Ethics and Social Welfare, 2013 Vol. 7, No. 2, 109 123, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17496535.2013.779002
‘Power, not Pity’: Poverty and Human Rights Ruth Lister ‘Power, not pity’ is a demand articulated by the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign in the United States. The article discusses the ways in which some poverty activists are deploying an ethical discourse of human rights as a way of thinking about, talking about and mobilising against poverty and as a way of articulating concrete demands. They are staking a claim to power and to recognition as well as redistribution. It concludes that as an ethical discourse human rights performs an important symbolic and mobilising function but that its effectiveness as a political tool in combating poverty is yet to be proven. Keywords
Activism; Citizenship; Human Rights; Poverty; Recognition
‘Power, not pity’ is a demand articulated by the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign in the United States. It is an example of how poverty activists are increasingly deploying a discourse of human rights in order to stake their claim to power and to recognition as well as redistribution. As Amartya Sen (who has been instrumental in the United Nations’ adoption of a human rights-based approach to poverty) has argued, human rights are best regarded as ‘a set of ethical claims’ rather than in narrow legalistic terms (1999, p. 229). These claims stem from recognition of the inherent dignity and equal worth of human beings. Thus, human rights have been described as an expression of ‘systemically derived ethical principles or social values’, which are ‘constitutive of our personhood’ (Dean 2004, p. 201). As such, they ‘govern how all of us together ought to design the basic rules of our common life’ (Pogge 2002, p. 47). A human rights approach to poverty thus raises fundamental ethical questions about how people in poverty are regarded and treated and about the responsibilities of others towards them. This article first, attempts to explain the emergence of a human rights poverty discourse by placing it in the context of the changing texture of social citizenship in advanced welfare states. It then explores in turn the ways in which a human rights ethic offers a way of: thinking about; talking about and mobilising against Ruth Lister is Emeritus Professor of Social Policy at Loughborough University and a Labour member of the House of Lords. She is honorary president of the Child Poverty Action Group and has published widely on poverty, citizenship, social justice and gender. Correspondence to: Ruth Lister, Department of Social Sciences, Loughborough University, Loughborough LE11 3TU, UK; Email: M.R.Lister@ lboro.ac.uk # 2013 Taylor & Francis
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poverty; and framing concrete demands for social rights, when human rights overlap with citizenship rights. Some brief concluding comments provide an overall assessment of the value of a human rights ethical discourse to antipoverty politics.
The Significance of an Emergent Human Rights Discourse The emergent use of a discourse of human rights to challenge poverty can perhaps best be understood in the context of developments in the nature of social citizenship in many advanced welfare states. Neo-liberalism challenged the very validity of social citizenship rights. Under what is sometimes described as ‘post-neo-liberalism’ (associated for example with New Labour in the UK) social citizenship rights have had an important role to play. However, instead of standing as a bulwark against the market*as crystallised in the concept of ‘decommodification’*they have been redefined so as to support the market in the name of economic competitiveness through a process of ‘recommodification’. This reflects a broader characteristic of post-neo-liberalism, identified by Alan Finlayson: ‘All social action is identified by its function in terms of furthering economic/instrumental ends’ (2003, p. 160). This contrasts with a Kantian human rights ethic, which treats human beings as ends not means (Chan & Bowpitt 2005). Typically, adult social citizenship rights are becoming increasingly conditional (primarily on paid work obligations but also in some cases on more general behavioural change); selective (as means-testing becomes ever more dominant) and exclusive (of nation-state outsiders). Although these trends are most marked to varying degrees in residualist liberal welfare states, they can be discerned to a lesser extent also in continental European welfare states. In the UK, under the Conservative-dominated Coalition government the validity of social rights is again under attack and they are frequently represented as privileges. These trends and the dominant articulation of social citizenship ‘from above’ with reference to responsibilities rather than rights (Lister 2011) has consequences for how citizenship is perceived ‘from below’. T. H. Marshall (1950) saw citizenship rights (and in particular social rights) as a pivotal integrative force, which helps to foster a sense of membership. This integrative function has been weakened in many countries in recent years. This may help to explain why some poverty activists in Western welfare states are adopting a human rights discourse, previously associated more with the international development context, as a potentially more potent mobilising tool than that of citizenship itself. A study of ‘how human rights have been used internationally to shape new conceptions of poverty and new approaches to combating it’ points to ‘evidence that human rights have been used to challenge the effects of regressive welfare reform and the language of personal responsibility that underpins it’ (Donald &
