Rights Based approaches to climate change

This short NGO practitioner-oriented article appeared in Monday Developments, the journal of InterAction, the largest umbrella organization of US development and relief NGOs. Based on the case study of our strategic evaluation of Plan Guatemala's transition towards a Rights Based Approach (RBA), the article analyzes the trade offs and challenges involved in implementing RBA for an child-sponsorship based NGO such as Plan, which in the past primarily engaged in service delivery activities.

This study aims to assess the cumulative risks and impacts of all REDD+ initiatives in Mai-Ndombe on the rights and subsistence of local communities and Indigenous Peoples, using existing tools while taking into account gray areas of the REDD+ process. Findings come from existing project documentation, field studies conducted in recent years, and a series of interviews with REDD+ stakeholders in Mai-Ndombe. The study provides a mapping of all existing and planned REDD+ initiatives in the province, as well as a cross-cutting contextual analysis of risks which connects REDD+ to human rights. This is followed by an assessment of these initiatives’ cumulative impacts as well as of national and project strategies to address and reduce risks. It thus offers a perspective on the link between the accumulation of REDD+ initiatives and conflicts at different scales.

: The article explores reconfiguring the concept of academic success in Zimbabwe, now premised on the attainment of benchmark Doctrine Education 5.0 pillars set by the Ministry of Higher and Tertiary Education, Innovation, Science and Technology Development and enforced by Zimbabwe Council for Higher Education (ZimCHE) as a quality assurance agency. It reviews academic success standards based on teaching and learning; research, community engagement; innovation; and industrialisation. Targeting, HEI quality assurance officers, managers, and students as the population, the study purposively selected three HEIs based on stated science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) mandates drawn from Zimbabwe’s 20 registered public and private universities. Questionnaire-elicited data were analysed using the Statistical Package for Social Scientists and presented in graphs derived from descriptive statistics to enhance meaning in findings. Findings show the five-fold Doctrine Educati...

Student-involvement in higher-education is necessary for quality-assurance outcomes, yet such involvement also threatens attainment of quality assured, presenting the paradox of higher-education (HE) systems. With the massification of enrolment-figures across the HE sector has been the need to balance HEI and student-centred perspectives. The notion of students as co-producers, consumers, and products of HEI processes creates discord in the quality assurance arena. Contradictory problems manifest when the producer must satisfy the consumer and audit quality of the products, yet students are all of these. This article explored the extent to which student-involvement fosters quality as well as sets parameters beyond which such participation cannot be done without compromising quality-assurance and desired academic-success. The artile drew a line for student-involvement and quality- assurance as double-barreled and sometimes paradoxical, contradictory pursuits. Data elicited from two H...

This study aims to assess the cumulative risks and impacts of all REDD+ initiatives in Mai-Ndombe on the rights and subsistence of local communities and Indigenous Peoples, using existing tools while taking into account gray areas of the REDD+ process. Findings come from existing project documentation, field studies conducted in recent years, and a series of interviews with REDD+ stakeholders in Mai-Ndombe. The study provides a mapping of all existing and planned REDD+ initiatives in the province, as well as a cross-cutting contextual analysis of risks which connects REDD+ to human rights. This is followed by an assessment of these initiatives’ cumulative impacts as well as of national and project strategies to address and reduce risks. It thus offers a perspective on the link between the accumulation of REDD+ initiatives and conflicts at different scales.

Whilst it is increasingly recognised that socio-political contexts shape climate change adaptation decisions and actions at all scales, current modes of development typically fail to recognise or adequately challenge these contexts where they constrain capacity to adapt. To address this failing, we consider how a rights-based approach broadens understanding of adaptive capacity while directing attention towards potential causes of marginalisation and exclusion. Drawing on human rights principles and lessons from rights-based practice, we develop a novel framework for analysis that assesses adaptive capacity in relation to four analytical spheres: 1) the state; 2) the legal, 3) the political, and 4) the social. We apply this framework to the case of aquatic agricultural systems in Timor-Leste to consider its utility in identifying the strengths, weaknesses, and potential for building adaptive capacity in response to climate change. The result is a ‘thick' qualitative analysis that unpacks the complexity and context specificity of social institutions, organisations, networks and actors that have a bearing on adaptive capacity. The findings reveal gaps in state-community accountability and weaknesses in transparency and mechanisms of formal justice. Certain individuals and groups are marginalised and even excluded from participation in decision making and public life, while the potential for empowerment is undermined by processes at different scales. Yet, statutory law provides some potential for building adaptive capacity in terms of a guarantee of environmental rights and protection for vulnerable groups. In addition, customary resource management mechanisms offer potential for flexibility and learning that supports equity in meeting ongoing environmental change. This empirical study supports an emerging body of thought that adaptive capacity requires development actors to take account of the socio-political contexts in which people adapt, and offers methods to support modes of development practice that open spaces for transformative adaptation, shifting adaptation focus from immediate problems and towards underlying inequality and how it structures risk. A rights perspective reveals and engages with the underlying politics of adaptation embedded in the interconnected and multi-layered nature of the state and the community, exposing mechanisms of marginalisation in relation to adaptive capacity. By doing so through human rights principles, it is an approach that addresses normative questions in transformation, helping resolve the inherent trade-offs and conflicts that represent one of “the most fundamental challenges facing development and the social relations that underpin capacities to adapt to climate risk” (Pelling, 2011).