Social Policy and Human Rights: Re-thinking the Engagement

Abstract

It is argued that the encompassing concept of welfare rights that is contained within the Social Policy literature – and which has developed from TH Marshall's distinction between civil and political rights on the one hand and social or welfare rights on the other – provides a clearer and more explicit basis for an international call for the progressive development of social policies than, for example, the human rights approach to poverty reduction currently espoused by the UNDP and OHCHR. Social rights continue to be a relatively marginalised or qualified element of the human rights agenda and may be more effectively harnessed by way of a welfare rights approach based on a politics of needs interpretation.

Critiquing capabilities: The distractions of a beguiling concept

“…1), for example, he presented his argument that the process of human development is the enhancement of human capabilities. However, it is argued elsewhere (Dean, 2002(Dean, , 2008) that the international establishment never properly embraced his central premise. The prevailing establishment discourse -that is evident in other parts of the Human Development Report 2000 -assumes that human development and the reduction of poverty self-evidently require economic growth, not human empowerment.…”

Can Policy to Address Some Disability Rights Mitigate Weak Approaches to Others?

“…The state is obliged to take steps towards realizing the social rights but these duties are not enforceable (Dean, 2008). Fraser argues that through the interaction between social cultural and political economic practices, injustice is resolved through redistribution and recognition, but in a post-welfare context, redistribution is threatened by the tightening of eligibility and rationing of resources (Parker, 2006).…”

Children’s rights and children’s welfare after the Convention on the Rights of the Child

“…But melding rights and broader concerns, especially around welfare, have proved more problematic than was initially thought. Dean (2008) is surely right in pointing out that rights advocates have not always understood the complex ways in which welfare regimes are created and operate, while welfare debates are not always rooted in concepts of human rights. Additionally, the CRC emerged after the 'golden age' of welfare, just at a time when the capacity and even the appropriateness of states as agents of social improvement and development was being questioned.…”