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Mottershaw 2009, p. 1). This is especially the case in the United States where Dorothy Thomas observes that ‘the rhetoric of personal responsibility . . . relies for its effect on the dehumanisation and even demonisation of the people living in poverty themselves. Both the language and the method of human rights help to communicate a much different picture’ (2008, p. 29). Thomas explains that ‘for the past decade I have been part of a growing domestic human rights movement in the United States . . . fuelled in no small measure by the work of antipoverty activists determined to challenge fundamental misconceptions about people living in poverty and about poverty itself, and to do so by communicating and carrying out their work in terms of human rights’ (2008, p. 28). This emergent human rights movement, it has been argued, represents ‘a powerful new politics of social justice’ (Cox & Thomas 2004, p. 7). Despite the absence of a strong tradition of social citizenship in the United States (Fraser & Gordon 1994), this new politics of social justice nevertheless has echoes of the earlier civil rights and welfare rights movements as well as the women’s movement, even if they did not deploy an explicitly human rights discourse (Kornbluh 2006; Zoelle & Josephson 2006). In the 1990s, the Kensington Welfare Rights Union discovered in human rights ‘a set of international rights principles, laws, methods and strategies that provided the unifying conceptual and practical bedrock they sought’ (Cox & Thomas 2004, p. 53). Their work led to the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign, which has brought together people living in poverty and homeless people ‘to raise the issue of poverty as a human rights violation’ (www.kwru.org/ ehrc/ehrcfaq.html; Baptist & Bricker-Jenkins 2002). Its activities have included national marches, grassroots political and human rights education and legal challenge. According to Zoelle and Josephson, it has also ‘staked out a strong position in the broader pantheon of groups arguing for women’s rights as human rights’ (2006, p. 82). Donald and Mottershaw report that ‘domestic activism on human rights and poverty has burgeoned in recent years’ in the United States (2009), p. 15). Among other US examples they detail are: the use of human rights to challenge injustice in the wake of hurricane Katrina; the New York City Human Rights Initiative, which ‘mobilised more than 100 groups to use the tools of the human rights system to tackle systemic inequality’; and a ‘Right to the City’ network, which ‘links some 40 groups in nine US cities to realise an ‘‘urban human rights agenda’’’ (2009a, p.18). In Europe, the language of indivisible human rights underpins the anti-poverty and social exclusion strategy propounded by the European Anti Poverty Network (EAPN). Organisations such as Oxfam and ATD Fourth World have been instrumental in translating human rights approaches from a development to a domestic context. Donald and Mottershaw conclude from their research that in the UK, ‘work to connect human rights and poverty’ is still ‘in its infancy’ (2009, p. 42). Nevertheless, a number of antipoverty organisations have begun to make links with human rights organisations to develop a human rights approach to poverty (BIHR et al. 2008; Killeen 2008).
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According to human rights activists, a human rights-based approach (HRBA) is based on two key premises: first, that all people have human rights (we are all rights holders), and secondly that for each right there is a corresponding duty on states to respect, protect and fulfil these rights. In this way a HRBA views human rights as an ethical claim with an important role to play in governing relations between those with greater and lesser power in a democracy. Hartley Dean has argued that ‘the language of rights provides a valuable discursive resource . . . [and] has certain ‘‘alchemical’’ force in the struggles of oppressed people’ and that the emergence of a human rights discourse around poverty represents ‘a mode of discursive struggle’ (2010, p. 156; 2004, p. 200). As such it can be interpreted as contributing to a ‘new poverty knowledge’, which counters the dominant knowledge, as called for by O’ Connor (2001) in the United States. It does so as a way of: thinking about poverty; talking about and mobilising against poverty; and articulating concrete antipoverty demands.
