Introduction
For a long time, development practice had centered on addressing the immediate and visible needs of communities, such as food, shelter, and health services, through sectoral projects and service delivery. While this approach helped alleviate the symptoms of poverty, it often positioned people as passive recipients rather than active agents of change, and in doing so, risked overlooking the deeper structural injustices that sustained inequality and poverty in the world. This realization birthed the idea of human rights-based approaches (HRBA).
Although first conceived within the global development arena, HRBA has steadily expanded into diverse fields such as natural resource governance, food security, technology, education, migration, among others. At its core, HRBA describes work shaped by international human rights standards. However, these standards are more than just legal texts. They represent a broader philosophical perspective about dignity, equality, and accountability.
The Early 1990s: Integrating Rights into Development
The origins of HRBA can be traced to debates in the early 1990s, when United Nations (UN) agencies, donors, and international NGOs began exploring how to integrate rights into development practice. The UN later defined HRBA as “a conceptual framework for the process of human development that is normatively based on international human rights standards and operationally directed to promoting and protecting human rights.” In essence, the approach aims to analyze the inequalities that are at the root of development problems and address discriminatory practices and unjust power distributions that hinder progress and often leave certain groups behind.
Yet, despite this definition, there has never been a single, universally accepted meaning. Scholars caution against reducing HRBA to a fixed idea, noting that its strength lies in its adaptability. Over time, HRBA has become specialised and diverse, interpreted differently depending on thematic focus, agency profile, and political or cultural context. This elasticity is often described as its greatest virtue since it allows HRBA to be customised to local or thematic realities while keeping human rights standards at the forefront of planning and practice.
Why HRBA Matters
Unlike other approaches, like needs-based approaches, HRBA emphasizes rights over charity. It empowers marginalized groups to assert their entitlements, demand accountability, and seek redress. By grounding interventions in global legal human rights frameworks, HRBA provides legitimacy and tools for advocacy, social mobilization, and justice.
In the governance of land and other natural resources, HRBA is transformative. It reframes communities not as passive recipients of land allocations or natural resource projects, but as rights-holders entitled to secure tenure, fair participation, and protection against exploitation.
At Tenure Advisory, we support our clients to mainstream HRBA into natural resource governance by:
- Embedding rights-based principles into policies and laws on natural resource governance
- Training governments, CSOs and communities on HRBA and its application to natural resource governance
- Designing participatory processes that amplify the voices of marginalized communities.
- Building accountability mechanisms that hold duty-bearers responsible for respecting, protecting and fulfilling human rights in natural resource governance interventions.
Key Takeaway
The evolution of HRBA shows us that it is not a rigid formula but a flexible compass. The approaches vary widely, and there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. The choice of approach and its extent depend on the specific context and field. HRBA’s origins in development debates have given way to applications across multiple disciplines, always with the same goal: to place human rights at the center of policy and practice.
Next in the series, we’ll explore the distinctive attributes of HRBA and how its principles shape interventions across sectors