Boomerang or Buckshot? Blame Diffusion in International Anti-Hunger Campaigns
by Michelle D. Jurkovich
B.A. in English, May 2005, California State University, Fresno M.A. in Political Science, June 2008, California State University, Los Angeles
A Dissertation submitted to
The Faculty of The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
August 31, 2014
Dissertation directed by
Martha Finnemore University Professor of Political Science and International Affairs
The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University certifies that Michelle D. Jurkovich has passed the Final Examination for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy as of June 25, 2014 . This is the final and approved form of the dissertation.
Boomerang or Buckshot? Blame Diffusion in International Anti-Hunger Campaigns
Michelle D. Jurkovich
Dissertation Research Committee:
Martha G. Finnemore, University Professor of Political Science and International Affairs, Dissertation Director
Susan K. Sell, Professor of Political Science and International Affairs, Committee Member
Kimberly J. Morgan, Professor of Political Science and International Affairs, Committee Member
ii
© Copyright 2014 by Michelle D. Jurkovich All rights reserved
iii Acknowledgements
It truly does take a village to produce a dissertation. In my case, this project would not have been possible without the encouragement and steadfast support of many friends and mentors or without the generous time given to me by activists, archivists, and colleagues around the world.
I am grateful to the Loughran Foundation, the American Consortium of
European Union Studies, the Millar Family and the Institute for European and
Eurasian Studies (at the George Washington University), and the Columbian College at the George Washington University for their generous financial support in funding essential research trips to Rome, Oxford, and London for interviews and archival work and time back in DC to work on writing the dissertation. While in Rome, special thanks are due to Patricia Merrikin, for helping me navigate the FAO library collections, Fabio Ciccarello for his assistance in accessing the FAO archives,
Richardo Munoz, who digitized FAO annual reports for me, and Mirza who gave up half of his office for me to have a space to work when based at the FAO. The staff of the Law and Social Science libraries at Oxford gave generously of their time to help me track down dusty historical records and provided access to their refugee studies collection. Many thanks to Jane Olmstead-Rumsey for excellent research assistance.
I am thankful to Dina Bishara, Kelly Bauer, Kerry Crawford, Jake
Hasselswerdt, Holger Albrecht, Jessica Epstein, Davy Banks, Katie Kuhn, Joey
O’Mahoney, Giovanni Mantilla, Oliver Westerwinter, Cordie Micah Qualle, James Orr,
Elise Leclerc-Gagné, Dov Levin, Anjali Kaushlesh Dayal, Gabriel Michael, Mathias
Poerter, Mara Pillinger, Jessie Anderson, Fabiana Perrera, and participants of the
iv GW IR student workshop, for their feedback and helping me to hone the argument and core concepts over countless cups of coffee. Many thanks to Wayne Sandholtz,
Lee Ann Fujii, Hans-Peter Schmitz, Thomas Risse, Margaret Keck, Charli Carpenter,
Michelle Allendoerfer, Kate Weaver, Eric Voeten, and Jon Western for generously giving of their time either by reading and providing comments or meeting to talk through important concepts as the dissertation evolved. Susan Wiley made it her life’s mission to make sure I finished my dissertation in a timely manner and made a point to ask “Michelle, how much have you written today?” whenever she saw me in the department hallway. I learned quickly that I had better have a good answer when I saw her.
I am grateful to members of my dissertation committee—Susan K. Sell,
Kimberly Morgan, Rachel Stein, and Jennifer Clapp—for their thoughtful comments as the project developed. Lee Ann Fujii mentored me throughout my graduate program, especially in the early years, and was a source of great encouragement.
Most of all, I am indebted to my dissertation advisor, Martha Finnemore. Marty was both my greatest advocate and the first to point out if my writing or thinking was unclear or sloppy. She read every draft, often in their ugliest forms, had a knack for asking deep probing questions, and was a steadfast source of encouragement. I could not have asked for a better mentor.
This dissertation is dedicated to my grandmother, Helen Keith.
v
Abstract of Dissertation
Boomerang or Buckshot? Blame Diffusion in International Anti-Hunger Campaigns
The transnational advocacy literature in field of international relations focuses almost exclusively on cases of civil and political rights campaigns. And yet, many of today’s largest and most pressing campaigns center not on civil and political rights but on economic, social, and cultural rights. This dissertation focuses attention on one such right: the right to food, and asks: What explains how international anti- hunger organizations construct their campaigns and whom they decide to target in these campaigns?
I argue that existing models in the literature, namely Keck and Sikkink’s (1998)
“boomerang model” and Risse, Ropp, and Sikkink’s (1999, 2013) “spiral model,” are unable to explain the behavior of international anti-hunger campaigns. These models function on the basis of a common (essential) assumption---that activists can agree on a singular actor as “to blame” for a given violation and effectively partner together to focus pressure on a target actor to compel change.
Yet, whom do activists blame for hunger? I interviewed and surveyed executive and senior staff at the top international anti-hunger organizations and documented the diffusion of blame by activists. I develop an alternative model to the “boomerang” and “spiral” models, called the “buckshot model,” which I argue is better able to
vi explain the behavior of transnational advocacy in the hunger issue area. Instead of focused pressure by activists onto a singular target state, the “buckshot model” shows the “buckshot” of blame across multiple targets, linking to diverse causal frames and proposed solutions to the problem.
How is it possible that international anti-hunger campaigns would behave differently from civil and political rights campaigns already documented in the literature? I argue that anti-hunger activists are working in an environment without a prescriptive norm around hunger. This lack of a norm is both constitutive of the diffusion of blame in this issue space but also makes less possible certain campaign outcomes (namely the centralized pressure on one target actor we have come to expect in the transnational advocacy literature). Why does hunger lack a prescriptive norm? Three factors contribute to the lack of a prescriptive norm in the hunger issue space. First, hunger is at once both a development problem and a human rights issue. The legacy of competing analytic frameworks around the problem (development vs. human rights) makes the construction of such a prescriptive norm difficult. Second, while traditional human rights frameworks would ascribe responsibility to national governments for hunger within their borders, anti-hunger organizations with in-country missions have strong incentives not to blame national governments for fear of jeopardizing the safety and security of staff and active programs. Even as historically “development” focused organizations embrace “rights frameworks,” they remain hesitant to centralize pressure on national governments while they retain on the ground operations.
