of the human rights project took force in the aftermath of World War II. Klug (2008) wonders what the drafters of the UDHR would think if they returned today and looked at how the human rights framework was being implemented. She summarised the main aims of the Declaration as being to enhance protection for individuals from state tyranny and abuse, to foster peace between nations and to promote a global recognition of the inherent dignity and equal work of all human beings. Klug summarised the essential message of the
UDHR as being “[t]o underline common standards of decency in a diverse world in a manner which reflects that diversity” (Klug, 2008: 7). Klug concluded that although the UDHR had exerted moral and legal influence across the globe nonetheless
“[t]he catalogue of human misery around the globe appears to continue unabated”
(Klug, 2008: 4). This conclusion could also be extended to apply to the treatment of women in pockets across the world as evidenced, for example, by the recent widely publicised violati ons of women’s rights in India.
93
This thesis has argued that attention needs to be paid to activists’ accounts in the deployment of human rights and women’s human rights. It has been argued that policy-makers working in the area of the operationalisation of these frameworks need to understand activists’ perceptions of the challenges to desired action.
Unless they do so, then it is contended that the implementation of the human rights frameworks will prove to be an inconsistent tool in the pursuit of eradicating
93 For example the widely publicised gang rapes of women during 2012 - 2014, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-27807539 and http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/worldasia-india-24078339.
266
violations and in the realisation of the inherent dignity and equal work of all human beings. As argued earlier in the chapter, future research will need to pursue a holistic understanding of the complexities of the deployment of human rights by
NGOs and this includes developing a dimensional model which feeds into and develops the analytic framework in this thesis.
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9. Appendices
268
9.1. Appendix I: Sample of Publicly Accessible NGOs in West Bengal and London
West Bengal NGOs
Class NGO Name NGO Web Address Interview
Success
Interview class 1 Noah's Ark of Calcutta http://www.noahsark.org.in/
Offer, Kolkata http://www.offerindia.org/index.htm Interview
The Emancipating Network, Kolkata http://www.madebysurvivors.com/TheEma ncipationNetwork
Not Successful
Karma-Kutir, Calcutta http://www.karmakutir.org/home/default.as
px
Short interview and insufficient material
Lucy: Let Us Care for You http://www.lucy.in/ Not Successful
Mahila Seva Simiti, Kolkata
Missionaries of Charity, Parganas http://mss-india.org/html/about.html http://home.comcast.net/~motherteresasit e/addresses.html
Not Successful
Not Successful
Naihati New Life Society, Parganas www.naihatinewlifesociety.org Not Successful
Sparsha Welfare Foundation http://www.sparshawelfare.org/ Not Successful
Asansol Anandam, Asansol http://www.asansolanandam.org/
269
Class NGO Name NGO Web Address
Bengal Service Society
Calcutta Avant-Garde
Calcutta Girl's Foundation
Calcutta Social Project
Crawl Society
Dakshin Kalikata Sevasram
Manovikas Kendra
Nanritam, Kolkata
Paripurnata Half-Way-Home, Kolkata http://bengalservicesociety.org/ http://calcuttaavantgarde.com/home http://www.calcuttafoundation.org/cgf.htm http://calcuttasocialproject.net/profile.htm http://www.crawlsociety.org/ http://dksevasram.org/index.php http://www.manovikaskendra.org/ www.nanritam.org http://www.paripurnata.org/
Interview
Success
Prantik Janavikash Samity
Sanlaap
Society Against Violence in
Education (SAVE)
Ujaan
Voice of World, Calcutta
Welfare Centre for the Mentally handicapped http://www.pjvs.org/ http://www.sanlaapindia.org/ www.no2ragging.org http://ujaanwelfare.wordpress.com/ www.voiceof world.net http://www.anandalok.net/
270
Class NGO Name
class 2 Bikash Bharati Welfare Society -
Calcutta
Forum of Communities United in
Service
Khrishnaa Human Initiatives
Smile Foundation
Amanat Foundation Trust
Networking Alliance for Voluntary
Action, Kolkata
Bengal Rural Welfare Service
Bharat Sevashram Sangh, Nadia
FOSET - Forum of Scientists,
Engineers and Technologists
Four Corners Initiatives Trust
Seva Bharati, Kapgari
class 3 Anirban Rural Welfare Society
NGO Web Address Interview
Success
Interview http://www.vikasbbws.org/index.htm http://www.focuskolkata.org/ Interview
(Moved to http://www.linkedin.com/company/krishnaa
-human-initiatives since interview.)
