Donor assessments
Measuring rights and governance: the quantification of aid conditionality
Human rights as an aid condition: An assessment
Authors:
K. Desormeau
Publisher:
Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, 2005
Donors have long used human rights arguments to justify the giving or withholding of development assistance. Until the late 1990s, however, donor governments relied mainly on subjective judgments.
Recently, in contrast, there has been a push for more systematic, “objective,” standards-based systems. In some cases, this push has manifested itself in the creation of statistical frameworks, composite indices, and ranking systems, which apply the same set of criteria to all would-be aid recipients in order to assess their performance in the areas of “human rights” and “governance.”
This paper examines this new wave in human rights measurement. Looking principally at the measurement tools currently employed by the World Bank and the U.S. Millennium Challenge Account, the author considers where the discussion on ODA conditionality and human rights measurement is going, and how the human rights community must be involved in it.
This paper argues that in their eagerness to see returns on their investments in terms of poverty reduction, economic growth, and increased participation in the global economy, the World Bank and the Millennium Challenge Account have allowed measurement methodologies to run ahead of clear conceptual thinking about what exactly they are measuring, and what data sources are best suited to capturing those phenomena.
Reluctant to get involved in the ethical mess of aid conditionality, the author says, the international human rights community has failed to help dispel this conceptual confusion. They have thus lost control of a critical part of their own mission. While they work to promote human rights around the world, what “human rights” means is being re-defined without their input.
The paper concludes that the human rights community must add its unique voice to the debate on ODA, lest it should find itself marginalized from the development agenda—and lest development should be pursued in ways that fail to respect human rights.
