Disability Support - Imagining Better

Hi all,

For your conversations on December 3 - it would be interesting to hear the feedback to the question below:

“what would you do if your day service was involved in a natural disaster and had to close indefinately?”

Linking Community Development and Human Rights Professor Jim Ife

Centre for Human Rights Education - Curtin University of Technology

j.ife@curtin.edu.au

Community Development, Human Rights and the Grassroots Conference Deakin University April 2004

This paper is concerned with the two ideas of human rights and community development. In it I will seek to describe each in terms of the other, to make a casethat each requires the other, and to establish some commonalities in theorising inboth areas.Let us begin with human rights. One of the important aspects of human rights is that they are linked to human responsibilities. This has been a link that many have soughtto deny or at least to minimise. For those on the political right, the idea of rights isregarded with some suspicion if not downright hostility, unless understood within verynarrow liberal confines of individual freedom rights and property rights; anything beyond that, such as the right to education, health, housing, employment, job security, working conditions, income security and a clean environment soundsdangerously like socialism. For such people, responsibilities are much moreimportant, and are the key to a stable society. To those in the political left, however, itis rights that are seen as important, while the idea of responsibility sounds likepaternalism, social control and “mutual obligation” with all its punitive overtones.This political polarisation of rights and responsibilities has meant that many people,because of their ideological blinkers, do not treat both seriously, and choose toconcentrate on one at the expense of the other, and this has, I believe, resulted insomething of a gap in human rights theorising. Yet the connection between rights and responsibilities is obvious. If I have a right, then that implies a responsibility onthe part of some other person, group or institution to (i) allow me the freedom toexercise that right, (ii) provide the mechanisms to protect that right, and/or (iii) make positive provision so that my right can be realised. The responsibilities associatedwith rights may lie with other individuals, with groups, with communities, or withgovernments. For example, the right to education requires some level of state actionor policy to provide adequate educational institutions and structures, either by itself,or to ensure that others do it. The right to freedom of expression requires not onlytolerance of diverse views in the general society, but it also imposes a responsibilityon national, state and local governments to provide the space, the forums and thetechnology to ensure that the right of free expression is realised. Rights can alsoimpose responsibilities on the person claiming the right: the responsibility to exercisethat right, and the responsibility to do so in a responsible way. In exercising our rightswe need to do so in a way that does not violate the rights of others.The responsibilities associated with human rights are often the most contentious partof rights discourse. We may readily agree on statements of rights, for example asdescribed in the Universal Declaration, but when it comes to deciding whoseresponsibility it is to ensure the protection and realisation of those rights there can bemajor disagreement, for example, who should be responsible for ensuring our rightsto health care are met: the Federal Government, the State Government, the privatemarket, employers, the community, the family, or the individual her/himself? In realitythe answer will usually be some combination of most or all of these, but then thequestion becomes what is the appropriate combination, and how much should eachcontribute? Responsibilities are usually more contentious than rights, and it isinteresting to note that we seem to find it easier to draw up charters of rights than wedo charters of responsibilities. Perhaps it is more appropriate to call human rightsworkers human responsibilities workers, as it is more often the responsibilities thatare in question, and that need to be established.The necessary link between rights and responsibilities is the first indication thatcommunity might be important in human rights. The strict individualist notion of rights – “my rights” – makes no sense. A sole individual on a desert island has no rights – because there is nobody to recognise them and to accept the responsibilities thatflow from them. Rights require some sort of group, community, collective or society,which is held together by a series of interlocking and reciprocal rights andresponsibilities. For this reason it is better to talk about “our rights” rather than themore traditional western liberal notion of “my rights” .There is another way in which human rights imply community. One of theresponsibilities that attaches to a right is the responsibility to exercise that right.There is no point in having the right to freedom of expression, or the right toeducation, or the right to vote, or the right to join a trade union, if nobody bothers toexercise that right. Indeed, every time we choose not to exercise a right we betraythose in previous generations who have fought (and sometimes died) in order toestablish that right. Sometimes it may be appropriate to do so, for example thedecision not to join a trade union that is corrupt and exploitative, or the decision tovote informal when presented with a choice between corrupt candidates. But theseare deliberate informed choices not to exercise a right, rather than the apatheticresponse of those who couldn’t be bothered. A society that respects and valueshuman rights is one where people are encouraged to exercise their rights, andaccept