Interview http://smilefoundationindia.org/p_asha.htm Interview http://amanatindia.com/amanat/old/overvie w.pdf
Not Successful http://www.navaindia.in/aboutnava.htm Not Successful http://www.brws.org/home.html http://bsspayradanga.com/index_files/hom e.htm http://www.foset.in
http://www.4ci.org
http://www.sevabharatikvk.org/index.html
Interview http://www.anirban.org.in/
271
Class NGO Name NGO Web Address Interview
Success
Interview Liberal Association for Movement of
People. Kolkata http://www.lamp-ngo-india.org/
West Bengal Scheduled Castes,
Tribes and Minority Welfare
Association, Kolkata http://wbscstmwa.org/ Not Successful
Paschim Banga Bijnan Mancha,
Kolkata http://www.pbvm.org.in/ Interview
Kadam http://www.kadamindia.org/about.html Interview
Kajia Jana Kalayan Samity http://www.aidindia.org/main/
All India Council for Mass Education and Development http://aicmedindia.org/contact.html
Amar Seva Sangha, Midnapore
Manbhum Ananda Ashram
Nityanand Trust http://www.amarsevasangha.org/index.ht
m
Baradrone Social Welfare Institution,
Parganas http://baradrone.org/
Gram Seva Sangha - North 24
Parganas
Gram Seva Sangha - North 24 Parganas http://www.mant.org.in/defult.html
Sankalpa Trust http://sankalpacmfs.org/general/sankalpa/ aboutus.pdf
Interview
272
Class NGO Name NGO Web Address
class 4
Society for People's Awareness http://spanvoice.org/contact.php
Southern Health Improvement Samiti
- South 24 Parganas http://www.shisindia.org/index.html
You and I Foundation, Chinsurah http://www.dingga.co.cc/home
ActionAid India, Kolkata http://www.actionaid.org/india/ http://www.agni.net.in/ A dream for Great Nation India
(AGNI)
Ashoka
CCLP - Education Charter
International
Manav Seva Prathisthan
Tagore Society for Rural
Development
All India Women's Conference -
Kolkata
Bharat Nirman http://www.ashoka.org Interview http://www.cclpworldwide.com/index.html Not Successful http://sevanow.org/ http://www.tsrd.org/ http://www.aiwc.org/ http://bharatnirman.org/
Interview
Success
Interview
Interview
Not Successful
Not Successful
Chandipur Mother and Child Health
Welfare Society chandipurmotherchild.googlepages.com
Development Action Society Kalkota http://www.suas.ie/das.html
273
Class NGO Name NGO Web Address http://www.ekk.org.in/dev/homepage.php
Interview
Success
Eso Kichu Kori (Come, Let's Do
Something) of Kolkata
Islampur Ramkrishapally Rural
Welfare Society http://irrwsngo.tripod.com/untitledpage.html
KDS - Ktelipara Development Society http://kdsmfi.org/index.html
Mukti, Baruipur http://muktiforsocialdevelopment.org/index
.php http://www.pkkindia.org/history.html Pratibandhi Sahayak Samity –
Panskura
Sarbik Gram Bikash Kendra
School of Human Genetics and
Population Health
The Jadavpur Association of
International Relations
Vivekananda Sevakendra-O-Sishu
Uddyan (VSSU) http://www.sgbk.org/ www.humanhealth.in http://sites.google.com/site/jaironweb/ http://www.vssu.in/ class 1, 3 Development Research
Communication and Service Centre,
Kolkata
Socio-Legal Aid Research and
Training Centre http://www.drcsc.org/ http://www.slartc.org/
Interview
Interview
274
Class NGO Name NGO Web Address class 4 Sabuj Sangha http://www.sabujsangha.org/index.html
class 1, 2 Path Welfare Society - Kolkata http://pathwelfaresociety.com/ class 2, 3 Council for Advancement of Rural and Downtrodden http://capart.nic.in/contact/index.html
No Significant Association http://ashiindia.org/index.html
Cathedral Relief Service - Calcutta
Convention of the Teachers of the
Deaf in India http://ncedindia.org/aboutus.html
Economic rural Development Society www.erds.org
Graham Bell Centre for the Deaf
International Mass Awareness
Programme http://www.deafchildworldwide.info/where_ we_work/south_asia/india/projects_partne rships/West_bengal/graham_bell.html http://www.imaptrust.org/
Kalyan, Purulia http://www.cathedralreliefservice.net/about
.html http://www.kalyankvk.in/
Mission for Population Control,
Siliguri http://www.populationcontrol.org/
New Pally Mangal Samity http://pallymangalsamity.org/
Niswarth www.niswarth.com
275
Interview
Success
Interview
Class NGO Name NGO Web Address
Purba Dwarakapur Sebayan Sangha
- Purba Dwarakapur http://www.sebayan.org/
Purbachal Ananda Foundation http://www.pafindia.org/
Sabera Foundation
Sane & Enthusiast Volunteers
Association of Kolkata - Kolkata
