Global Poverty and the Right to Development

8

GLOBAL POVERTY AND THE RIGHT TO DEVELOPMENT

ALTHOUGH EXPERTS DISPUTE precise figures, more than 1 billion people—virtually all of whom live in developing countries—live on less than one dollar a day.¹ Close to 3 billion—more than 40 percent of the world’s population—live on less than two dollars a day.² The top 5 percent of the world’s population receive about one-third of total world income; the top 10 percent receive one-half of total world income. The bottom 5 and 10 percent of the world’s population receive 0.2 and 0.7 percent of the total world income respectively. The richest people earn in about forty–eight hours as much as the poorest people earn in a year.³

International law, traditionally understood, has little to say about global poverty. It imposes legal obligations on States to provide their citizens with access to a set of basic social resources, such as food, shelter, a basic income, healthcare, and education. In the name of poverty reduction, most, if not all, developed States also provide assistance in the form of bilateral loans, grants, and debt relief to developing States, and make contributions to multilateral institutions such as the World Bank and regional development banks, which in turn provide various forms of financial assistance to recipient States. But international law typically is not understood as requiring a State to address poverty beyond its borders. It comprehends bilateral and multilateral financial assistance in charitable terms. Global—as opposed to domestic—poverty historically has been seen as possessing no international legal significance.

This chapter also challenges the second assumption about the nature of our international legal order, namely, that sovereignty in international law does not obligate States to take measures to alleviate global poverty. The challenge is not to the truth of this proposition but, instead, to the commitment to sovereignty that lies behind it. Global poverty is, in part, a consequence of the terms by which international law aspires to bring legal order to global politics. It is precisely because sovereignty is an essential feature of the structure and operation of international law that the right to development generates international legal obligations to alleviate global poverty.

THE EMERGENCE OF THE RIGHT

Global poverty was not among the primary factors behind the establishment of the United Nations in 1945. Article 55 of the U.N. Charter calls on the United Nations to promote higher standards of living, conditions of economic and social progress and development, and solutions to international economic, social, and health-related problems.⁴ Article 56 of the Charter further stipulates that member States “pledge themselves to take joint and separate action in cooperation with the Organization for the achievement of these purposes.” The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948, enshrines rights to social security, work, an adequate standard of living, and education.⁵ But, despite these social and economic commitments, the original organizational thrust of the United Nations was to structure the international legal order around an inclusive commitment to the sovereign equality of States—albeit one weighted in favor of the great powers—to minimize threats to international peace and security.⁶

Not long after the creation of the United Nations, however, the General Assembly, under the auspices of articles 55 and 56 of the Charter, began to turn its attention to some of the proximate causes of global poverty. In 1952, galvanized by decolonized member States concerned about their economic independence, the General Assembly adopted a Resolution on a right to exploit freely natural wealth and resources.⁷ The 1952 Resolution referred to “a right of peoples freely to use and exploit their natural wealth and resources wherever deemed desirable by them for their own progress and economic development.”⁸ It stated that such a right of peoples is “inherent in their sovereignty” and recommended that all States “refrain from acts, direct or indirect, designed to impede the exercise of the sovereignty of any State over its natural resources.”⁹ In 1958, the General Assembly established a Commission on Permanent Sovereignty over Natural Resources and instructed it to conduct a survey on the status of permanent sovereignty over natural wealth and resources as an element of the right of self-determination.¹⁰This in turn prompted a 1962 General Assembly Resolution on Permanent Sovereignty over Natural Resources (Resolution 1803), which reaffirmed the “right of peoples and nations to permanent sovereignty over their natural wealth and resources.”¹¹ It also called for international cooperation in the economic development of developing countries. Such cooperation, “whether in the form of public or private capital investments, exchange of goods and services, technical assistance, or exchange of scientific information,” must “further their independent national development” and “be based upon respect for their sovereignty over their natural resources.”¹²

These developments were precursors of a bolder set of international initiatives introduced in the 1970s by developing States seeking to reshape the international legal order in ways that would address economic and political inequalities between the developed and developing worlds. In 1974, the General Assembly adopted a Declaration and Programme of Action on a New International Economic Order.¹³ The 1974 Declaration called for an international order that would “correct inequalities and redress existing injustices, making it possible to eliminate the widening gap between the developed and the developing countries.”¹⁴ It was accompanied by a Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States that stipulated that all States were under a responsibility to promote economic, social, and cultural development for all people everywhere.¹⁵