vii Third, international human rights law does not provide a prescriptive norm in this issue space. While in the case of civil and political rights campaigns, activists often leverage international human rights law to focus campaigns on a single target actor
(national governments who signed onto the specific human rights treaty in question), international human rights law is leveraged far less often in the case of the right to food, despite the fact that nearly all states have ratified at least one legally binding treaty attributing responsibility to national governments for the right to food within their borders. Chapter 5 examines why this is the case.
viii Table of Contents
Abstract of Dissertation…………………………….…………………………………………………………vi
List of Figures……………………………………………………………………………………..………………..x
List of Tables………………………………………………………………………….………..………………….xi
List of Abbreviations and Acronyms…………………………………………………………..……..…xii
Chapter 1: Introduction………………………….…………………………………………………………... 1
Chapter 2: Boomerang or Buckshot?………………………………….….…………………………… 13
Chapter 3: Not all Human Rights have Norms…………………………..…………………...……. 62
Chapter 4: Hunger at the Nexus of Rights and Development…………………...….……….. 87
Chapter 5: On International Human Rights Law.…….………………………………………… 125
Chapter 6: Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………...………….148
References………………………………………………………………………………….……………………160
Appendix….…………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 178
ix List of Figures
Figure 2.1: The Boomerang Model...... 23
Figure 2.2: Multiple Channels of Blame…………………………………………...…………………..32
Figure 2.3: The Varied Causes of Hunger……………………………………………………………..36
Figure 2.4: The Buckshot Model………………………………………………………………………….46
Figure 3.1: The Diffusion of Blame………………………………………………………………………72
Figure 3.2: Oxfam Executive Response to Blame…………………….……………………………74
Figure 3.3: The Many Varied Solutions to Hunger………………..………………………………81
Figure 4.1: The “Big 10” ………………………………………………………………………………...…108
Figure 4.2: ActionAid as Charity Organization……………………………………………………115
Figure 4.3: ActionAid as “Empowerment Organization” ...……………………………..……116
Figure 4.4: ActionAid as Human Rights Organization..…………………………………..……118
Figure 5.1: Human Rights Obligations under General Comment 12…………………….132
x List of Tables
Table 2.1: Who is to Blame for Hunger?...... 33
Table 2.2: What Causes Hunger?...... ………………………………………….....37
Table 2.3: Underlying Assumptions behind Existing Models…………………….……….….40
Table 5.1: International Human Rights Instruments which Include
the Right to Food………………………………………………………….…………………..……134
xi List of Abbreviations and Acronyms
CEDAW Convention for the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination
Against Women
CESCR Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights
CRC Convention on the Rights of the Child
FAO United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization
FIAN FoodFirst Information and Action Nework
G-8 Group of Eight
G-77 Group of 77
GMO Genetically Modified Organism
HIV/AIDS Human Immunodeficiency Virus/Acquired Immunodeficiency
Syndrome
HRBAP Human Rights Based Approach to Programming
ICCPR International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights
ICESCR International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural
Rights
IMF International Monetary Fund
INGO International Non-Governmental Organization
IO International Organization
MDGs Millennium Development Goals
MSF Doctor’s Without Borders/ Médecins Sans Frontières
NGO Non-Governmental Organization
xii OECD Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development
TNC Transnational Corporation
UN United Nations
UNDP United Nations Development Programme
UNHR Universal Declaration of Human Rights
UNICEF United Nations Children’s Fund
VG Voluntary Guidelines
WFP United Nations World Food Programme
WHO United Nations World Health Organization
xiii CHAPTER 1:
Introduction
I began graduate school thinking that surely a discipline which sought to understand and theorize power should have a lot to say about a problem like global hunger. Indeed, hunger has many of the characteristics that one would think political scientists would be drawn to: it affects a significant percentage of the global population (at minimum roughly 842 million people);1 it serves as the raison d'être of two international organizations (the UN Food and Agriculture Organization
(FAO) and the World Food Programme (WFP)); it has attracted hundreds of civil society organizations working towards its amelioration; it involves agribusinesses, transnational corporations, and near constant trade disputes; and most importantly, it is a matter of life and death. If we think politics is about “the uneven distribution of power in society, how the struggle over power is conducted, and its impact on the creation and distribution of resources, life chances and well-being,” there are few problems as inherently political as who gets enough to eat in this world and who does not.2
Yet, I found precious few political scientists, particularly in the United States, had focused much attention on the problem of global hunger. There was a brief surge of interest in hunger and the politics of food in the late 1970’s, culminating in
1 (2013).The State of Food Insecurity in the World. As will be discussed in Chapter 2, this should be taken as a very conservative estimate. 2 In my first graduate class in political science, this is how our professor defined politics and it has stuck with me. Definition is attributed to former anti-apartheid activist (and later political scientist), Adrian Leftwich.
1 a special edition of International Organization devoted on the “Global Political
Economy of Food,” but the discipline’s interest in the topic quickly subsided.3 Over the coming decades, a few political scientists would conduct studies on international food aid,4 apply regime theory to hunger,5 examine the global food crisis of 2008,6 debate the role of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in modern agriculture,7 and probe the link between food insecurity and domestic instability,8 but such studies were comparatively rare. In the United States, at least, the subfield of international relations in particular remained focused on questions of war and trade, with virtually no scholarship on hunger in any of the field’s flagship journals.
Instead, in the social sciences, scholarship on hunger is scattered across a number of disciplines with no clear disciplinary “home.” Economists have been and continue to be interested in questions of economic demand for food, food subsidies, food price volatility, the effects of economic policies on nutrition, and the economics of food aid.9 Anthropologists have conducted important studies on food insecurity in specific local contexts.10 Sociology, like political science, has seen little scholarship on hunger in recent years, despite the efforts of Scanlan (2003, 2009) to bring the
3 See: (Summer 1978) Special Issue: The Global Political Economy of Food, International Organization, 32(3) with contributions by Raymond F Hopkins, Donald J. Puchala, I.M. Destler, Robert L. Paalberg, Norman K. Nicholson and John D. Esseks, Gary L. Seevers, Cheryl Christensen, Henry R. Nau, James E. Austin, D. Gale Johnson. 4 Uvin (1992); Clapp (2012); Wallerstein (1980) 5 Uvin (1994) 6 Clapp and Cohen (2009) 7 Paarlberg (2009); Zerbe (2004) 8 Hendrix and Brinkman (2013). On the relationship between food insecurity and conflict, see: Messer and Cohen (2007). 9 Sen (1982); Dreze, Sen, & Hussain (1995); Barrett (2001); Barrett and Maxwell (2005); Pinstrup- Andersen (1987, 1988, 2010). 10 De Waal (2004); Taussig (1978). For a broader survey see: Pottier (1999).