Save The Environment - Kolkata http://www.saberafoundationindia.org http://www.sevacmentalhealthcare.org/a boutus.html
http://stenvironment.com/about_us.htm
Interview
Success
Starve Prevent Foundation, Kolkata http://www.starve5.webs.com/
Swanirvar
Unique Search
Vaani Deaf Children's Foundation www.swanirvarbengal.org http://www.uniquesearch.org/ www.vaani.in
Omitted from Alceste Analysis
Compassionate Crusaders Trust,
Calcutta
Indian Research Institute for
Integrated Medicine
Kriya Yoga Mission
People for Animals, Kolkata http://www.altmedworld.net/about.htm http://www.animalcrusaders.org/ http://www.iriim.org/ www.kriyayogmission.org http://www.peopleforanimalsindia.org/
276
Class NGO Name NGO Web Address
World Wide Fund for Nature-India –
Calcutta
London NGOs
class 1 The Otesha Project
UK Connect
Daughters of Charity
Age UK
Asthma UK
British Heart Foundation
Centre for Ethnic Minority Voluntary
Organisations
Diabetes UK
Humanity First http://www.wwfindia.org/ http://www.otesha.org.uk/ http://www.ukconnect.org/ http://www.daughtersofcharity.org.uk/ http://www.ageuk.org.uk/ http://www.asthma.org.uk/index.html http://www.bhf.org.uk/ http://www.cemvo.org.uk/ http://www.diabetes.org.uk/ http://uk.humanityfirst.org/index.php?optio
n=com_content&task=view&id=199
Interview
Success
Interview
Interview
Interview
277
Class NGO Name
Jewels Fund
Africa Foundation Stone (UK)
African Youth Trust
Blue Elephant Theatre
Camberwell After School Project
Children Education Group
NGO Web Address Interview
Success
Jewish Council for Racial Equality http://www.jcore.org.uk/index.php
National Literacy Trust
Volunteering England
Ycare International class 2 Barnet Multicultural Centre
Envision
Kids City
Crofton Early Learners www.literacytrust.org.uk http://www.volunteering.org.uk/ http://www.ycareinternational.org/news http://barnetmcc.moonfruit.com/ Interview http://www.envision.org.uk/about http://africafoundationstone.org/
Interview http://www.kidscity.org.uk/about_us/def ault.aspx
http://www.jewelsfund.org/
Interview
Interview http://www.aytonline.org.uk/ http://www.blueelephanttheatre.co.uk/educ ation http://www.caspuk.org/ http://wwww.childreneducationgroup.com/ wordpress/ http://www.croftonearlylearners.btik.co
278
Class NGO Name NGO Web Address m/Home
Interview
Success
Gingerbread Corner
Girl Guiding http://www.gingerbreadcorner.co.uk/ind ex.asp
http://www.girlguiding.org.uk/home.aspx
Heathrow Muslim Community Centre http://www.hmcc-uk.org/index.html
High Trees
Marine Society and Sea Cadets http://www.high-trees.org/ http://www.ms-sc.org/
Mudchute
Novas Scarman
Orient Regeneration
Positive Mental Attitude
Redcliffe School Trust
Roots and Shoots
Waldorf School
YMCA England
class 3 Ethnic Minority Foundation http://www.mudchute.org/ http://novasscarman.org/ http://www.o-regen.co.uk/AboutUs.asp http://www.pmacc.co.uk/ http://www.redcliffeschool.com/index1.html http://www.rootsandshoots.org.uk/ http://waldorflondon.co.uk/why-ourschool/our-incredible-community/ http://www.ymca.org.uk/ http://www.emfoundation.org.uk/
279
Interview
Class NGO Name NGO Web Address
Hansard Society
Institute of Alcohol Studies http://www.hansardsociety.org.uk/ http://www.ias.org.uk/index.html
Justice
Trade Justice Movement (Women's
Institute)
National Alliance of Women's
Organisations
Rights of Women http://www.justice.org.uk/ http://www.thewi.org.uk/ http://www.nawo.org.uk/id2.html http://www.rightsofwomen.org.uk/
Airey Neave Trust
Association for the Conservation of
Energy http://www.aireyneavetrust.org.uk/ http://www.ukace.org/
Black Women's Rape Action Project http://www.womenagainstrape.net/
Children's Rights Alliance for
England
Citizens UK
Citzen's Rights http://www.crae.org.uk/about/us.html
Homeless Link
Index on Censorship http://www.citizensuk.org/ http://www.citizen-rightsuk.org/Programmes.html http://www.homeless.org.uk/ http://www.indexoncensorship.org/
280
Interview
Success
Interview
Interview
Interview
Interview
Not Successful
Not Successful
Class
class 3
NGO Name
Liberty
Prison Reform Trust
Quaker Peace and Social Action
Safra Project
Women's Environment class 4 999 Club
Hillingdon Women's Centre
Home Start Haringey
Sunshine Charity
NGO Web Address Interview
Success http://www.liberty-humanrights.org.uk/index.php http://www.prisonreformtrust.org.uk/ http://www.quaker.org.uk/faith-action http://www.safraproject.org/ http://www.wen.org.uk/about-wen/