Three years later, the U.N. Human Rights Commission recommended that the Secretary General undertake a study of “the international dimensions of the right to development as a human right” in light of “the requirements of the New International Economic Order.”¹⁶ The ensuing Report led the U.N. General Assembly to affirm the existence of the right to development in 1979,¹⁷ and a Working Group of Governmental Experts on the Right to Development was established in 1981. Assigned the task of drafting a declaration on the right to development, the Working Group reported regularly on its progress.¹⁸ These initiatives eventually culminated in the adoption by the General Assembly of the Declaration on the Right to Development in 1986.¹⁹

The Declaration is not, in itself, a legally binding instrument.²⁰ Its preamble, however, expressly refers to the purposes and principles of the U.N. Charter, and thus it may be regarded as an authoritative interpretation of the Charter.²¹ It also contains a series of principles and rights that are based on human rights standards enshrined in other international instruments that are legally binding—such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights ²² and the International Covenant on Economic, Cultural and Social Rights ²³ The ICESCR enshrines more specific rights to international cooperation and assistance that are contained in the Declaration. Both the ICCPR and the ICESCR enshrine the right of self-determination and specify that self-determination entitles “[a]‌ll peoples” to “freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.”²⁴

The Declaration on the Right to Development refers to the right to development as “an inalienable human right by virtue of which every human person and all peoples are entitled to participate in, contribute to, and enjoy economic, social, cultural and political development, in which all human rights and fundamental freedoms can be fully realized.”²⁵ It defines the right as an entitlement to “a comprehensive economic, social, cultural and political process.” It comprehends the alleviation of poverty as an objective of development, by referring to development as aiming “at the constant improvement of the well-being of the entire population and of all individuals on the basis of their active, free and meaningful participation in development and in the fair distribution of benefits resulting therefrom.”²⁶

It further comprehends the right to development as imposing negative and positive obligations on both the internal and external exercise of sovereign power.²⁷ The internal dimensions of the right require States to exercise their sovereign power over resources and revenues in ways that promote development for the benefit of their populations. Article 2(3) of the Declaration imposes on States “the duty to formulate appropriate national development policies.”²⁸ Article 8 requires States to undertake “at the national level all necessary measures for the realization of the right to development.”²⁹ The external dimensions of the right speak to the exercise of sovereign power in the international arena. Article 3(1) imposes positive obligations on States to create “international conditions favourable to the realization of the right to development.”³⁰ Article 4(1) provides that States are under an individual and collective obligation “to formulate international development policies with a view to facilitating the full realization of the right to development.”³¹ Other articles refer to duties of international cooperation and assistance, further specifying the external dimensions of the right.³²

The Declaration on the Right to Development thus verifies the international legal existence of the right to development and validates its international legal character as a human right. The Declaration defines development in comprehensive and participatory terms and comprehends development as requiring the alleviation of poverty. It imposes internal obligations on all States to promote development for the benefit of their respective populations, and imposes external obligations on States to facilitate development beyond their borders.

Enshrining the right to development in the pantheon of international human rights law was not without its skeptics. In a famously scathing critique, Jack Donnelly argued that proponents of the Declaration failed to adequately specify the legal actors in whom the right to development vests.³³ Some proponents formulated the right in collective terms. Some envisioned the right-holder to be people.³⁴ For others, it was the State.³⁵ Other proponents saw the right as vesting in individuals.³⁶ Still others treated the right as vesting in both collectivities and individuals.³⁷ Lack of specificity on this front produced ambiguities on another front. It is said that all legal rights create legal duties.³⁸ But who are the legal actors who bear duties created by the right to development? In Donnelly’s words, “if the right to development is primarily a right of States, it would be held primarily in relation to other States, while as a right of peoples it would be held against States (one’s own or others), and perhaps even individuals as well.”³⁹ If it is an individual right, then, according to Donnelly, it generates duties on the State in which the individual is located.⁴⁰

The text of the Declaration, for Donnelly, does little to resolve these questions.⁴¹ Article 1 states that “every human person” and “all peoples” possess the right to development, suggesting that it vests in both individuals and peoples. Article 2(1), however, states that “[t]‌he human person is the central subject of development and should be the active participant and beneficiary of the right to development,”⁴² implying that any collective dimensions of the right are secondary to its individual dimensions. Article 2(2) complicates matters further by declaring that “States have the right … to formulate appropriate national development policies that aim at the constant improvement of the well-being of the entire population and of all individuals.”⁴³ The Declaration, in other words, appears to contemplate that the right to development vests in individuals, peoples, and States.

