Human rights
What’ s the goal? what’ s the purpose? observations on human rights impact assessment
Assessing the impact of human rights projects
Authors:
B.A. Andreassen; Hans-Otto Sano
Publisher:
Norwegian Centre for Human Rights , 2004
Over the last decade, support for international human rights and democratisation has grown steadily as an area of international development co-operation, and since the mid-1980s, there has been a shift in policy orientation from principle commitment to actual support for human rights programs and projects. Comparatively large resources have been used on supporting human rights and democracy interventions by governmental, inter-governmental and non-governmental institutions and organisations.
These developments have created a need for developing indicators and approaches for measuring and assessing impact of human rights and democracy projects. At the international level, the interest among human rights organisations at local and national levels is matched by international organisations to learn more about the effects of joint (or “partnership”) activities, requiring the construction of analytical models and tool for impact assessment.
The paper highlights the need for formulating indicators that are accurate and appropriately related to the goals and objectives of human rights projects. It assumes that this has been neglected in international human rights project work, as well as in human rights research.
The authors argue that even if there are many methodological problems connected to making accurate impact analysis in this field, it is still possible to develop better methods and analytical tools for making inferences about the impact of human rights projects than has been done so far.
