International Organizations and Human Rights: Realizing, Resisting or Repackaging the Right to Water?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
International (or intergovernmental) organizations involved in development cooperation have not historically engaged with the international human rights community. However, since the mid-1990s, a rights-based approach to development has been increasingly promoted in an attempt to integrate human rights into the activities of various international organizations. Using the right to water as a case study, this paper examines how international human rights are understood by intergovernmental organizations involved in development cooperation. Based on empirical evidence (including elite interviews), the right to water, international human rights, and international law were generally not seen by practitioners to be relevant to on-the-ground development activities. “Rights” was seen to constitute untouchable technical, legal, and often political language, which the international organizations lacked the mandate in which to engage. Alternatively, or sometimes simultaneously, human rights were seen to be simply a development outcome. Rights-based approaches appeared to have little influence on programming activities with practitioners explaining it was not clear what such an approach meant in practice. Despite the clarification intended by the United Nations (UN) Common Understanding, the term “rights-based approaches” was used loosely and variably, and typically associated with vague procedural principles, such as participation, nondiscrimination, and access to information, that were often explained to come within existing approaches to development. With little association of rights-based approaches with the international human rights framework, particularly the treaty body system, this paper calls for a reinjection of such a framework, particularly increased reference to applicable legal obligations and normative standards, into development cooperation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.012 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.047 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.016 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".