A Way of Thinking about Poverty Human rights, with their foundational ethical commitment to the recognition of human dignity and flourishing, offer a way of thinking about poverty that goes beyond the material. The material is of course still crucially important*it is, after all, inadequate incomes and living standards which serve to define poverty and which measures of poverty typically attempt to capture. But the experience of poverty is about more than this. It is not just a disadvantaged and insecure economic condition but it is also a shameful social relation, corrosive of human dignity and flourishing, which is experienced in interactions with the wider society and in the way people in poverty are talked about and treated by politicians, officials, professionals, the media, and sometimes academics (Lister 2004). The link between a relational conceptualisation of poverty and human rights is indicated by Walsh (2006). She suggests that one way of thinking about rights is that they ‘construct relationships: relationships of power, responsibility and accountability. In other words’ that they are ‘tools for giving expression to the types of relationships between individuals and groups that we value’. By asserting an ethical set of human relationships, they help to counteract poverty as a shameful social relation and to challenge the power imbalance that shapes this social relation. The relational dimension of poverty has emerged in particular through participatory action research. This has highlighted the psychological pain all too often associated with poverty: disrespect, humiliation and an assault on dignity and self-esteem; shame and stigma; and also powerlessness, lack of voice, and denial of full human rights and diminished citizenship. These stem in part from a process of ‘othering’ by which people in poverty are treated as ‘other’ i.e. different and inferior to the rest of us. It is a process of
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differentiation and demarcation by which social distance is established and maintained (Lister 2004). Mark Peel describes the process in the introduction to his study of Australian poverty: ‘Somehow poor people have never quite become part of a common humanity. Other people always want to push them out. There must be something wrong with poor people after all’. He cites the kind of labels used to describe people in poverty: ‘loser’, ‘bludger’, ‘people who don’t count’ and observes that ‘some of our most respectable citizens seem happy enough to use those words. To treat poor people so harshly you have to see them as unlike you in a very fundamental way’. And he identifies as the underlying problem: ‘the way that people who are not poor think about those who are’ (2003, p. 10). In the UK, a common refrain is, as a group of low income parents told a parliamentary group, ‘the worst thing about living in poverty is the way it gives others permission to treat you as if you don’t matter’ (Galloway 2002, p. 13). The Commission on Poverty, Participation and Power (discussed below) observed that: ‘too often, people experiencing poverty are not treated with respect, either in general or by the people they come into contact with most . . . The lack of respect for people living in poverty was one of the clearest and most heartfelt messages which came across to us as a Commission’ (2000), p. 3). Understood in this way, the politics of poverty is transformed into ‘a politics of recognition&respect’ (to adapt Nancy Fraser’s formulation) as well as a more traditional politics of redistribution (Lister 2004). In line with Fraser’s (2008) theory of social justice, a human rights approach to poverty is underpinned by and contributes to an understanding of social justice as embracing both recognition and redistribution (and also representation). The process of ‘othering’ is aggravated when poverty interacts with social divisions such as gender, ‘race’/ethnicity and disability; another important dimension of a human rights conceptualisation is that it builds in the principle of non-discrimination. Advocates of a human rights approach also advance the broader argument that ‘human rights invite analysis of the structural causes of poverty, rather than only its symptoms’ (Donald & Mottershaw 2009, p. 5). This is primarily because ‘The language of human rights shifts the burden of responsibility for poverty off those experiencing it, focusing instead on the role of dutybearers, especially the state’ to ensure basic material needs are met (op.cit., p.43). Thomas (2008, p. 29) cites the example of US anti-hunger activists who used the language of human rights to challenge the idea that hunger in New York was the fault of the hungry; instead they identified the ‘systemic barriers’ created by government, which prevented those eligible for help accessing food stamps. This perspective is potentially important in the current UK context where individualistic explanations of poverty are gaining currency. By focusing on the structural causes of poverty and the responsibilities of the state, advocates underline ‘the potential for human rights to challenge unequal power relationships and recast the relationship between people experiencing poverty and the state’ by enabling them to hold the state accountable (op.cit., p.13). In the words of Irene Khan, former Secretary General of Amnesty
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International, ‘framing poverty in human rights terms provides an empowering framework for rights holders (people living in poverty), and an accountability framework for duty holders (those who exercise power over poor people) to respect and protect rights’ (2009, p. 13). This ‘empowering framework’ addresses the powerlessness felt by many people living in poverty both by strengthening their sense of themselves as active agents and by curbing the power exercised over them by the state and others.