a responsibility to do so where they can. This is an active participatorysociety, that requires citizens to be active contributors rather than passiveconsumers; and the promotion of such a participatory society has long been theagenda of community development.Human rights, in my view, are constructed rather than naturally occurring in some positivist sense. They are constantly being constructed and reconstructed, and donot remain static. Inevitably constructions of human rights will vary according to thestandpoint of the constructor, and will be affected by culture, class, gender, race andpersonal experience. I will discuss the construction of human rights in more detaillater, but for the present the important point is that if human rights are constructed,we must ask who does the constructing? Whose definitions of human rightspredominate?One of the problems with conventional human rights discourse is that human rightsare typically defined by the powerful on behalf of the powerless. The long-standingcriticism has been that human rights were largely defined by white western males,however while this is still to some extent the case, is now being assiduouslyaddressed in the literature and the broader human rights discourse. Women’s voices,and voices from a variety of cultural backgrounds, are now present in the humanrights literature, and that literature is richer as a consequence. But this has blinded usto a more insidious form of domination of the human rights discourse. The voices thatdefine human rights are still the voices of relative privilege: for the most part it islawyers, politicians and academics, with a few key activists (e.g. from AmnestyInternational) and journalists, who have the power to define and institutionalise human rights. Those voices are no longer exclusively male or western, but they donot reflect the general population even of the developed world, let alone the poor ofthe “less developed” world. We may be addressing issues of gender and race, but wehave not really begun to address issues of class. Human rights thus remains adiscourse of the powerful about the powerless, and in that sense it itself constitutes ahuman rights abuse. It represents a privileged view of human rights, and howeverwell-intentioned that may be, it will not reflect the views of the majority world. JohanGaltung has pointed out, for example, the absence in any of the UN human rightsdocuments of the right of access to a toilet; something so taken for granted by thepeople who write human rights treaties that they do not bother to include it, and donot stop to realise that for millions of people in the “less developed” world the lack ofthis basic right is demeaning and a source of shame – there are stories, for example,of women in India having to wait until nightfall so they can perform bodily functionswith at least some degree of modesty and dignity. This, and other basic rights, willcontinue to be omitted from human rights discourse until a greater range of theworld’s population have the opportunity to access and affect that discourse.This points to the need for a more bottom-up participatory and developmentalapproach to the construction of what constitute our basic human rights, and this issurely a community development agenda. It is another example of how human rightsimplies and needs a community development approach. The idea of “human rightsfrom below” is completely foreign for the majority of lawyers, journalists, politiciansand academics who write and talk about human rights; for them it remainsexclusively a top-down perspective. This is beginning to change, and voices “frombelow” are starting to make themselves heard, not just in demanding their own rights(this has a long history, of course) but in defining what those rights ought to be andhow they should be expressed. But there is a long way to go. The human rights field,in my view, desperately needs the wisdom and expertise of community developmentworkers.So much for the ways in which human rights need community development. Theother side, how community development needs human rights, is probably morefamiliar territory. It is derived from the potential danger of community developmentthat is undertaken in a moral vacuum, and that sees its role as helping a communityto articulate where it wants to go, and then helping it to get there; even though wherethe community wants to go may be racist, exclusive or violent. Similarly, valuing acommunity’s heritage – another traditional and important aspect of community 4 development – may be valuing a heritage of bigotry, domestic violence orhomophobia. Perhaps the most extreme form of community development that doesnot take human rights into account is seen in the Hitler Youth, a highly “successful”program in terms of getting young people involved and giving them a sense ofdirection and purpose; all the key performance indicators of participation could surelybe ticked off. But it was also part of one of the most hideous regimes in the world’srecent history. This single example – there are many others – serves to emphasisehow important a human rights framework is for community development. Communitydevelopment must respect, protect and realise human rights, and so it needs to beunderstood from a human rights perspective, just as human rights need to beunderstood from a community development perspective.The argument thus far has made a fairly simple and obvious point: human rights andcommunity development are closely related, and each needs to incorporate theperspective of the other. This can be illustrated further by a linguistic similarity.Community development sees its goal as the establishment of human community ,while human rights emphasises the goal of achieving a common humanity . The twoterms are both linguistically and semantically similar, if not synonymous.This raises some important questions for both theory and practice. I