2 study of food security into the field.11 Hunger has, in many ways, become an
“orphan” issue. Everyone agrees that it is important, but nobody knows who ought to be studying it.
My goal in the study that follows is to convince my fellow political scientists that hunger falls very much under the purview of what we study and, moreover, that political science can learn much and benefit greatly from attention to this important issue. Hunger can contribute to many conversations already going on in political science. It is a human rights violation, but the “right to food,” functions differently than most of the human rights we typically study (i.e. torture, freedom of speech, universal suffrage). Hunger can be a political weapon, but we understand little about why this weapon is used sometimes but not others.12 Hunger can be a precursor to domestic instability, but we still know very little about under what conditions this happens.13 Hunger is also a complex, chronic problem that plagues developed as well as developing states. How do states approach problem-solving for cases of complex, chronic problems? We really do not know much about this either. The hunger case could shed light on a great many issues and questions of import to political scientists, and yet we have left this wide empirical world relatively unexplored.
This dissertation seeks to understand one specific facet of the hunger problem: the nature of international anti-hunger activism, particularly around the
11 Scanlan (2003, 2009). There has been, however, growing interest in food safety regimes. See: Epstein (2011) 12 Jurkovich (2010) 13 Though this is a question that is now beginning to get some attention. See: Hendrix and Brinkman (2013).
3 problem of chronic hunger. While a study of campaigns seeking emergency famine relief would be an extremely valuable contribution in and of itself, the majority of the world’s hungry suffer not from short-term famine but from long-term food deprivation.14 This hunger often does not have the benefit of flashy media attention, where pictures of children with bloated bellies could perhaps sustain a brief day (or maybe even week) of sympathy for a food crisis. Campaigns in response to long- term hunger require far more effort on the part of activists to construct meaningful campaigns, and how and why activists construct these campaigns matters a great deal. Put differently, it would be easy to forget about chronic global hunger. A problem of this sort cannot on its own easily sustain media or public attention.
Without these activists and advocates, it is unlikely that this problem would receive much attention or support at all.
What explains how international anti-hunger organizations construct their campaigns and whom they decide to target in these campaigns? In our human rights literature we have come to rely on two dominant models to explain the trajectories of advocacy campaigns---Keck and Sikkink’s (1998) “boomerang model” and Risse, Ropp, and Sikkink’s (1999, 2013) “spiral model”-- but both of these models paint an orderly picture of activism where NGOs partner together to focus centralized pressure on a single target. In the world of boomerangs and spiral
14 As will be discussed in Chapter 4, however, the line between humanitarian and development work in the hunger case can be blurry, and organizations can engage in both emergency relief and campaign for longer term chronic hunger. When groups like MSF and CARE were surveyed, they were asked to direct their answers to their understandings of chronic hunger, as while these groups also engage in significant emergency relief for short term hunger or famine.
4 models, activists agree on who is to blame for a rights violation and they coordinate efforts to effectively shame that target into reforming their ways.
Juxtapose this orderly world of focused activism with the hunger world and you are left with a puzzle. Far from focused pressure on a single actor that activists agree is to blame for hunger, international anti-hunger organizations are waging campaigns against a diverse array of targets: transnational corporations (TNCs), national governments, outside states (usually the G-8), price speculators, or sometimes choosing to blame no one at all for the hunger problem. There is no centralized pressure by activists (even within the same organization) on a single target; rather, anti-hunger campaigns “buckshot” blame across multiple actors and campaign targets. But if the boomerang and spiral models cannot explain activism in this issue area, what can?
In Chapter 2, I put forward an alternative model of advocacy (called the
“buckshot model”) which can better describe international campaigns in this issue area. The remaining three chapters of the dissertation focus on explaining a central component of the “buckshot model:” the scattering (or “buckshotting”) of international advocacy campaigns across multiple targets. In the hunger issue area, campaigns are not waged against one common “violator,” but rather target multiple actors, often at the same time. How is it possible that international anti-hunger campaigns “buckshot” instead of “boomerang” or “spiral”? Unlike in the case of many civil and political rights campaigns which follow the boomerang and spiral models, the hunger issue area lacks a clear prescriptive norm. Prescriptive norms, often present for civil and political rights, ascribe a specific appropriate behavior to a
5 specific actor. Good governments ought to regulate elections to ensure they are free and fair is one example (used in Chapter 3) of a prescriptive norm. But good who ought to do what to ensure that people are fed? What is the appropriate behavior prescribed for which specific actor in the hunger policy space? Prescriptive norms can help centralize advocacy campaigns on a specific target by clarifying exactly who should do exactly what, but such norms are simply not present in the hunger case to do so. The lack of such norms shapes the environment in which anti-hunger organizations work and the kinds of campaigns they construct. Specifically, it makes it less likely that campaigns will focus on one single target as expected in the scholarly literature and as has been so well documented in some civil and political rights campaigns.
Why does the hunger issue area lack a prescriptive norm? This dissertation explores three reasons why this is the case. First, hunger is an issue area that rests between two (at times competing) analytic frameworks: development and human rights. These two frameworks understand questions of responsibility and blame around hunger in different ways, with development frameworks often asserting the responsibility of the global North (both Northern states and their comparatively wealthy citizens) in developing the global South. Human rights approaches, by contrast, tend to place responsibility on national governments for the realization of the human rights of their own citizens. Second, in the case of one important subset of anti-hunger organizations, those that were historically development organizations but have recently adopted human rights frameworks (i.e. Oxfam and
ActionAid), development legacies can be particularly salient in explaining why they
6 do not focus pressure solely on national governments. These organizations continue to retain on the ground operations and have staff in-country doing the hands-on work of implementing programs. The presence of such staff and on-going programs makes blaming national governments risky, as it jeopardizes the safety and security of their more traditional development missions.
