Poverty Agency And Human Rights

Poverty, Agency, and Human Rights collects thirteen new essays that analyze how human agency relates to poverty and human rights respectively as well as how agency mediates issues concerning poverty and social and economic human rights. No other collection of philosophical papers focuses on the diverse ways poverty impacts the agency of the poor, the reasons why poverty alleviation schemes should also promote the agency of beneficiaries, and the fitness of the human rights regime to secure both economic development and free agency. The book is divided into four parts. Part 1 considers the diverse meanings of poverty both from the standpoint of the poor and from that of the relatively well-off. Part 2 examines morally appropriate responses to poverty on the part of persons who are better-off and powerful institutions. Part 3 identifies economic development strategies that secure the agency of the beneficiaries. Part 4 addresses the constraints poverty imposes on agency in the context of biomedical research, migration for work, and trafficking in persons.

This important Research Handbook explores the nexus between human rights, poverty and inequality as a critical lens for understanding and addressing key challenges of the coming decades, including the objectives set out in the Sustainable Development Goals. The Research Handbook starts from the premise that poverty is not solely an issue of minimum income and explores the profound ways that deprivation and distributive inequality of power and capability relate to economic, social, cultural, civil and political rights.

This timely and insightful book brings together scholars from a range of disciplines to evaluate the role of human rights in tackling the global challenges of poverty and economic inequality. Reflecting on the concrete experiences of particular countries in tackling poverty, it appraises the international success of human rights-based approaches.

Presents fifteen essays by academics about the severe poverty that afflicts billions of human lives. These essays seek to explain why freedom from poverty is a human right and what duties this right creates for the affluent.

This open access book analyses the interplay of sustainable development and human rights from different perspectives including fight against poverty, health, gender equality, working conditions, climate change and the role of private actors. Each aspect is addressed from a more human rights-focused angle and a development-policy angle. This allows comparisons between the different approaches but also seeks to close gaps which would remain if only one perspective would be at the center of the discussions. Specifically, the book shows the strong connections between human rights and the objectives of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Sustainable Development Goals adopted by the United Nations in 2015. Already the preamble of this document explicitly states that "the 17 Sustainable Development Goals ... seek to realise the human rights of all". Moreover, several goals and targets of the 2030 Agenda correspond to already existing individual human rights obligations. The contributions of this volume therefore also address how the implementation of human rights and SDGs can reinforce each other, but also point to critical shortcomings of the different approaches.

This work brings together two issues that are not necessarily related: measures to reduce poverty, and respect for human rights. Most of the contributors are from Latin America, a continent characterized by terrible human rights violations and immense inequalities of wealth. Law, they argue, is no panacea for the intractable problem of poverty. But it can be an indispensable basis for social mobilization, which, in turn, can be strengthened by socially engaged and critical social science. Vigorous advocacy of compliance with international human rights norms and the inclusion of such standards in national legal frameworks can help to eradicate global poverty and social injustice. The contributions pay particular attention to the struggle of indigenous peoples and explore a range of questions including the relatively new notion of the right to development.

This book seeks to advance the emerging field of international poverty law. While law and development discourse has dealt with international poverty, advocates of poverty reduction customarily operate within a nation-state context. The contributors to this volume, while largely, although not exclusively, relying on human rights discourse and United Nations, International Labour Organization and World Trade Organization initiatives as their primary legal sources, begin to position international poverty law as a legitimate field for transnational, multidisciplinary legal research and dialogue. While critiquing both legal theory and current policy, they nevertheless open up a constructive prospect of specific arenas in which the development of international poverty law can contribute to addressing poverty reduction. The opening chapters of this volume provide a framework within which to position the future theoretical development of international poverty law. The rest of the book explores specific human rights initiatives that address particular aspects of poverty. These include an overview of human rights conventions and how they can be connected to international poverty law; measures required to counter the tendency of intellectual property law as applied to biological products and processes to undermine food security; the right to food as framed in United Nations development documents; the potential role that voluntary codes of conduct currently being adopted by some transnational corporations might play in poverty reduction; and the startlingly important development in the new South Africa of an alternative vision of constitutional law that takes account of international human rights instruments in moving towards rendering social and economic rights justifiable.