It is less ambiguous about who bears duties created by the right. Although article 2(2) declares that “[a]‌ll human beings have a responsibility for development,”⁴⁴ suggesting that the right creates duties in individuals, the Declaration speaks primarily of duties that the right imposes on States. Article 2(3) provides that States have not only the “right” but also “the duty to formulate appropriate national development policies.”⁴⁵ Article 3(1) stipulates a duty of States to create “international conditions favourable to the realization of the right to development.”⁴⁶ Article 3(3) refers to a duty of States “to co-operate with each other in ensuring development and eliminating obstacles to development.”⁴⁷ Article 4 provides that “[s]tates have the duty to take steps, individually and collectively, to formulate international development policies with a view to facilitating the full realization of the right to development.”⁴⁸

Least convincing, for Donnelly, are accounts of the right’s relationship to other international human rights and what it actually protects. Mohammed Bedjaoui, one of the first legal scholars to engage these questions, wrote prosaically of the right to development as the “alpha and omega of human rights, the first and last human right, the beginning and the end, the means and the goal of human rights, in short it is the core right from which all others stem.”⁴⁹ Others regarded the right to development as intimately related to the right to self-determination. Some saw self-determination as an element of the right to development; others saw the right to development as an element of the right of self-determination.⁵⁰ Still others saw the right as a composite of social and economic rights. Abi-Saab, for example, suggested that the right to development is an aggregation of the social, economic, and cultural rights of all individuals in a political community.⁵¹ Philip Alston presented the right as “a synthesis of existing rights” that emphasizes “the interdependence and indivisibility” of social and economic rights and civil and political rights.”⁵²

Each of these formulations has textual support in the Declaration itself. The Preamble and article 1(1) speak of development as a “comprehensive economic, social, cultural and political process.”⁵³ Article 1(2) states that the right to development “implies the full realization of the right of peoples to self-determination.”⁵⁴ Article 8 specifically identifies social and economic interests, including equal access to basic resources, education, health services, food, housing, employment, and the fair distribution of income, as necessary measures for the realization of the right to development.⁵⁵ Article 6 affirms that “[a]‌ll human rights and fundamental freedoms are indivisible and interdependent,” and calls for “the implementation, promotion and protection of civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights.”⁵⁶

Such formulations treat development either as a valuable consequence or as a necessary condition of protecting human rights that are more firmly grounded in international human rights law, such as economic, social, and cultural rights, civil and political rights, the right to self-determination, or some combination thereof. For Donnelly, however, neither approach justifies treating development itself as a right. The first approach wrongly conceptualizes an outcome of a right’s protection as a right itself as opposed to simply an outcome. The second wrongly assumes that because development is necessary to the full enjoyment of other rights, development itself is a right. In Donnelly’s words, “the instrumental necessity of x for the enjoyment of A’s right r simply does not establish that A has a right to x.”⁵⁷ Both approaches incorrectly assume that the aggregation of certain human rights into a more general right to development will result in greater protection than their disaggregation. Since neither development as a consequence nor development as a necessary condition actually performs this function, the right to development, in Donnelley’s words, is a “mythical creature.”⁵⁸

Donnelly is making a deeper claim about the right to development than one of analytic confusion. His critique ultimately rests on a universal conception of human rights that draws a sharp distinction between moral obligation and human right. Human rights give rise to certain obligations, but not all moral obligations possess a counterpart in the form of a human right. “In a just world,” Donnelly writes, “underdevelopment would not be permitted; morality and justice demand development.”⁵⁹ But human rights are not coextensive with morality and justice; for Donnelly, they protect essential features of what it means to be a human being. “[I]‌t is logically and phenomenologically quite possible,” he writes, “to be a human being, and thus possessed of human rights, without perceiving oneself or being considered by others to be a member of the international community, and thus a beneficiary of rights or duties of solidarity.”⁶⁰ The source of an obligation to assist others in need “reflects special bonds between members of a community, which establish reciprocal obligations of assistance owed by each member to any other member in special need.”⁶¹ It does not correlate with a right that vests in all of us by virtue of our common humanity.

