Integrating Human Rights and Development: Strategies, Impact and Emerging Issues

The objective of the research project is to critically analyse, understand and explain the role of human rights in development with a view to clarify the opportunities and challenges of various strategies to linking human rights and development and contribute to the further development of such strategies. It studies the role of international, national as well as local actors in processes that either promote or harm the realisation of human rights and sustainable development. The project is composed of two main research strands. The first focuses on the impact of some of the established strategies aimed at integrating human rights and development, including traditional human rights development projects and human rights mainstreaming. The second research strand studies some emerging perspectives to integrating human rights and development agendas by examining the relevance and sufficiency of human rights monitoring and accountability regimes to the changing and globalising development processes. The multidisciplinary research project makes use of both legal and social science research methods involving field visits to countries such as Bolivia and Ethiopia. It seeks to contribute to the scholarly debate on the integration of human rights and development and to the work of policy-makers and practitioners in the two areas.