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Key Text Operationalising the Rights Agenda: DFID’s Participatory Rights Assessment Methodologies (PRAMs) Project

Author: M A Brocklesby and S Crawford
Date: 2004
Size: 18 pages (688 KB)

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Summary

How successful have rights-based approaches (RBA) been in reducing poverty? How can RBAs best be operationalised? This study, by the Department for International Development (DFID), assesses the success of its Participatory Rights Assessment Methodologies (PRAMs). PRAMs are intended to create institutional change to ensure participation, inclusion and obligation to all human rights for all people. The study argues that PRAMs re-enforce institutional learning: rights based development brings positive changes in the relationships between people at all levels and stages in development.

Rights-based development (RBD) meets people's needs. Moreover, it is based on principles that extend beyond needs and sets the foundations for more sustainable development. A PRAMs approach politicises analysis, highlighting power relations and processes of exclusion and discrimination. When RBD approaches and methods are used, people are empowered. Duty bearers feel more secure in their work and claim holders feel able to join in decision-making and share in roles and responsibilities for their own development. This leads to greater commitment and investment from all stakeholders.

Not only does RBD politicise development, it also builds in a strong action-orientation linked to institutional accountability and transparency.

Rights-based approaches address structural inequality. However, it takes practice to develop appropriate methods and tools.
RBD demands a commitment to change the way representatives of the state and civil society organisations work with, and respond to, the demands of citizens.
RBD involves building a basic understanding of the wider rights environment.
This includes understanding the formal and informal local rights systems within which people live their lives and develop their own concepts and capacities to address rights issues.
Politicisation means that representatives of donor institutions have to forgo a position of neutrality or supervision and become part of the less manageable process of transformative change.
Promotion of an RBD process depends on the manner of facilitation: RBD facilitators need highly developed capacities and skills for innovative, flexible participatory work with stakeholders at all levels.

RBA does work and can achieve results. Nevertheless, there are significant challenges thrown up by the PRAMs process. In order to be successful, it is necessary to:

Design and implement work-based RBD training to increase skills and capacities. It is important to allocate sufficient time for field-based skills.
Recognise that concentration of efforts in civil society alone can bring many benefits but it will always be more cost effective to work with government and civil society together.
Identify a powerful "hook" for RBD in which a wide range of stakeholders have investment and which must be fulfilled.
Identify a "champion" within the organisation to promote and support all RBD work.
Introduce rights issues in ways that stakeholders find relevant and appropriate. Increase understanding on the incremental approach to fulfilling rights.
Work with mixed-level teams to promote chances for relationship change from the outset. Set success measures that are appropriate to all stakeholders and generated by them.

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Source: Brocklesby, M.A. and Crawford, S., 2004, ‘Operationalising the Rights Agenda: DFID’s Participatory Rights Assessment Methodologies (PRAMs) Project’, Centre for Development Studies, Swansea