Donnelly’s point is not that such communal bonds are present only at the national level; he is open to the possibility that international bonds of solidarity ground moral obligations that transcend one’s own political community. It is instead that such bonds—whether national or international in nature—establish, at best, “a moral obligation to act to promote development.”⁶² A human right to development, for Donnelly, is nothing more than an individual “right to pursue full personal development along all major dimensions of human life;” it thus “stands as a summary of traditional rights.”⁶³ The obligations to which it gives rise call on others to not interfere with its exercise and to perhaps promote its realization. They do not amount to anything more than the sum of obligations that correspond to the more specific human rights that comprise the canon of international human rights law. Most important, they do not include international legal obligations to assist strangers in need or, more generally, to take positive measures to address global poverty. Such obligations might be required as a matter of morality and justice, but they are not owed as of human right.

Donnelly’s distinction between obligations that correspond to human rights and those that reflect special bonds of solidarity echoes a distinction, introduced in previous chapters, more formally drawn by H.L.A. Hart between general and special rights. For Hart, general rights are rights that vest in men “qua men and not only if they are members of some society or stand in some special relation to each other”⁶⁴ whereas special rights are “rights that arise out of special transactions between individuals or out of some special relationship in which they stand to each other.”⁶⁵ General rights impose obligations on “everyone” whereas special rights impose obligations only on “parties to the special transaction or relationship.”⁶⁶

Donnelly treats human rights as general rights. They arise from the fact of humanity, they can be claimed by all, and they impose obligations on all. Human rights are not special rights. They do not reflect special bonds that exist among members of particular communities, they do not vest in some people and not others, and they do not require us to be partial to some at the expense of others. To speak of a right to development as a human right must mean something other than what justice requires in the context of contingent relationships in which we find ourselves. It must mean an entitlement grounded in a universal feature of what it means to be human, regardless of the diverse circumstances that define our places in the world.

This account, focused on conditioning the existence of rights on abstract moral duties we owe others directly, offers little reason to comprehend the right to development as yielding positive duties on all of us to improve the social and economic condition of impoverished people around the world. To the extent that it accepts that the right to development is a human right, it comprehends it as vesting in individuals and as an aggregate of more specific civil, political, social, economic, and cultural rights. The duties that it imposes on others are primarily negative in nature. The possibility that the right to development yields positive duties beyond voluntary measures to address global poverty quickly becomes subsumed in a larger debate within classical political theory about the nature of one’s moral obligations to assist strangers in need.

Contrary to Donnelly’s universal perspective, the right to development is far from mythical in legal terms. The Declaration affirms the right to development as a human right in international law and specifies internal obligations on all States to promote development for the benefit of their respective populations and external obligations on States to facilitate development beyond their borders. It takes its place in a panoply of established international legal instruments that promote development. The International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, for example, is binding on the more than 150 States party to its terms, and it imposes obligations on States “to take steps, individually and through international assistance and co-operation,” to protect social, economic and cultural rights enshrined in the Covenant.⁶⁷ The Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights Committee has stated that these obligations give rise to “international responsibilities for developed States” to address global poverty.”⁶⁸ And both International Covenants stipulate that, by virtue of the right of self-determination, “all peoples … freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.”⁶⁹ From the perspective of positive international law, the relevant questions concerning the right to development relate not to its existence as a human right but instead to its content. In whom does the right to development vest? What does development mean? What does the right protect? And what are the nature and scope of obligations it imposes on international legal actors?

The legal existence of a right to development does not foreclose construing its content in universal terms as protecting certain features that we all share as human beings. But, as Donnelly convincingly argues, this would mean that the right to development performs no independent legal function at all, rendering it legally meaningless. The common features of humanity that it could plausibly be interpreted to protect already receive legal protection as a result of other, more specific human rights that comprise the field. If a universal account renders the right unintelligible, then it is not at all clear why it should be construed in universal terms. Unintelligibility does not inhere in the text of the Declaration; the text is unintelligible only if the yardstick of intelligibility is a universal conception of the right. If the text does not cohere with a universal conception, then universalism is the wrong frame of reference by which to comprehend the nature and scope of the right.