Finally, international law has not served to generate a prescriptive norm in this issue space, as one might have expected. In the case of civil and political rights campaigns, activists will often cite international legal frameworks as legitimizing a particular target (generally national governments) as responsible for failing to fulfill their responsibilities vis-à-vis the human right in question. In this way, international law serves to focus activism on a single campaign target (the actor who publically committed to a specific behavior when ratifying the international treaty or covenant) by legitimizing this actor as legally responsible for a particular human right. The right to food is codified in multiple (binding) international legal covenants. It is articulated in the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and
Cultural Rights (ICESCR), the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), the
Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women
(CEDAW) as well as the (non-binding) Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Nearly all governments, with the notable exception of the United States, have ratified at least one of these binding covenants. In terms of international law, responsibility for ensuring the right to food is clearly ascribed to national governments, and yet this has not generated a viable prescriptive norm in this issue area. Chapter 5 examines why this is the case.
7 A detailed research design is provided in Chapter 2, but a few words on the philosophy of science underlying this dissertation would be valuable here. This project is largely a descriptive study, but it also makes some “how possible” claims, which inherently have a causal dimension, as we will see with the description of
Finnemore’s (2003) work below. In terms of its descriptive focus, there are several reasons to believe this to be valuable. As Gerring (2012) argues, descriptive work is essential to the discipline of political science, as it helps the field to hone important concepts (as I will attempt to do with our understanding of norms and law around hunger),15 it helps with the ever difficult task of measurement,16 and it helps address questions of what, how, and how possible of important substantive issues.17
Descriptive work is especially important in issue areas where we lack strong empirical grounding, which is certainly the case with international anti-hunger advocacy.18 Moreover, descriptive work can also serve to explain.19
While common in the constructivist literature, the idea that a norm (or a lack of a norm) can be both constitutive and causal in its relationship to an outcome being investigated would likely seem at odds with the traditional understanding of causal arguments. Proponents of King, Keohane, and Verba’s (KKV) (1994)
Designing Social Inquiry would argue that descriptive inference simply cannot be used to explain, as describing and explaining are separate enterprises and “At its
15 Gerring(2012), see especially pp.733-741. 16 Ibid 17 Ibid, pp.722 & 730; See also Wendt (1998) 18 Ibid, esp. p. 741 19 Ibid, p. 724; Wendt (1998)
8 core, real explanation is always based on causal inferences.”20 Causality, here, is understood to meet three conditions (saying X causes Y requires that X must be independent of Y, occur before Y, and absent X, Y would never happen).21
“Variables” language is often used by scholars of this philosophical bent. One’s
“dependent variable” must be truly independent from one’s “independent variable”
(hence, the ‘independence’ of this variable) or the study falls prey to endogeniety.22
How then can something both constitute and cause an outcome to be observed?
Certainly, this would violate the independence condition in KKV’s understanding of causality.
This question becomes especially salient when studying social norms.
Constructivist scholarship often blends constitutive and causal roles for norms, as, for example, they both constitute what an actor believes to be appropriate behavior and this belief can make possible certain types of action. My study follows from the example of Finnemore’s (2003) The Purpose of Intervention: Changing Beliefs about the Use of Force. In this book, Finnemore argues that:
new beliefs [about the use of force] make possible (and in that sense cause) new intervention behavior by creating new norms of behavior and new reasons for action….Thus understanding beliefs about the legitimate purposes of intervention is not ‘mere description,’ since beliefs about legitimate intervention constitute certain behavioral possibilities and, in that sense, cause them.23
If norms can make possible certain behavior, the logic holds that a lack of a
20 Emphasis added, but is telling, I think, of how work based on a strict positivist sense of “causal inference” is seen as more “real” than the (apparently illusionary?) work of other sorts of social science: King, Keohane, & Verba (1994), p.75, fn1 21 Wendt (1998), pp.105-106 22 King, Keohane & Verba (1994), p. 94 23 Finnemore (2004), pp. 14-15.
9 norm can make impossible, or at least, less possible certain behavior. This is what I argue in the case of a lack of a prescriptive hunger norm. This lack of a norm is both constitutive of the diffusion of blame present among anti-hunger activists and organizations and it makes less possible the possibility for these campaigns to take the form expected in the boomerang and spiral models (i.e. centralized pressure on a single target). The lack of a prescriptive norm shapes the terrain in which anti- hunger activists work. It does not guarantee an outcome (I make no law-like claims here), but it can create an environment where centralized pressure on one single target is less likely and the scattering of campaigns targeting multiple actors is more likely.
I have written this dissertation with a number of different audiences in mind.
For human rights scholars, my goal is to make the case for expanding the scope of our inquiry to focus greater attention on economic and social rights and their campaigns. Our literature is severely lopsided. We now know a great deal, empirically, about civil and political rights campaigns and have used this knowledge to derive theoretical arguments about how and why advocacy campaigns function they way that they do. But there is an entire subset of rights, economic and social rights, which we have left understudied. This dissertation looks at one case of an economic and social right, the right to food, and finds that many of the assumptions we make in our literature on human rights advocacy do not apply here, especially assumptions about the nature of blame and the logic of advocacy that flows from these views. I provide an alternative model to the “boomerang” and “spiral” models, called the “buckshot model,” which I argue better explains the trajectories of
10 campaigns in this issue space. The right to food shares many important characteristics with the larger category of economic and social rights and there may be great theoretical and empirical payoffs to focusing greater attention on this subset of rights.
For constructivists, this dissertation explores the implications for an issue area (hunger) when there is no prescriptive norm present. Constructivist work often highlights how norms make some action possible, but often do not look at the logical corollary: how a lack of a norm can make action impossible, or less possible.
In the hunger case, the lack of a prescriptive norm made centralized pressure around a single target less likely. Additionally, for constructivist scholars of human rights in particular, this book questions the assumption that all human rights actually have viable prescriptive norms.
For legal scholars and constructivists, this dissertation seeks to encourage new thinking on the varied role of international law in legitimizing advocacy campaigns. We know little about why international law is used to legitimize advocacy campaigns in some issue areas but not in others. Moreover, the hunger case highlights how prescriptive norms do not necessarily translate automatically from law, but only scratches the surface in explaining why. There is much more work to be done here.
Finally, for activists this study seeks to make sense of what anti-hunger activists already know: activism in this issue area is extremely difficult. This dissertation explores the conditions that contribute to making activism challenging here with the hope that greater understanding of these conditions can be useful
11 going forward. At a basic level, this dissertation also serves to map out what anti- hunger activism currently looks like across a wide number of important organizations. During interviews, the staff of these organizations frequently expressed interest in knowing how their fellow activists understood questions of blame and causality for the hunger problem. My hope is that they find the results as interesting and telling as I did. I wish that I could, now at the end of this study, provide them concrete advice on how to structure their future hunger campaigns.