A Way of Talking about and Mobilising against Poverty How people understand their situation shapes their responses to it. By offering this kind of alternative understanding and a means of expressing it, the language of human rights represents a potentially powerful mobilising tool. Cheri Honkala, one of the founders of the Kensington Welfare Rights Union in the United States, explains: ‘People have been going hungry all along, [but] without a way to describe what was happening to them. We now have a movement where poor people have taken ownership of the language and their lives’ (Cox & Thomas 2004, p. 56). Thomas describes the use of human rights by anti-poverty activists as an ‘affirmative communications strategy’, designed not just to change perceptions of poverty and of people living in poverty but also to mobilise them to act (2008, p. 28). It does so in at least two, interrelated, ways: by strengthening political agency (a function of the language of citizenship also) and by counteracting the shame of poverty, thereby making it easier to develop a collective identity associated with being poor. Donald and Mottershaw’s evaluation of the use of human rights in anti-poverty action reports that ‘interviewees said human rights can give people living in poverty ‘‘a sense of self’’ in relation to the state and a belief that they are worthy of investment’ (2009, p. 43). A sense of self is crucial to the development of political agency (Lister 2003). Indeed, a key gain identified by their study is the ‘heightened political agency of those experiencing poverty’ Donald & Mottershaw 2009, p. 6). In the United States, Cox and Thomas observe that as poor people . . . and others become aware of their human rights and organize to defend them, they gradually become the agents rather than the objects of social change. This begins to alter the power balance between those who experience human rights abuse and those who act on their behalf, moving them from a client/professional relationship towards a more equal partnership (2004, p.12).
By challenging dominant representations of poverty, a human rights discourse also makes it easier to accept the label of poverty and identify with others living in poverty and thereby develop the collective identity necessary for effective political agency. A human rights discourse offers people in poverty an alternative, more affirming discourse than dominant discourses, which are often
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demeaning and disrespectful. It’s as if the language of human rights is here being used to counter the negative associations that identifying as ‘poor’ typically provokes. At present many people in poverty do not want to be associated with what is perceived as a stigmatising term: ‘Proud to be poor’ is not a banner under which many want to march (Lister 2004). But marching under the banner of human rights makes it easier to stand up and be counted as poor, as has happened in the United States. This aspect of human rights’ mobilising power is illustrated by another observation from Cheri Honkala. Recalling a pivotal moment when homeless people in Pennsylvania were forcibly evicted from their camp during freezing weather, she reflects: ‘That night, none of us knew what human rights meant but we had one thing in common we felt less than human beings . . . We began to use the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in our everyday organising to counter the denial and shame of being poor’ (Donald & Mottershaw 2009, p. 15). More generally in the United States, Cox and Thomas found that human rights offered ‘an affirmation of human dignity and equality that resonated powerfully with . . . often impoverished, abused and virtually decimated communities’ (2004, p. 11). The language of human rights counters the process of othering because it is about what we share and have in common as human beings rather than about what separates us. Furthermore, according to Donald and Mottershaw, ‘The US experience suggests the potential of human rights to unite groups that might otherwise be divided by class, race, faith, identity, geography or single-issue affiliations. Interviewees in the United States described this as one of the most significant insights to emerge from their domestic human rights activism’ (2009, p. 17). Cox and Thomas make a similar point when they refer to ‘the potential of human rights to restore to US social justice work a sense of the underlying commonality of simply being human that is often lost to all of its divisions by identity, geography, issue area and belief’ (2004, p. 8). And they quote Cheri Honkala: ‘we base our vision in the essence of being human’ (Donald & Mottershaw 2004). At the heart of the idea of human rights as an ethical stance is respect for the fundamental dignity of all human beings, regardless of difference, which is so important when many people living in poverty feel that they are denied this respect. As one woman put it: ‘poverty strips your dignity. You can’t have any dignity with poverty’ (Beresford et al., 1999, p. 90). It can be the everyday indignities that make poverty so difficult to bear. For instance, US poverty activist Willie Baptist tells how the main concern of a group of homeless people was the indignity of having to line up daily to receive a ration of five pieces of toilet paper. ‘That infuriated them’, he writes, ‘it took them beneath any level of dignity they might have’ and it was around that indignity, rather than the wider issue of homelessness, that they were prepared to organise (www.kwru.org/ educat/orgmod2.html). Here the language of human rights and of citizenship sometimes overlaps. Uma Narayan, for instance, has put forward as a feminist citizenship ideal ‘a society that is responsive to the social dignity and worth of all who are members’ (1997,
