Human Rights Indicators inDevelopment : An Introduction

McInerney-Lankford, Siobhan ; Sano, Hans-Otto

World Bank

关键词: ADEQUATE FOOD;    ADVOCACY;    ANTIDISCRIMINATION;    APPLICABLE LAW;    CERTIFICATION;   

DOI  :  10.1596/978-0-8213-8604-0
RP-ID  :  57884

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

【 摘 要 】

Human rights indicators are central tothe application of human rights standards in context andrelate essentially to measuring human rights realization,both qualitatively and quantitatively. They offer anempirical or evidence-based dimension to the normativecontent of human rights legal obligations and provide ameans of connecting those obligations with empirical dataand evidence and, in this way, relate to human rightsaccountability and the enforcement of human rightsobligations. Human rights indicators are important for bothassessment and diagnostic purposes: the assessment functionof human rights indicators relates to their use inmonitoring accountability, effectiveness, and impact; thediagnostic purpose relates to measuring the current state ofhuman rights implementation and enjoyment in a givencontext, whether regional, country-specific, or local. Thispaper offers a preliminary review of the foregoing in thedevelopment context and a general perspective on thesignificance of human rights indicators for developmentprocesses and outcomes. It is not intended to beprescriptive and does not provide specific operationalrecommendations on the use of human rights indicators indevelopment projects. Nor does it advocate a particularapproach or mode of integrating human rights in developmentor argue for a rights-based approach to development. Thispaper is designed to provide development practitioners witha preliminary view on the possible relevance, design, anduse of human rights indicators in development policy andpractice. It also introduces a basic conceptual frameworkabout the relationship between rights and development,including in the World Bank context. It then moves tomethodological approaches on human rights measurement,exploring in general terms different types of human rightsindicators and their potential implications for developmentat three levels of convergence or integration. The papertherefore offers a theoretical introduction to a complexarea of growing relevance in a number of areas ofdevelopment that may be of interest to practitioners andscholars in a variety of institutional settings.