In truth, I am very limited in what I can prescribe here, which is probably more frustrating for me than it is for the activists who know this issue area all too well.
12
CHAPTER 2:
Boomerang or Buckshot?
The transnational advocacy literature in IR focuses almost exclusively on cases of civil and political rights campaigns. Studies of campaigns against torture, forced disappearances, apartheid, landmines, and chemical weapons have transformed the way we think about the possibilities for promoting and protecting human rights and the kinds of actors that can successfully do this work.24 We know a great deal now about the strategies and techniques that have succeeded in the civil and political rights sphere, yet many of today’s largest and most pressing advocacy campaigns center not on civil and political rights but on economic and social rights.
This dissertation focuses attention on international advocacy around one such right: the right to food. What explains how international anti-hunger organizations construct their campaigns and whom they decide to target in these campaigns?
This chapter takes the first step in answering this question by probing the assumptions behind the preexisting models of advocacy in the scholarly literature, mapping out the space of international anti-hunger campaigns, and determining if our extant models are useful in explaining the hunger case. Arguing that they are not, I develop an alternative model of advocacy, “the buckshot model,” which is
24 See for example: Klotz (1999); Price (1998, 1997). Keck and Sikkink (1998)
13 better equipped to explain international campaigns in the hunger case. The remaining chapters of the dissertation focus attention on explaining a central characteristic of the “buckshot model:” the “buckshot” of international advocacy campaigns across multiple targets.
The analysis that follows shows that existing models of rights advocacy in the literature, namely Keck and Sikkink’s (1998) “boomerang model” and Risse, Ropp, and Sikkink’s (1999, 2013) “spiral model,” are unable to explain the behavior of international anti-hunger campaigns.25 These models function on the basis of a common (essential) assumption---that activists can agree on a single actor as “to blame” for a given violation and effectively partner together to focus pressure on a target actor to compel change.
Yet, whom do activists blame for hunger? I interviewed and surveyed executive and senior staff at the top international anti-hunger organizations and documented the diffusion of blame by activists. In total, I conducted extensive interviews with over 50 executive and senior level staff at international anti-hunger organizations as well as the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and World
Food Programme (WFP),26 and 21 surveys across executive and senior staff of the top international anti-hunger organizations. I asked activists what they believed caused hunger, who was to blame, and how the problem could best be solved. Their responses suggest that there is no common understanding across activists for a
25 Keck and Sikkink(1998); Risse, Ropp, & Sikkink (1999, 2013). 26 These are roughly split between interviews with anti-hunger organization staff (~25) and employees of anti-hunger IOs (mostly entirely within the FAO (~25) with a few interviews at with employees at WFP).
14 singular actor that is to blame for hunger or a singular causal frame (or solution) to the problem. While these surveys gauged respondent beliefs and opinions of executive and senior staff at anti-hunger organizations on questions of causality, blame, and solutions to hunger, it is important that they are supplemented by examining the actual behavior of international advocacy campaigns around the hunger issue area. Perhaps executive and senior staff may believe, for instance, that blame should be shared among multiple actors for hunger but still wage campaigns targeting one single actor. An examination of the international anti-hunger campaigns waged by these organizations determines that this is not the case.
Indeed, anti-hunger campaigns in practice are waged simultaneously blaming diverse actors such as transnational corporations (TNCs), price speculators, national governments as well as outside states. Thus, rather than boomerangs or spirals, anti hunger advocacy follows something that looks more like a “buckshot model” of behavior. Instead of focused pressure by activists onto a singular target state, the
“buckshot model” shows the buckshot of blame across multiple targets, linking to diverse causal frames and proposed solutions to the problem.
Why should any of this matter? In terms of policy, understanding the hunger case is important because it affects, as a very conservative estimate, approximately
842 million people worldwide.27 According to John Holmes, United Nations Under-
Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs (2008), “Each day, 25,000 people,
27 (2013).The State of Food Insecurity in the World. The estimate is very conservative because it only attempts to measure hunger that lasts for 1 year or longer (so short term periods or seasons of hunger are not included). Similarly, the estimate assumes a very low necessary calorie intake, suitable only for a body at rest. Given that most people, particularly in the developing world, work in capacities that require physical activity, this estimate sets the bar very low for what constitutes “undernourishment” (the FAO’s label for “hunger”).
15 including more than 10,000 children, die from hunger and related causes.”28 To put this issue in perspective, more people die from hunger globally than in all wars (civil and international) combined. More people die from hunger each year than in all violent deaths combined (including gang violence, intentional and unintentional homicide).29 In terms of human rights, the right to food is perhaps the most essential of all rights, as no civil, political, economic, social, or cultural right can be enjoyed if it is not first realized.30
Theoretically, understanding the trajectory of activist campaigns that center on hunger amelioration is important because this case highlights weaknesses in some of our core assumptions in the human rights and TAN literatures---namely that blame is centralized on a common violator in international advocacy campaigns. Furthermore, by targeting non-state actors (most commonly transnational corporations (TNCs)) as “to blame” in anti-hunger campaigns, activists have begun to reshape the “right to food” as no longer the sole responsibility of states, but rather also of the private sector. This attribution of responsibility to private actors is not derived from international law (which asserts that states bear sole responsibility for human rights), but represents a potentially profound reinterpretation of economic and social rights by activist communities in ways that warrant serious study within the human rights literature.
28 Holmes (2008) 29 “Global burden of armed violence 2011, Lethal encounters: Executive summary.” (2011).
30 To Shue (1980), the right to food constitutes a “basic right,” and as such a core human right to be protected as the enjoyment of any other human right would be conditional to achieving subsistence (and security) rights first.
16 This chapter will begin with a brief discussion of the landscape of international anti-hunger advocacy, introducing key IO and NGO actors in this issue area, followed by an examination of existing models of activism in the literature. I will then discuss the research design and present the results of the survey. Arguing that the models available in the literature are unable to explain the campaigns in this issue area, I will present the “buckshot model” as a means of better explaining the trajectory of these anti-hunger campaigns. Finally, I conclude with a discussion of why the diffusion of blame matters and preview the following three chapters of the dissertation, which seek to explain the “buckshotting” of campaigns across multiple targets in this issue space, a central feature of the “buckshot model.”