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p. 54). A study of citizenship in poor communities in Rio de Janeiro found that ‘dignity was the most important aspect of citizenship identified by 74 per cent of the participants’ (Wheeler 2004, p. 41). This referred primarily to dignified treatment when accessing public services. Although social and economic rights are sometimes characterised as ‘passive’ welfare in political debate, not least in the UK, human rights activists do not see them in this way. They argue that rights have to be claimed and that they construct people in poverty as legitimate claimants of entitlements from an accountable state rather than as recipients of state largesse whose needs are defined by others (Neville 2010). This is a further way in which a human rights approach acknowledges and can promote the agency of people in poverty i.e. the idea that even though their lives are heavily constrained by their socio-economic circumstances they still can and do make choices and act as agents in their own lives. The same principle underlies the increasingly influential capabilities approach (developed in particular by Sen [1999] and Nussbaum [2000]) with its focus on what people are able to be and do: the kind of life we want people to be able to achieve in order to flourish. The capabilities approach enhances a human rights approach by shifting the focus from formal rights to the ability of people to exercise those rights in practice.
A Way of Articulating Concrete Demands The counter-discourse of human rights has also been important in framing demands for social rights both for citizens and non-citizens. If respect for the dignity of all is one key tenet of a human rights approach to poverty, the other is the indivisibility or interdependence of the different forms of rights*a principle which is enshrined in the UN International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. The specific principle of the right to an adequate income, sufficient to enable people to live decently and with their human dignity respected, is enunciated in various conventions, declarations and treaties (though, of course, how one measures such ‘adequacy’ is a difficult question). Thus the argument of some poverty activists is that lack of an adequate income*poverty*represents the denial of human rights. The Minimum Income Standard developed by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation showed that members of the general public subscribed to a minimum which allows for ‘sufficient resources to participate in society and to maintain human dignity’, in other words implicitly endorsed a human rights standard (Bradshaw et al. 2008, p. 3). In the United States, the KWRU has also used Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, regarding a minimum standard of living, to promote the claims of homeless people. The UK parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights (JCHR), in a report on the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, suggested that the obligation of the progressive realisation of these rights ‘should provide
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the standard against which government progress in poverty reduction is assessed’ and that Covenant rights should provide a framework and additional impetus for government policy in this area’ (2004, p. 38). It concluded that ‘a rights-based approach can assist government in addressing poverty and parliament and civil society in scrutinising its success in doing so’ (ibid.). Recognition of economic and social rights as human rights is particularly valuable for the most marginalised groups such as asylum-seekers because they lack the social citizenship rights enjoyed by others and in many countries these rights have been eroded. While demands for stronger social and economic rights have traditionally been understood as a politics of redistribution, increasingly poverty activists are also framing their demands in terms of a ‘politics of recognition & respect’ (Lister 2004). This has implications for how social rights are delivered and developed, which represents also one aspect of procedural citizenship rights, which have been described as a ‘hybrid between civil and political rights’ (Coote 1992, p. 9). One set of demands*for respectful treatment*relates to everyday interactions with the state, which by and large looms larger in the life of people living in poverty than the rest of the population. Anna Yeatman’s work on individualisation and the delivery of welfare services is helpful here. She suggests that her conception of the self as the ‘subject of right’ ‘indicates an expansive public welfare state where attention must be given to the question of service delivery’ (2009, p. 5). This involves both ‘the relationship of service delivery’ and ‘the quality of service delivery’ (op.cit., p. 7). Moreover, she argues that welfare services can ‘make the difference to whether an individual is able to assume life as a self’, which means, among other things, ‘being accorded dignity and recognition as a unique centre of subjective life whose sense