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When aid NGOs embrace the human rights-based approach: human rights norms, religiosity, and civic culture

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Abstract

International aid non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have generally been seen as emergency relief organizations that help people in dire conditions survive. Beginning in the late 1980s, this idea began to change when a new development scheme called the human rights-based approach (HRBA) emerged; this approach promotes the civil and political rights of marginalized people to achieve sustainable development ends. This HRBA has become the new norm, and NGOs have begun to undertake political activities in the hope of producing long-term development effects. However, some NGOs have maintained their traditional missions limited to humanitarian relief. What caused the divergent responses of NGOs to the changing development norms? The research employs large-N logit regression modeling to identify the factors that determined the divergence in NGOs’ activities. The findings reveal that the following variables matter: contact with human rights norms, the civic culture of the home country, and the religiosity of the original mission.

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Notes

  1. The division between CPRs and ESCRs has been described in international covenants such as the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) in 1966 (Donnelly, 2003).

  2. Barnett (2018) touches upon the nuanced intersectionality of humanitarianism and human rights. Aid NGOs mainly motivated by humanitarianism may fail to achieve sustainable development even though they save the lives of people facing immediate threats. Such long-term development goals are less pressing for humanitarian NGOs. However, long-term efficacy is an integral part of the human rights-based approach, which is inextricably related to political empowerment (i.e., human rights), rather than simply the survival or the urgent economic support of people in developing countries. Thus, humanitarianism and human rights should not be conflated in the conceptual discourse about these distinct approaches to development.

  3. Another important question is whether the HRBA is practically conducive to sustainable development. There are divergent views; some scholars like Nelson and Dorsey (2003; 2007) argue that the HRBA is effective for long-term and sustainable development, while others (Campbell et al., 2019; Broberg and Sano, 2018) disagree. Even though the efficacy of the HRBA matters from both an academic and a policy standpoint, the focus of this paper is to examine why (or under what conditions) aid NGOs change into human rights advocates.

  4. See Stewart (1989), Nelson and Dorsey (2003; 2007), and Cornwall and Nyanmu-Musembi (2004) for how ideas about human rights came to be accepted as norms.

  5. See Lang (2013), Yanacopulos (2016), Cameron and Kwiecien (2019), and Green (2016) for the ways that NGOs engage in public policymaking.

  6. Putnam (1993) argues that elements of civic culture include civic involvement, political equality, social solidarity, and social structures of cooperation.

  7. There are a variety of indicators that measure political culture, such as CIRI human rights data, Freedom House reports, or Polity data. These compare not only Western democracies but also authoritarian countries. However, these indicators cannot distinguish between Western democratic countries, while the EIU can, particularly among the seven democratic countries that this study examines.

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Funding

This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea [NRF-2020S1A5A2A03045536]; and The Marquette Fellowship and The James C. Carter, S. J. Faculty Fellowship from Loyola University New Orleans.

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  1. Handong Global University, 558 Handong-Ro, Heunghae-eup, Buk-gu, Pohang-si, Gyeongsangbuk-do, Republic of Korea

    Junhyup Kim

  2. Department of Political Science, Loyola University New Orleans, 6363 St. Charles Avenue, New Orleans, LA, 70118, USA

    Young Soo Kim

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Kim, J., Kim, Y.S. When aid NGOs embrace the human rights-based approach: human rights norms, religiosity, and civic culture. Int Polit 60, 25–44 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41311-021-00365-6

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