Landscape for International Anti-Hunger Advocacy
The size and scope of the problem of global hunger has attracted hundreds of civil society organizations and foundations, and resulted in the construction of two international organizations tasked with its amelioration.
Nongovernmental organizations like OXFAM (formerly the Oxford Famine
Relief Committee) and CARE have been mobilizing support for combatting global hunger since the end of World War II. World Vision started campaigning for hunger amelioration in 1950 and Doctor’s Without Borders (MSF), Action Against Hunger
(ACF), ActionAid, and Bread for the World all began their anti-hunger campaigns in the 1970’s. Notable human rights organizations Amnesty International and FIAN began anti-hunger campaigns in 2008 and 1986 respectively.31 Private foundations
31 FIAN was formerly known as the FoodFirst Information and Action Network
17 have flocked to this issue area as well, with the Rockefeller Foundation beginning work on agricultural development in 1934 and the Gates Foundation taking up the issue in 2005.32
Broadly, we can think of international anti-hunger organizations as fitting into one of three ideal types: humanitarian, development, and human rights organizations. Most organizations blend the work of two of these three types---for instance, humanitarian organizations which also engage in development work or development organizations which have recently developed “human rights based approaches” (HRBA) to their work. It is not especially useful, in other words, to think of these types as hard and fast in the hunger space. This dissertation looks at twelve of the most dominant international anti-hunger organizations, which include organizations engaging in each of these three types of work.
These organizations will be discussed in greater detail in subsequent chapters, but for now a quick overview would be useful. MSF, Save the Children,
CARE, Action Against Hunger, and World Vision, for instance, are largely humanitarian organizations, though they may also engage in development work.
Oxfam, ActionAid, and the Gates and Rockefeller Foundations engage largely in development work, though Oxfam and ActionAid also consider themselves to also be human rights-focused organizations. Amnesty International and FIAN wage human rights campaigns and neither organization maintains active on-the-ground operations or missions (meaning, they are not leading projects like feeding centers,
32 These are among the most influential international anti-hunger organizations, but they certainly are not the only ones. There are over 700 civil society organizations networked with the FAO alone.
18 education programs, or farmer training, though they do wage in-country advocacy campaigns). Bread for the World is a bit unique in that they are purely an advocacy organization (they retain no on-the-ground operations), though they do not use human rights rhetoric around hunger (i.e. they do not campaign around the “right to food”). These organizations were selected because of their influence in this issue space. In many cases this corresponds with the relative size of their budget vis-à-vis other anti-hunger organizations (i.e. Oxfam), but not always. FIAN, for example, has a much smaller budget than Oxfam but their very vocal and visible activism has made them extremely significant in this issue space.
The anti-hunger community also includes to two key international organizations: the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Food
Programme (WFP). The FAO, established in 1945 with a mandate to ameliorate global hunger, has become the main authoritative voice in the UN for all matters related to chronic undernourishment. The World Food Programme (WFP), once a division within the FAO but now its own independent IO, serves as the UN’s largest humanitarian organization and authority on short-term food crises or famines.
There are, of course, a great many government agencies (USAID, USDA, DFID, etc.) that are also involved in the hunger space. This dissertation focuses on non- state anti-hunger organizations and international organizations because these are the key actors involved in pushing forward changes in state (and non-state) approaches to hunger. In the modern day, it is these activists that shape (and reshape) the hunger conversation.
19 Existing Models in the Literature
More often than not, when the human rights literature in international relations discusses human rights, activists, and their campaign trajectories, it refers almost exclusively to civil and political rights (or physical integrity rights even more narrowly). In part, this bias towards civil and political rights is an understandable legacy of the Cold War. During the Cold War, the United States government in particular favored an emphasis on political and civil rights and media coverage more generally focused far more on campaigns against violations of these sorts of rights (i.e. torture, forced disappearances, lack of free speech, etc.) than violations of economic or social rights (i.e. inadequate food, shelter, health care, education).33
The academy followed suit. Noticing patterns in how transnational actors could compel national governments to improve their human rights records, particularly in the case of civil and political rights, Risse, Ropp and Sikkink (1999, and most recently their updated edition in 2013) and Keck and Sikkink (1998) developed what are likely still the two dominant human rights models referenced in the literature. Their “spiral model”34 and “boomerang model,”35 respectively, both function on the basis of a common (essential) assumption---that blame can be centered on the “violating” national government so that pressure can effectively be focused by transnational actors onto the violating state in order to compel change.36
33 There are some notable exceptions here. For an excellent analysis of right to education campaigns, see Mundy (2010). On the right to health in South Africa, see: Heywood (2009). 34 Risse, Ropp, and Sikkink (1999, 2013) 35 Keck and Sikkink (1998) 36 The focus on civil political rights specifically was common outside of the more constructivist literature on human rights. Lebovic and Voeten (2006) and Simmons (2009) also focused, with few
20 And their models worked. From cases of forced disappearances in Guatemala to torture in Kenya, racial discrimination in South Africa and arbitrary arrest in the
Philippines, scholars were able to explain national governments’ acquiescence to international pressure in the form of changed behavior vis-à-vis political and civil human rights.37
But while these models have been an extremely useful point of departure for the literature on transnational advocacy, where they are less clear is in articulating their scope conditions.38 The hunger case calls into question the assumption that these models function for all types of rights.
