Unpacking rights and wrongs : do human rights make a difference? : the case of water rights in India and South Africa

Abstract

This paper focuses on why poor and marginalised people still lack access to economic, social and cultural \nrights (also known as positive rights), despite a fairly mainstream support to positive rights in mainstream \ndevelopment debates. In part this is due to the problematic division between so-called first and second \ngeneration of rights. This is particularly true in the water debate where dominant narratives more often see \nwater as an economic good rather than as a human right. \nRights also fail to be realised due to sins of omission where poor states may lack the institutional \ncapacity or financial resources to provide rights. Similarly, citizens may not be aware of rights and may not \nhave the capacity to mobilise around them. Lack of rights may also be due to sins of commission. Thus states \nor non-state actors such as the World Bank may knowingly put vulnerable people’s rights at risk or even \nviolate them with impunity. Economic globalisation also leads to policies that violate basic rights where \ndiffuse and unclear rules of accountability exist for global and local players. \nThe paper focuses on the right to water in South Africa to examine sins of omission and looks at \nforced displacement caused by the Narmada dams in India to examine sins of commission. In both cases, \nit examines local-level dynamics of rights grievances and claims and argues that there is a blurriness \nbetween policy and practice around rights practice and violation and that there are often overlaps between \nsins of omission and commission. Finally, the paper highlights the need for accountability structures and \nmechanisms through which compliance and answerability can become an indispensable aspect of the \nhuman rights regime. \nKeywords: human rights; economic, social and cultural rights; citizenship; accountability; right to water; \nforced displacement; Narmada Project; India and South Africa.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 14 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.