Freed from the conceptual constraints of universalism, the text of the Declaration becomes much less ambiguous than Donnelly’s account of it suggests. The right to development enshrined in the Declaration promotes “the constant improvement of the well-being of the entire population” of a State.⁷⁰ It does so by protecting the capacity of a State’s population to “participate in, contribute to, and enjoy economic, social, cultural and political development.”⁷¹ It provides this protection by imposing negative and positive obligations on both the internal and external exercise of sovereign power.⁷² The internal dimensions of the right to development police the relationship between a State and its citizens by imposing obligations on States to exercise their sovereign power over resources and revenues in ways that promote development for the benefit of its population. The external dimensions of the right speak to the exercise of sovereign power in the international arena.

Understanding the content of the right to development as including obligations on States to promote development at home and abroad is also consistent with the intent of the drafters of the Declaration. One of the reasons the United States voted against the Declaration—and why eight other States abstained from voting—was precisely because of fears that it imposes positive obligations on developed States to assist developing States in promoting development.⁷³ But the United States was the only State that voted against the Declaration, which suggests that the 148 States that voted in favor of its adoption did so on the understanding that the right imposes positive obligations on States to promote development at home and abroad.

Textual considerations and the intent of those responsible for its drafting do not end interpretive ambiguities over the content of the right. These sources fail to specify in sufficient detail its meaning, its relationship to the alleviation of poverty, and, most important, the precise nature of the obligations that the right to development imposes on States in the exercise of internal and external sovereign power. The Declaration makes it clear that a State is under an obligation to exercise its sovereign power in ways that promote development for the benefit of its population, and that a State’s actions in the international arena must aim to realize the right to development, but what do these internal and external obligations actually require of States? The text of the Declaration does not answer this question. Nor are answers readily available from the intent of its framers. And no doubt a multiplicity of intentions motivated those responsible for its drafting, making intent an unreliable guide to ascertaining the content of the right. As demonstrated in the next part of this chapter, many of the questions surrounding the content of the right to development left open by the Declaration have been resolved by efforts by a variety of international legal actors to affirm, elaborate, and implement the right to development subsequent to its formal entrance onto the international stage as a human right.

IMPLEMENTING THE RIGHT

After an initial wave of academic interest in the right to development, there was a flurry of activity within the United Nations devoted to its affirmation, elaboration, and implementation. Most if not all of the efforts to affirm and elaborate the right to development emphasize its procedural and participatory dimensions and seek to demonstrate that it possesses meaning above and beyond the civil, political, social, economic, and cultural rights that are said to form its constituent components. Measures to implement the right to development have been proposed and introduced in several international and regional institutions involved in development projects. Framed in procedural and participatory terms, the right to development has, in varying degrees, been internalized by the practice of international legal actors involved in concessional aid, debt relief, and poverty reduction. These various efforts to affirm, elaborate, and implement the right to development illuminate the internal dimensions of the right to development, which require States to promote development at home and abroad in ways that address global poverty. They also suggest what the right to development might also require of States in the external exercise of sovereign power.

Initial steps to affirm, elaborate, and implement the Declaration on the Right to Development yielded little concrete guidance on the content of its terms. They began with a request by the U.N. Commission on Human Rights to a working group of governmental experts responsible for initiating the Declaration that it clarify the right to development and its implications. After three sessions between 1986 and 1989, the Working Group was unsuccessful in generating concrete recommendations for the implementation of the right.⁷⁴ As a result, the U.N. Commission on Human Rights asked the Secretary General to organize a “global consultation” on the issue, involving experts, U.N. representatives, regional intergovernmental organizations, and relevant nongovernmental organizations.⁷⁵ Participants produced a report that echoed most, if not all, of the provisions of the Declaration, but it focused on the operational activities of the U.N. and, perhaps more than the Declaration itself, underlined participation as the principal means of implementing the right.⁷⁶ It emphasized the need for indicators to monitor the form, quality, democratic nature, and effectiveness of participatory processes in development initiatives. In particular, it called for the democratization of decision-making in international institutions dealing with trade, monetary policy, and development assistance. The Commission also established a second working group in 1993 for a period of three years to report on obstacles to implementation of the right.⁷⁷

These recommendations had no immediate effect on international institutions, and the right to development received little attention at the international level until the Vienna World Conference on Human Rights in 1993. One hundred and seventy-one States unanimously approved the Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action, which affirmed the right to development as “a universal and inalienable right and an integral part of fundamental human rights.”⁷⁸ The Vienna Declaration called on States to cooperate with each other in ensuring development and eliminating obstacles to development, and called for “effective international cooperation for the realization of the right to development.”⁷⁹ It also called on the international community to help alleviate the external debt burden of developing countries and declared that “extreme poverty and social exclusion constitute a violation of human dignity,” noting that some of the causes of extreme poverty relate to “the problem of development.”⁸⁰