will not dwell toomuch on practice, as this was the topic of a paper I gave recently at anotherconference in Melbourne, and as some of the same people may be here today I donot want to waste their time by covering the same ground, and I do not want to beaccused of making one paper serve two purposes. I will make some comments at theend of the paper about practice, but these will be brief and rather different from thepaper I gave at RMIT. But prior to that I want to consider some questions of theory.The traditional view of human rights divides the field into three so-called“generations”, civil and political rights, economic social and cultural rights, andcollective rights. The first two are reflected in the UN International Covenants, andare essentially a legacy of cold war thinking. The west (especially the USA) washappy to emphasise a rather narrow view of civil and political rights but was nevertoo enthusiastic about economic social and cultural rights, as these soundeddangerously collectivist and socialist. By contrast, the Soviet bloc emphasisedeconomic social and cultural rights for all, but was highly suspicious of theindividualism and western liberalism inherent in civil and political rights. However thepolitical imperative in the aftermath of the horrors of World War 2 was strong enough to require both sides to reach some sort of consensus on human rights, so this dualclassification was established, and remains enshrined in UN documents to this day.Later, this classification was criticised, particularly by Asian leaders (especially EastAsian and South-East Asian), who claimed that the conventional view of humanrights was, because of its Western Enlightenment origins, too individualistic, anddenied the legitimacy of other cultures which had a more collective tradition. Whilesome of this was no more than blatant political self-justification by repressive leaders,using the West’s readiness to feel guilt about being “culturally insensitive” as a way ofblunting criticism, there was also some legitimacy to the claim, and it forced westernhuman rights advocates to admit their cultural bias and to add a third category, orgeneration, of so-called “collective rights”. Thus the three “generations” of humanrights roughly equate to human rights as defined by the “first world”, the “secondworld” and the “third world”. This division of the world may once have approximatedreality, but does not bear much relevance to the contemporary world, whish is morecomplex and fluid. The three generations of human rights may have been fine whenthe world, like Caesar’s Gaul, could be divided into three parts, but in the world ofpostmodernity, where the contemporary Roman Empire, the USA, has effectivelyconquered Gaul rendering the three parts redundant, perhaps we also need a moresophisticated understanding of human rights as well as of international relations.The creation of a separate category of collective rights, the “third generation”designed to include more collective cultural traditions, is both misleading andinconsistent. It implies that those rights in the first two categories, civil and politicalrights, and economic social and cultural rights, are all individual rights which need tobe juxtaposed with a third category of collective rights. However I would argue thatthere are collective and individual dimensions to all rights, and that the first two“generations” of rights can be understood both individually and collectively. The rightof freedom of expression, for example, has a collective aspect when we consider theright of Indigenous People to be heard. As another example, the right to educationapplies to groups as well as individuals, as in the historical struggle for women toachieve the right to an equal education with men. The right to health care isunderstood collectively when we think of the scandalous state of Indigenous health,and the right of Indigenous People to adequate health care at all levels. Rightsunderstood only at an individual level tell only part of the story, and of course theydepoliticise the problem by locating the right with the individual and thereby placingthe onus on the individual to claim that right. Collective understandings of rights,however, can open up more uncomfortable political questions, as they can locate the 6 responsibility elsewhere. This is not to say that individual understandings of rights areinvalid – on the contrary, they are very important. But they are only one side ofhuman rights. And to think that collective understandings only apply to the so-called“third generation” rights, or that they only apply in countries with more Confuciancultural traditions, is misleading. So I have suggested that we do away with the thirdgeneration, which separates apparently “collective” rights into a separate categoryimplying that other rights are only individual, and instead that we insist that all humanrights have both individual and collective dimensions, and then think about what thatmeans.We also need to apply the same reasoning to the other side of the equation, namelyresponsibilities, and to insist that there should be both individual and collectiveunderstandings of responsibilities, duties or obligations. Responsibilities do not lieonly with individuals, but to say this does not invalidate any notion of individualresponsibility. Across both the rights and responsibilities dimensions, therefore, wecan consider the relative place of individual and collective understandings. Here weare inevitably affected in our analysis by ideological factors, and different ideologiesor value systems will suggest that the balance between individual and collectiverights and responsibilities be understood in different ways. This can be seen, perhapssimplistically, in the following diagram, using a simple 2 by 2 matrix to identify fourtraditions of the relationship of individual and collective rights and responsibilities:

Figure 1: Rights and Responsibilities: Individual and Collective RightsIndividual

see: http://www.scribd.com/doc/17103404/Jim-Ife-Linking-Community-Development-and-Human-Rights PAGE 6.

  The dominant human rights discourse in western societies such as Australia has ofcourse been that of liberalism, emphasising individual rights and individualresponsibilities, in the process devaluing both collective rights and collective responsibilities. But it is only one cell of the matrix, and the other three also havelegitimate claims on our practice: the socialist tradition which seeks to articulate thecollective responsibility for the meeting of individual need, the Confucian traditionwhere the individual has duties to contribute and it is the collective whole that has theright and is seen to benefit, and the communitarian tradition seeking to understandboth rights and responsibilities collectively. The dominance of the liberal discoursehas given the west a somewhat limited view of human rights, which has limited boththeory and practice, and this suggests that an important task is to emphasise thecollective aspects of both rights and responsibilities, to move beyond traditionalconservative western formulations, and understand human rights and responsibilitiesacross all four of the cells of the matrix, recognising the importance of both theindividual and the collective, and the relationships between them. Communitydevelopment, of course, stands for just such a project, as it seeks to emphasise ourcommon experiences in community, and to emphasise that it is only through anenriched experience of community that we can hope to achieve our full humanity.In this way, we can see that community development has an important role to playacross the whole spectrum of human rights, and not merely with the so-called “thirdgeneration” rights. Indeed, if it is true that it is only in community that we can realiseour human rights, as I have suggested above, then community development workersare also human rights workers. This places community development in a far morecentral position in the human rights field, a place traditionally occupied by lawyers.The role that lawyers have played, and continue to play, in human rights activism isobviously important, indeed essential. But the dominance of the law in human rightsdiscourse has led to a narrow view of human rights, has emphasised those rights thatcan be most readily protected or realised through legal structures and processes,and has led us to believe that it is primarily through the law that human rights workcan take place. Human rights, in my view, involve all aspects of our humanity, andinvolve everything we do in interaction with other human beings. No single disciplineor profession can hope to cover this vast field, and clearly a multidisciplinaryapproach is required, including, but not privileging, the law. But if we take the view ofhuman rights that I have been suggesting, community development must, bydefinition, play a central role.The view of human rights I have discussed so far is much broader than the idea ofhuman rights portrayed by the dominant discourse, namely civil and political rights,understood largely individually. To emphasise this, I believe it is useful not only to 8 eliminate the idea of collective rights as a separate category, but also to look furtherat the other two generations, in particular the so-called “second generation”,economic social and cultural rights. I see no particular reason why these three shouldbe grouped together, as social rights, economic rights and cultural rights are distinctcategories, each with different characteristics and raising different questions. Togroup them together like this devalues their significance and their distinct differences.In addition, the dominant discourse of economic rationalism can lead to anassumption that economic rights are the most important, and social and culturalrights are thereby devalued if they are included in the same category. In my ownreworking of human rights, therefore, I separated economic rights, social rights andcultural rights, and I further drew a distinction between survival rights (shelter, food,health, etc), which are commonly classed within “social rights” and the other socialrights, such as the rights to have children, form relationships, choice of family,recreation, etc. To these I then added yet another category, namely spiritual rights,as I considered that for many people it is inadequate to cover them solely within theframework of cultural rights, as many understandings of the spiritual extend wellbeyond the cultural. Finally, I added environmental rights, traditionally understood aswithin the third generation of collective rights, but needing a category of their own.Of course such categorisation has its problems, as the boundaries between themmay seem to be rigid and impermeable, when of course we need to understand it in amuch more fluid way. Let’s not make the mistake of simply dividing Gaul into sevenparts rather than three; we need to look also at how the seven interact, overlap andreinforce each other.However such categories can be useful for extending ourthinking, and giving us a new construction that in turn invites further deconstructionand reconstruction. I have used this taxonomy with groups as a framework forworkshops on understanding human rights, and have found it very successful. Butthe point for our present purposes is the discovery that the list of rights categories Ihad come up with was, with the exception of survival rights, identical to the list I hadcome up with some years earlier in seeking to conceptualise communitydevelopment, namely social, economic, political, cultural, environmental, andpersonal/spiritual. Starting at a very different point I had, quite unintentionally, endedup with an almost identical framework for understanding human rights. This furthersuggests that the commonalities between human rights and community developmentare worth exploration. Examination of both human rights and communitydevelopment in these different domains, and an analysis of how they relate to eachother, could represent a powerful framework for theoretical development.