Interview http://www.999club.org/site/index.php http://hillingdonwomenscentre.org.uk/ Interview http://www.home-start-haringey.org/ Interview http://www.sunshinecharity.com/index.htm Interview http://www.adkc.org.uk/ Action Disability, Kensington and
Chelsea
Britis Stammering Association
British Association for Adoption and
Fostering
Child Accident Prevention Trust
Enfield Turkish Cypriot Association http://www.stammering.org/about_bsa.htm
l http://www.baaf.org.uk/ http://www.capt.org.uk/ http://www.etca.org.uk/
281
Class NGO Name
Hounslow Crossroad Care Limited
Mind
Pro Cancer Research Fund
Respond
SHAD (unmbrella)
The Polish and Eastern European
Christian Family
The Woolnoth Society
NGO Web Address http://www.hounslowcrossroads.org/about
_us.html http://www.mind.org.uk/ http://pcr-fund.org/home http://www.respond.org.uk/ http://www.shad.org.uk/index.html http://www.peec.org.uk/
Interview
Success class 1, 2 class 1, 3
Westminster Mind
Winged Fellowship (now Vitalise)
World Trust Foundation
Refugee Action class 1, 4 Haringey Women's Aid
Mencap
No Significant Association http://www.woolnothsociety.org.uk/index.ht
ml http://Westminstermind.org.uk/ http://www.vitalise.org.uk/about_us/our_hi story/ http://www.worldtrust.org/ http://www.refugee-action.org.uk/ http://www.hwfonline.org.uk/ Interview http://www.mencap.org.uk/ http://www.ace-ed.org.uk/
282
Class NGO Name NGO Web Address
Age Concern Haringey
Alternatives Trust East London
Anglo-Jewish
British Muslim Initiative
Changing Attitude
Credo
Development in Action UK
Jane Bubear Sports Foundation http://www.ageconcernharingey.org.uk/ http://www.altel.org.uk/ http://www.anglojewish.org.uk/ http://www.bminitiative.net/ http://changingattitude.org.uk/ http://www.credoceramics.org/ http://www.developmentinaction.org/ http://www.janebubearsport.co.uk/
London Friend
Mission Care http://www.londonfriend.org.uk/ http://www.missioncare.org.uk/
Oshwal Elderly Welfare Association http://www.oewa.org.uk/
Race Online
Redbridge Equalities http://raceonline2012.org/ http://www.redbridgeequalities.org/east/
Refocus
Release
Roma Support Group http://www.refocusproject.org.uk/ http://www.release.org.uk/ http://www.romasupportgroup.org.uk/
283
Interview
Success
Class NGO Name
St John's School Association
The Simon Community
The Wakefield and Tetley Trust
The Wandle Trust
World Service Enquiry
NGO Web Address http://www.st-johns.croydon.sch.uk/ http://www.simoncommunity.org.uk/ http://www.wakefieldtrust.org.uk/ http://www.wandletrust.org/ http://www.wse.org.uk/index.htm
Interview
Success
284
9.2. Appendix II: Alceste
Report of West Bengal NGOs’ Vision and Mission
Statements
Branch One
Branch Two
This summary report shows that Alceste was able to classify 82% of the original elementary context units (ECUs) in the West Bengal corpus. This is above the 80% threshold required for a strong analysis. The diagram represents the hierarchical classification produced by Alceste. The most common words by each class are listed under the class as well as the χ2 result. The second list of words and χ2 results show the words least closely associated with the class.
285
9.3. Appendix III: Alceste Report of London:
NGOs’ Vision and Mission
Statements
Branch One
Branch Two
This summary report shows that Alceste was able to classify 70% % of the original elementary context units (ECUs) in the West Bengal corpus. This at the threshold required for an acceptable analysis. The diagram represents the hierarchical classification produced by Alceste. The most common words by each class are listed u nder the class as well as the χ2 result. The second list of words and χ2 results show the words least closely associated with the class.
286
9.4. Appendix IV: Combined Corpora: West Bengal and London
Branch One (London dominant)
Branch Two (West
Bengal dominant)
This summary report shows that Alceste was able to classify 75% of the original elementary context units (ECUs) in the West Bengal corpus. This at the threshold required for an acceptable analysis. The diagram represents the hierarchical classification produced by Alceste. The most common words by each class are listed under the class as well as the χ2 result. The second list of words and χ2 results show the words least closely associated with the class.
287
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