At the conclusion of the 1995 World Summit for Social Development, participating States issued the Copenhagen Declaration on Social Development and a Programme of Action.⁸¹ The Copenhagen Declaration called for sustainable and equitable development, defined as a process that respected and promoted democracy, social justice, environmental protection, accountable governance, and human rights.⁸² It called on other members of the international community, including specialized agencies of the United Nations, to support developing countries in their efforts to achieve sustainable development. It was only after the Copenhagen Declaration that efforts to affirm, elaborate, and implement the Declaration on the Right to Development began to bear fruit.

In the wake of the Copenhagen Declaration, the U.N. established a second working group on the right to development in 1996 with a two-year mandate, which made a series of recommendations, including an increase in the amount of development assistance from developed countries to 0.7 percent of GDP, and the “mainstreaming” of the right to development in the policies of international financial institutions, such as the World Bank and the IMF.⁸³ In 1998, the working group was made open-ended and was provided with an independent expert who would prepare a series of reports to focus discussion.⁸⁴ The first independent expert, Arjun Sengupta, wrote a series of reports on the topic, which provide greater clarity on the nature and scope of the right.⁸⁵

In his reports, Sengupta characterizes the Declaration on the Right to Development as an instrument that bridges the divide between civil and political rights and social and economic rights. In his words, these two categories of rights “have to be fulfilled together and the violation of one would be as offensive as the other.”⁸⁶ This is because “[t]‌he right to development unifies civil and political rights with economic, social and cultural rights into an indivisible and interdependent set of human rights and fundamental freedoms, to be enjoyed by all human beings.”⁸⁷ Affirming the view that there is value in comprehending the right in aggregate terms, Sengupta speaks of the right to development as a “vector” that consists of “a large number of elements such as income, employment, health, education or opportunities in general which include all forms of freedoms.”⁸⁸ Aggregating these freedoms in a single overarching right underscores his view that their cumulative realization is development.

Sengupta’s conception of the right to development as an aggregation of civil and political, social, and economic rights is a juridical formulation of Amartya Sen’s theory of development. According to Sen, freedom is both the end and the means of development. Freedom is the end of development because development means the protection and enhancement of “elementary capabilities” of individuals to be free to avoid certain “deprivations,” such as starvation and premature mortality, and be able to enrich their lives by exercising civil and political freedom.⁸⁹ Freedom is also the means of development because “different kinds of freedom interrelate with one another, and freedom of one type may greatly help in advancing freedom of other kinds,” which both constitutes and facilitates development.⁹⁰

Enlisting Sen’s theory of development, Sengupta casts development as a process in which all are entitled to participate as of right, one that promotes human development in terms that extend “well beyond the conventional notions of economic growth to the expansion of opportunities and capabilities to enjoy those opportunities.”⁹¹ As a result, development policies should not be focused solely on maximizing gross domestic product, industrialization, technological change, and aggregate consumption; instead they should make considerations of equity and justice “the primary determinants of development” and shape development by these determinants.⁹² The right to development, for Sengupta, guarantees a process that enables individual participation at all stages of decision-making, and it protects civil and political rights as well as social, economic, and cultural rights, equal opportunity of access to resources, and a fair distribution of the benefits of development and of income; finally, it calls for international cooperation to achieve these ends.

Sengupta builds on his procedural, participatory conception of the right to development by combining it with the idea of a “development compact” as a mechanism for implementing the right.⁹³ If a country finds itself unable, because of a lack of resources, to pursue rights-based development that includes provisioning for public goods and public participation, it should be free to enter a development compact with relevant U.N. institutions, bilateral donors, and international financial institutions to seek assistance in meeting its goals. For Sengupta, a compact is essentially the acceptance of a mutual obligation. If developing countries comply with specified obligations geared toward realizing the right to development in accordance with arrangements worked out with their consent, then the international community, donors, and financial institutions promise to provide the necessary financial, technical, and other assistance.⁹⁴