 There is another way in which community development and human rights can cometogether at a theoretical level. This can be seen by identifying two dimensions whichare important both for community development theory and for human rights theory.One of these dimensions is the one familiar to all community workers, namely thecontrast between working “from above” and “from below”, alternatively known as “topdown” and “bottom up” development. It also relates to our assumptions about socialclass, and emphasises the importance of class analysis in community work, ascommunity development is all too often imposed on the less privileged and thepowerless by the privileged and the powerful. Similarly, it can emphasise theimportance of a gender analysis, as “top down” work is characteristically patriarchal,while a more feminist approach is likely to be more “bottom up”. In this form,community development simply reinforces class and/or gender oppression, and is allthe more insidious because it appears so benign. Progressive communitydevelopment theory naturally favours the approach from below, although as we knowmany government programs assume the a top-down formula, with ideas of expertise,planning, specified objectives, and accountability upwards, causing a major dilemmafor community workers.The other dimension is that of working “from outside” or “from inside”, or external andinternal community work. This is often equated with “from above” and “from below”,but for analytical purposes it is important to separate these. Community developmentthat is from within the community itself can still be from above, where thatdevelopment is initiated and controlled by community elites, potentially working in theinterests of those elites rather than the community as a whole, as is the case withsome Local Government community work, for example. And, similarly, communitydevelopment may be initiated externally, but can be “from below”, examples beingthe programs of international NGOs such as Oxfam/Community Aid Abroad, orcommunity workers coming from outside the community but using a specificallyGandhian perspective of working with the poorest of the poor. The two dimensionsare therefore different. Working from above risks reinforcing class oppression, whileworking from outside risks colonialist practice.The two dimensions can be combined in a table, classifying different approaches tocommunity development, as follows: 10 Figure 2: Dimensions of Community Development

