CULTURE AND HUMAN RIGHTS - Development Geography - page 209

These range from more narrow understandings of culture as a product
or tool to achieve economic growth, to more progressive understand-
ings that seek to mobilize culture to achieve social justice.
• Rights-based approaches to development have become increasingly
prominent since the late 1990s. Key elements are the link between
development and human rights, greater accountability of states and
international actors, an emphasis on empowerment, participation
and non-discrimination, and attention to vulnerable groups.
• Criticisms of rights-based development include the fact that the
'state-centric' approach establishes the nation state as the primary
site for accountability and responsibility for fulfilling people's rights,
which contradicts the dominant neoliberal paradigm and contempo-
rary era of globalization. The universalist and individualistic nature
of the international human rights legal framework has also been
criticized for not taking account of cultural differences and the com-
munitarian values evident in much of the global South.
• Cultural relativist arguments that people's rights and obligations
can only be defined in relation to particular cultural, ideological and
political contexts have also been subject to criticisms for failing to
address important development concerns that affect people around
the world. Notions of 'culture' and 'tradition' are often appropriated
by powerful actors to impose their views on societies.
• This raises the question of the potential of rights-based approaches
to challenge sociocultural norms and institutional discrimination.
Development interventions need to engage with the constantly shift-
ing web of meanings, cultural values, practices and social relations
in particular places in order to fulfil people's economic, social and
cultural rights.

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further reading

Schech and Haggis' Culture and Development (2000) provides a critical
introduction to the relationship between culture, development and
human rights, drawing on useful case studies to illustrate the arguments.
Similarly, Radcliffe's edited topic, Culture and Development in a
Globalizing World (2006b) gives a helpful overview of recent approaches
to culture and development from a range of global contexts. Schech
and Haggis' collection, Development: a Cultural Studies Reader (2002),
contains extracts from classic texts relating to culture and development
by post-colonial and post-development theorists, such as Edward Said,