The Spiral Model
Risse, Ropp, and Sikkink (1999) wrote one of the foundational texts for the human rights literature arguing that they created a model of “human rights change” which mapped the socialization process of “human rights norms” in a way that was
“generalizable across cases irrespective of cultural, political, or economic differences of the countries.”39 Their “spiral model” is designed to explain key phases of human rights change as the result of a dynamic process of interaction between the state, domestic society, and international/transnational actors. More
exceptions, on questions of state commitment to civil and political human rights. See also, Moravcsik (2000) and Goodliffe and Hawkins (2006). 37 These scholars include Hans Peter Schmitz, David Black, Sieglinde Granzer, Anja Jetschke, Daniel Thomas, Thomas Risse, Kathryn Sikkink, Margaret Keck, Stephen Ropp, Thomas Risse, Audie Klotz, and others. 38 Keck and Sikkink (1998) do lay out some scope conditions, in passing, with the boomerang model. They assume that the model will be more effective, for instance, on cases where there are very clearly vulnerable groups (like children) and where causal chains are short (especially relevant to the hunger case). 39 Risse, and Sikkink (1999), pp. 3 and 6
21 specifically, it theorizes three types of socialization processes (adaptation and strategic bargaining; “shaming,” argumentation and persuasion; and institutionalization/habitualization) and identifies five phases where the state’s response to a given human right can change because of the power of international norms and the state’s interaction with domestic society or the international community. It is worth noting that not all human rights campaigns are expected to follow all five of the phases or do so in the same order. Rather, the spiral model is:
…a causal model which attempts to explain the variation in the extent to which national governments move along the path toward improvement of human rights conditions… Thus, the “spiral model” serves to operationalize the theoretical framework of norm socialization…to identify the dominant mode of social interaction in each phase…and, ultimately, to specify the causal mechanisms by which international norms affect domestic structural change.40
Figure 1: The Spiral Model
Risse and Sikkink (1999) note that their spiral model elaborates on an earlier
“boomerang model” (Figure 2.1, below) developed by Keck and Sikkink (1998).41
Briefly, the boomerang model hypothesizes linkages between domestic NGO groups, international NGOs, and foreign states which can work together to apply pressure to a norm-violating state. According to the model, when unable to successfully apply
40 Ibid, p. 18-19. 41 Risse and Sikkink (1999), pp. 18-19.
22 pressure to a norm violating state, domestic NGOs can link with international NGOs
(INGOs) to gain leverage (through increased resources) in partnership with other states to pressure the norm-violating state to change its behavior.42 For their part, domestic NGOs provide legitimacy and necessary information about the rights violations to INGOs.
Figure 2.1: The Boomerang Model43
A close examination reveals that the inability to clearly identify a “norm violator” would be crippling to the efficacy of both models. In fact, the two powerful forces behind the work of both models are blaming and applying pressure. Blaming is important in both the spiral and boomerang models as a way to focus attention on one specific “norm violator” (which both models assume is the national government). Phase two in the spiral model, for example, “puts the norm-violating
42 Keck and Sikkink (1998), pp. 12-13. 43 Ibid, p. 13
23 state on the international agenda of the human rights network and serves to raise the level of international public attention towards the ‘target state.’”44 Once the norm-violator is on the international agenda, the TAN can more effectively apply pressure for it to conform to the specific human rights norm. Importantly, this pressure serves as a driving force behind each transition in the phases of the spiral model (with the exception of the transition from phase four to five) as well as the driving force behind the second arm of the boomerang model.
Research Design
In beginning this research, I was primarily interested in whether or not the IR literature could explain the trajectories of current global anti-hunger campaigns. In order to explore this, I needed to create a snapshot of the anti-hunger network, dominant organizations at play, the campaigns they were waging, and test whether or not they used the mechanisms of blame, shame, and social pressure against states in ways expected by the boomerang and spiral model and the IR activist literature more broadly. Were states seen as “violators” in this issue space? Who did activists blame? Unpacking this question also meant asking about causality, as different causal frames around hunger would solicit different understandings of who was to blame. If, for instance, climate change was perceived to be responsible for hunger in
Bolivia, campaigns should not focus on shaming Bolivian President Evo Morales, as
Bolivia is hardly a major contributor to climate change. If, however, hunger was
44 Risse and Sikkink (1999), p. 22.
24 caused by a lack of social safety nets and if activists believed there was state capacity to provide such a net, one might reasonably expect activists to blame
Morales for high hunger rates in his country.
In order to get at questions of blame and causality as well as to determine which organizations and campaigns were being waged simultaneously in the hunger issue space, I conducted interviews and surveys with senior staff at anti-hunger
NGOs and foundations either in their Washington, DC or New York, NY offices or via
Skype if they resided outside of the DC or NYC area. I selected the following organizations as the most dominant in the anti-hunger issue space: OXFAM, CARE,
Action Against Hunger, FIAN International, Amnesty International, ActionAid, Bread for the World, World Vision, Gates Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, MSF, and
Save the Children.45 These organizations were selected based on prior secondary research as well as through discussions with activists currently involved in anti- hunger campaigns.46 In order to understand the role of the UN Food and Agriculture
Organization (FAO) and World Food Programme (WFP) in this issue space, I conducted additional interviews at the organizations’ headquarters in Rome. In total, I conducted over 50 extensive one-on-one interviews averaging about 60-75 minutes each.
I administered surveys to 21 different executive and senior level staff spread across twelve of the most active and dominant international anti-hunger
45 One of the respondents from World Vision worked with World Vision International and the other with World Vision USA. Otherwise, all survey respondents worked within the same confederate office/affiliate of the given NGO. 46 As part of my interview questions with activists I would ask which organizations they perceived to me the most dominant in the field. I also asked which organizations they partnered with.
25 organizations. The survey design is explored in greater depth later on in the chapter, but briefly, it was designed to determine which causal frames resonated among senior and executive staff at each anti-hunger organization and who the respondent viewed as “to blame” for hunger. Respondents were also asked as a part of the survey if “any of the platforms or campaigns of the anti-hunger organizations you have worked for disagree with or differ from” the answers they provided on the survey. Most responded that their answers were consistent with the organization’s stance on questions of blame, causality, and the solutions to the hunger problem. As will be developed at greater length later on, the surveys indicated that blame was diffuse in anti-hunger organizations and that causal frames embraced by executive and senior level staff of these organizations varied. In addition to conducting surveys, I also reviewed campaign materials (organizational reports, promotional campaign material, etc.) in order to track the diffusion of blame in campaigns on the ground. In this way, surveys provide insight into senior and executive staff opinions on questions of blame around hunger, and I am able to see evidence of the diffusion of blame in active campaigns being waged on the ground (which target multiple actors). While this chapter focuses largely on the survey results, chapters Four and
Five provide greater detail on the behavior of international anti-hunger campaigns gleaned from organizational reports, campaign materials, and interviews with senior and executive staff at these organizations. In addition, archival research was conducted in the FAO archives in Rome, the Refugee Studies Collection at the
University of Oxford, the US National Archives and the UK National Archives.
26 Finally, while it is more often the norm among qualitative projects in the TAN literature to examine a singular campaign or partnership in a given issue area, I opted instead to widen the lens of my project to encompass multiple anti-hunger campaigns across different types of organizations (including development and more purely human rights-based organizations) taking place simultaneously. In this way,
I am better able to observe variation in causal frames and attribution of blame across different organizations and understand more comprehensively the complexity around activist campaigns in the hunger issue area.