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NGOs e.g.Oxfam/CAALocalgrassroots Community development literature tends to criticise the top left model, and seeks tomove the discourse of practice into one of the other cells of the diagram. While theideal may well be seen as the bottom right cell, this may often be unrealistic givenvarious constraints, and the hope is often to move to it via either the top right orbottom left cells, depending on the nature of the power analysis that we mightundertake. Sometimes there are simply not the resources or community resilience orconfidence to start working immediately in the bottom-right cell, and otherapproaches are required, at least initially. This table, however, can assist inidentifying the potential dangers of class or gender oppression, and of colonialistpractice.These two dimensions are also important when we consider human rights. Top-downapproaches are where human rights are defined by opinion leaders, politicians,media, laws, UN declarations or other dominant discourses, whereas bottom-upapproaches are where people are involved in constructing ideas of human rights forthemselves. I have termed these the discursive and reflexive approaches to humanrights, and they are analogous to community development practised from above orfrom below. The other dimension, which might be called the colonial/indigenousdimension, has long been important in human rights, and expresses the debate andconflict over cultural relativism and the imposition of human right standards fromoutside, usually from Western Enlightenment perspectives which do not alwaysresonate with other cultural and intellectual traditions. Here a similar table can bedrawn:

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 These dimensions, then, can be shown to have a relevance for both human rightsand community development, and represent another convergence between the twoat a theoretical level. A further point of convergence is around globalisation.Community development has not only been affected by globalisation, as in theattempts to develop some form of community practice involving globalisation frombelow, but it also has become a point of resistance to the forces of globalisation,given the reaction of localisation and the renewed interest in developing localcommunity-based structures as people feel increasingly by-passed by the globaleconomy and the global culture. Similarly, human rights also stands against thecurrent form of globalisation. Though it is by its very nature a global discourse, theidea of human rights has been central to the arguments of the anti-globalisationprotesters, who claim with justification that globalisation violates human rights.Indeed, human rights represent one of the few legitimate discourses of opposition tothe dominant discourse of economic rationalism and global capitalism; the idearesonates strongly with many people, suggesting a perspective that privileges humanvalues over economic values, and the interests of a wider humanity over the interestsof powerful elites; for this reason if for no other, human rights is a critically importantdiscourse for our times.However this convergence between community development and human rights is notalways evident in the reality of practice. Those who call themselves human rightsworkers or human rights activists overwhelmingly use an advocacy model, to the

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extent that some people even seem to equate human rights work with advocacy. Thisis, perhaps, a legacy of the legal domination of human rights discourse. Advocacy, ofcourse, is important, but if human rights are to be about reaching our full humanpotential, and respecting each other’s rights by fulfilling our responsibilities, morethan advocacy is required. Indeed, advocacy alone represents a somewhatconservative and top-down view of human rights, as it assumes that the rights areprotected and provided by the powerful, and advocacy directed towards the powerfulis what is required if our rights are to be realised. This does not take into accountideas of human rights from below, as being constructed not merely by dominantdiscourses of power, but also as being reflexively constructed in our daily humaninteractions with each other. Human rights work requires the range of roles and skillsthat community workers have developed, of which advocacy is only one, and notalways the most appropriate for helping people, groups, communities and institutionsto identify and enact their mutual rights and responsibilities. Other community workroles and skills include facilitation, education, communication, consciousness raising,organising, building solidarity, inclusiveness, and activism. Here communitydevelopment has quite a bit to teach human rights. Similarly, there are someprinciples of human rights practice that are important for community development.These include an analysis of rights and responsibilities, non-violence, the use of legalconventions, processes and institutions.Community development can be a basis for human rights work, and human rightscan be a basis for community development, and as each is explored in relation to theother, the boundaries between them become blurred. Whether they are actually thesame thing, or closely related ideas that are part of some larger project, is a questionwe could debate. It may be that a human rights base for community developmentblinds us to other important community development dimensions, and it may be thata community development approach to human rights similarly limits human rightswork. I do not want to pursue the analysis any further, because that is really the taskof this important conference, and it can only be achieved by sharing the extensiveknowledge, wisdom and experience represented among the participants. I have triedto draw some parallels between the two, as I have myself become increasingly awareof many points of commonality, but it is up to all of us in the coming days to work outtogether what it all might mean.

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