of self must enter into how the service in question is specified and delivered’ (op.cit., p. 9). Peel’s study illustrates how this is lacking in the treatment of Australians living in poverty. He writes: ‘Disrespect and neglect are all you can expect when you come from a poor area. The disdainful tenancy officer and the uncaring social worker’ symbolise ‘what impoverished people had learned to anticipate and to fear from everyone’ (2003, p. 39). There is similarly plenty of evidence in the UK of the failure of services to accord dignity and recognition. For example, the former official Social Exclusion Unit notes in a report on services for disadvantaged groups, ‘lack of respect is a recurring issue’ and ‘being treated with dignity and respect is key to a positive . . . experience’ (2005, p. 59). A similar message emerges from a number of other studies. Mel Bartley, for instance, in her study of resilience and the factors conducive to it, notes that ‘the message that users are not valued, and indeed mistrusted, permeates many facilities in hard-pressed areas. It is not just the degrading physical environment; too often the way the services are provided is disrespectful of people’s lives and experiences’ (2006, p. 22). She highlights in particular ‘not being listened to’ and argues that ‘treating user groups and individual clients as a legitimate source of ‘‘welfare wisdom’’ and incorporating their views is essential’ (op.cit., p. 23). This is the philosophy that used to underpin many Sure Start childcare programmes. An evaluation found that one of the keys to the ‘empowerment’ of the parents
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involved in the programmes was respectful treatment by service providers: ‘empowerment has grown where staff across all professional disciplines and at all levels, have worked and engaged with parents in an open, accessible, informal, nonjudgemental way, listening, respecting and learning from parents’ own experiences’ (Williams & Churchill 2006, p. 1). In Britain, the introduction of the Human Rights Act in 1998 and the establishment of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) in 2007 provided the context for calls for the development of a human rights culture in public bodies. A human rights enquiry, conducted by the EHRC, concluded that ‘a human rights approach can provide an ethical framework for the actions of public authorities. Properly understood and applied, it can have a transformative function.’ And it advises that a human rights approach ‘requires a change in attitude and culture’ (EHRC 2009, pp. 14, 15). Poverty activists argue that this culture change must involve an understanding of what poverty means and of the crucial importance of respectful treatment of people living in poverty. One tool is training of professionals and officials and the involvement of people with experience of poverty in that training. This was the aim of a project that brought together social service users with experience of poverty, social work practitioners and academics in order to develop a training module on poverty for social work students that would be delivered by people with experience of poverty (Perry 2005). One of the participants summed it up: ‘it is about how we are treated, we just want them to treat us the same way they want us to treat them*with respect’ (Gupta 2004, p. 7). The involvement of people in poverty is indicative of another key demand of poverty activists in recent years concerning participation and voice. EAPN notes that ‘participation by people experiencing poverty and social exclusion is a challenge that has grown over the years’ (2007, p. 1). According to the Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights ‘a human rights approach to poverty reduction . . . requires active and informed participation by the poor in the formulation, implementation and monitoring of poverty reduction strategies’ (2002, para. 10). Participation is theorised as central to a human rights-based approach because it underpins the effective realisation of other rights. It acknowledges the agency of rights-bearers and their potential to play a role in the development of rights and services. In strengthening that agency it enables people with experience of poverty to act more effectively as democratic citizens and bearers of human rights. It has thus been identified as an important means of empowerment. The right of participation represents an important means of recognising the dignity of people living in poverty because it is saying that their voices count, that they have something important to contribute. It acknowledges the validity and value of the expertise borne of experience, which can itself represent a form of power (Nevile 2008). A similar point is made by Peel. Having listened to people living in poverty he concluded that they ‘don’t need to be taught and they don’t need to be told. They need to be trusted, respected and heard. They want to begin the conversation about poverty and injustice rather than always coming in at the
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end’ (2003, p. 179). And he reports, ‘If they wanted one thing to change, it was that they be treated as knowledgeable, that outsiders should expect to learn and listen’ (op.cit, p. 168). A participant at a European Union meeting of people experiencing poverty wrote: ‘I saw people who for the first time understood what it meant to have the right to dignity’ (EAPN 2007, p. 3).