Multilateral lending practices with developing countries developed by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank help to further clarify the internal obligations that a State might owe to its citizens by virtue of the right to development. The IMF and the World Bank rely on development compacts similar to those proposed by Sengupta. Both institutions provide development assistance to developing countries in the form of concessional financing and debt relief. Both attach conditions to the receipt of development assistance that generally require recipient States to make structural adjustments to their economic and regulatory environments deemed necessary by the IMF and the World Bank to foster development. Neither institution has openly acknowledged the fact that structural adjustment policies designed to promote development might actually limit a population’s capacity to freely pursue their economic, social, and cultural development.⁹⁵ Both, however, have begun to promote development compacts as mechanisms that promote a participatory approach to development that is consistent with, although not referenced to, the internal dimensions of the right to development.

Known as Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs), these instruments incorporate a set of policies that aim to reduce poverty in countries that qualify for development assistance from the World Bank and the IMF. First introduced in 1999, PRSPs have become central features of the provision of multilateral development assistance to countries in need. A PRSP is a document in which a State seeking multilateral development assistance details the measures it undertakes to introduce to address poverty within its midst over a three-year period. It provides a comprehensive, country-specific analysis of poverty, including macroeconomic and structural impediments to poverty reduction. A PRSP is expected to be the result of a participatory process, where the recipient government engages the active participation of the population as well as relevant governmental officials, ministries, and agencies. It aims to “reflect the multidimensional nature of poverty, identifying not just the economic but also the social, political, and cultural constraints that need to be overcome” to reduce poverty in the country.⁹⁶ Finally, it presents a detailed plan to reduce poverty that links inputs to outputs, sets intermediate and long-term targets, and identifies indicators of progress to enable monitoring of implementation of its terms.

PRSPs do not appear to protect a population’s capacity to choose a model of development at variance with the conditions that the IMF and the World Bank typically attach to the provision of development assistance. And the extent to which they promote the more modest goal of ensuring the active participation of its citizens in the formulation and implementation of policies designed to promote development turns on a host of factors, such as who is involved in participation, how participation is organized, and the policy choices that participation is designed to engage.⁹⁷ One would also expect their success to turn on a plethora of variables that are country-specific, such as the extent of political instability in any given State.⁹⁸ Nor do they refer to participation as an incident of the right to development, and there remains significant resistance to transforming PRSPs into human rights instruments.⁹⁹ However, they are nonetheless consistent with a conception of the right to development that requires States to take measures to ensure that its citizens have the capacity to actively participate in the formulation and implementation of development policy.

While the rise of PRSPs is consistent with a conception of the right to development that possesses internal dimensions, the formulation of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), and the monitoring mechanisms in place to chart progress toward their realization, help to clarify some of the right’s external dimensions. Established in 2000 at the U.N. Millennium Summit and affirmed at the 2002 International Conference on Financing for Development in Monterrey, Mexico, the eight MDGs call for the eradication of extreme poverty and hunger, the achievement of universal primary education, the promotion of gender equality and the empowerment of women, the reduction of child mortality, the improvement of maternal health, the combat of HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases, environmental sustainability, and the development of a global partnership for development.¹⁰⁰ Participants at the Millennium Summit and the Monterrey Conference agreed to achieve the MDGs by 2015.¹⁰¹ The World Bank and the IMF issue annual Global Monitoring Reports that monitor progress to this end. These reports provide detailed assessments of the contributions of developing countries, developed countries, and international financial institutions toward meeting development commitments, and propose specific recommendations to achieve greater compliance.

The 2006 Global Monitoring Report, for example, details the fact that many countries are off track in meeting the MDGs, particularly in Africa and South Asia, but provides evidence that higher quality aid and better policy environments are accelerating progress in some countries, and that the benefits of this progress are reaching poor families. It also argues that sustained monitoring is needed to ensure continued progress and to prevent the cycle of accumulating unsustainable debt from repeating itself. It argues further that international financial institutions, for their part, need to focus on development outcomes rather than on inputs, and support the efforts of developing countries to strengthen their statistical and institutional capacities.¹⁰²

Whether development will occur anytime soon on the scale imagined by the Millennium Summit will depend on the willingness and capacity of developing countries to formulate and execute poverty reduction strategies that increase public investments, strengthen governance, promote human rights, and engage their respective civil societies and private sectors. It will also, of course, depend on the willingness of developed countries to provide extensive debt relief and increase their official development assistance to developing countries.¹⁰³