The independent UK Commission on Poverty, Participation and Power, established to explore the barriers to effective participation, was constituted with half of its members with direct experience of poverty.1 Anger at lack of respect and lack of voice were key intertwined messages that it received. It also learned that ‘people experiencing poverty see consultation without commitment and phoney participation without power to bring about change as the ultimate disrespect’. The Commission called its report Listen Hear: the right to be heard, reflecting both the importance of hearing what people in poverty have to say and the central argument that participation is a human right (CoPPP 2000). One barrier to participation that it identified is the benefits system itself. In effect, some of the conditions attached to social rights can serve to undermine democratic participation and active citizenship. The benefit rules can discourage people claiming benefit from getting involved in the very community initiatives and service development that the Government has encouraged. A discussion paper, published by the Commission for Social Care Inspection, describes the ways in which ‘benefit barriers to involvement’ discourage or prevent the involvement of people in receipt of benefits, with damaging implications for ‘active citizenship’ (CSCI 2007, p. 1). This is an example of a wider point made by Janet Newman who suggests that ‘active citizenship’, directed towards ‘improving the quality of life in deprived communities’ may ‘be in tension with’ dominant ‘activated citizenship’ policies, particularly in the case of women’s capacity ‘to play multiple roles*as empowered workers and as caring and active community members’ (2007, p. 373). Moreover, the activation policies associated with greater conditionality do not translate into the promotion of active citizenship through user-involvement in the delivery of benefits and employment services, common in other areas of social policy such as social care. This contrast between the status accorded userinvolvement in different policy areas reflects a tension, identified by van Berkel and Borghi: between new governance and activation policy rhetoric: whereas the former emphasises the voice and choice that policy users should have in service provision processes, the latter emphasises the obligations and individual responsibilities of
1. As a member of the Commission it had a big impact on my understanding of poverty and my subsequent conceptualisation of it (Lister 2002).
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Concluding Comments This article has argued that human rights offer an inclusive way of thinking and talking about and mobilising against poverty. Returning to the title, in the words of the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign its message is one that demands ‘power not pity’. It also offers a set of principles for formulating concrete demands through what represents a politics of recognition & respect as well as redistribution. It has been an essentially optimistic account grounded in the claims of human rights activists themselves. It is, however, difficult to be optimistic at present about the impact on policy of a human rights-based approach in the UK. New Labour ignored the recommendations of the JCHR for a rights-based antipoverty strategy. The dominant partner in the current government is highly suspicious of human rights and the coalition government does not talk the language of social rights and is busy undermining such rights (although there is evidence of public support for social rights in general [Weir 2007]). In their study, Donald and Mottershaw also reported some reservations about the use of ‘rights talk’ as being ‘inaccessible’, ‘overly adversarial’ and litigious or as not resonating with the general public (2009, p. 5). Similar concerns have been voiced in the United States but the practice of working with human rights has helped to overcome some of them according to Cox and Thomas (2004). There is, of course, also a wider philosophical debate about the individualistic nature of rights (Hobson & Lister 2002). Donald and Mottershaw’s international study is able to point to some successful examples of governments responding to and using human rights approaches, but nevertheless they conclude that ‘rarely are human rights at the core of a government’s anti-poverty work’ (2009, p. 45). Thus there remains a gap between the promise of international human rights instruments and the reality of ‘underfulfillment’, particularly of socio-economic rights. From a different perspective, Hartley Dean argues that ‘recent attempts to define a human rights approach to global poverty reduction would seem to embody a managerial rather than an emancipatory ethos’ (2008, p. 9). While his warning is a reflection of how all language can be distorted when co-opted by the establishment, I would argue that it downplays the significance of the emancipatory ethos of human rights as a mobilising force. An unpublished evaluation of a poverty and human rights project conducted by the British Institute of Human Rights lends support to this view. It observed the ‘transformative’ effects of involvement in the project: ‘a form of alchemy took place: people’s lives and their view of themselves were transformed’. The project ‘built the confidence and self-esteem of rights holders. This demonstrates’ they write ‘what is at the heart of a human rights based approach people seeing
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themselves, often for the first time, as human beings who are worth something just by dint of being human and who are entitled to be treated with dignity and respect’ (Amh consulting 2011, pp. 11, 15). The alchemical impact of this involvement underlines the ethical nature of the project. In conclusion, I would argue that a human rights ethical discourse performs a very important symbolic and mobilising function. Nevertheless, its effectiveness as a political tool in combating poverty is yet to be proven.
Acknowledgements Thanks to two anonymous referees and the editors for their helpful comments on an earlier draft.
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