Blame Diffusion in the Hunger Case: Survey Results
Blame, shame, and pressure are important mechanisms in both the spiral and boomerang models, but who is to blame for global hunger? Relatedly, what do organizations see as causing the problem of hunger? In order to determine this, I surveyed executive and senior level staff at the top twelve international anti-hunger organizations. Where possible, multiple senior staff were surveyed within the same organization. While the opinions of employees at all levels of the organization would be valuable, executive and senior staff were selected because they are the most likely to be able to “speak for the organization,” as their decisions directly shape the nature of the advocacy in these NGOs.47
47 This project has received IRB approval (#061153), however a condition to IRB approval was that the exact positions/names of respondents not be disclosed. As specifying the sex of the respondent would, at times, betray their identity all gendered pronouns (when referring to interviews and surveys) have been made feminine.
27 These surveys were designed to be brief (they take roughly five to ten minutes) and are conducted during an interview that lasted an hour, on average.
The interview is designed to allow the respondents to talk openly about how the organization views causality with hunger and the question of blame. It is also designed to help me understand what may drive an organization to a particular causal frame. In order to then determine why NGO employees may understand the causes and blame differently to the hunger problem, I ask several additional questions during the interview, such as which other NGOs the group partners with, how the organizations were funded, as well as several additional questions.
In the survey portion of the interview, respondents were asked five questions:
1) Which NGOs, foundations, or international organizations have you worked for which ran anti-hunger/right to food campaigns? When did you work for them? 2) In your view, which are the top causes of hunger? Please rank the top three (3). 3) In your view, who is to blame for hunger? If you believe there are multiple actors to blame for hunger, please rank all that apply. 4) In your view, which of the following are the best solutions to hunger? Please rank the top three (3).48 5) Would any of the platforms or campaigns of the anti-hunger organizations you have worked for disagree with or differ from your choices in #2, #3 or #4? If so, how?
48 The data obtained from question #4 (on the best solutions to hunger) are not discussed in this chapter, though they are synthesized in Chapter 3.
28 All respondents qualified their responses with certainty scores on a range from 1-10
(with 1 representing “very uncertain” and 10 representing “very certain” of their choice).
Interestingly, there was little overlap in the answers given by the senior/executive level staff members I interviewed and surveyed within the same organization, though almost all of them answered that the platforms and campaigns of their organization would neither disagree with nor differ from their survey answers. I had not expected variation in responses from within executive staff at the same organization as I had assumed organizational cultures were relatively cohesive and that senior officials would share common understandings of blame and causality in the hunger issue area. For this reason, the survey was not designed to test variation among individuals within the same organizations (I would have needed to complete many more surveys within each organization if I wanted to make hard claims about the sum total of causal frames and blame attribution within each organization). Caution should be used, therefore, when extrapolating too much from the surveys regarding the inner dynamics of any particular organization. The survey was designed, rather, to test whether or not it was reasonable to assume common causal frames and a single attribution of blame resonated across anti- hunger organizations. Subsequent chapters will drill deeper into specific organizational contexts for additional information on active anti-hunger campaigns.
Survey Results: Blame Attribution
29 In response to “who is to blame,” respondents were asked to list as many (or as few) actors as they thought were relevant, to rank these actors, and to provide a certainty score (i.e. how confident were they in their response?). The options listed were derived from the anti-hunger campaign literature available. Responses are displayed below in Figure 2.2.
If respondents did not believe anyone was to blame for hunger, they could select this option. If the respondent did not believe any of the options listed were applicable, they could select “Other.” Among those who responded “Other,” one
(from the Gates Foundation) elaborated that they mean that blame is not the word they would use, but rather “responsibility” and that national governments were
“responsible,” but that lack of foreign assistance and poor local agricultural development are also “responsible” for hunger. The second respondent listing
“Other” (from MSF), qualified the response by saying it was a combination of factors
(distorted markets, price speculation, poor focus of national government policies).
The third (World Vision) said that “blame is not the word we use, but rather [we talk in terms of] causes.” To this individual, poor productivity, poor local knowledge of nutrition and hygiene, and gender disparities were behind hunger. An additional respondent (from World Vision International) selected “Other,” stating that the
“world was fallen” and that “we are all to blame for hunger.” One respondent from
Amnesty International stated that international financial institutions were also to blame for hunger and the respondent from Save the Children added a “lack of political will” as to blame for hunger, but did not link this lack of will to a singular actor. The FIAN respondent added intergovernmental organizations as to blame for
30 hunger. Finally, one respondent from Oxfam selected “Other,” noting that it was
“economic injustice” that was to blame for hunger, but not specifically any of the actors listed on the survey.
31 Figure 2.2: Multiple Channels of Blame
*The number in ( ) represents the number of respondents from this organization. There were, for example, three respondents from the Gates Foundation. Only one line was provided linking an organization to a particular response. If multiple people from the same organization listed the same response only one line was provided for the sake of visual clarity.
If we were to remove responses with low certainty scores (scores 1-5, representing “very uncertain” to “neither certain nor uncertain”) we see the following responses (Table 2.1). As is evident in the table, blame is not centralized on one singular actor.
32 Table 2.1
Who is to blame for hunger?
(certainty scores of 6+)
# % of Respondents
National Governments 14 67%
Outside Governments 13 62%
Other 8 38%
Lack of Capacity 6 29%
TNCs 4 19%
Price Speculators 1 5%
Total number of respondents 20 95% with certainty score of 6+ (on blame question)
Survey Results: Causality
Respondents were also asked to rank what they perceived as being the top three causes of hunger. They were provided with a list of causes derived from anti- hunger campaign literatures and provided with an “Other” option if they felt an important cause was not listed. They were then asked to provide a certainty score for each of the causes they selected. The results are listed below in Figure 2.3. As discussed earlier, understanding dominant causal frames is important around the hunger issue area (and around economic and social rights issues more generally) as different causal understandings of the problem will necessarily translate into
33 different targets in individual campaigns. In other words, while in the case of civil and political rights there may be a short causal chain that links the behavior of the state to the violation of a right, in the case of problems like a lack of education, water, healthcare or food, that connection may be less clear and/or multiple causal frames may resonate.
As with the question on blame, respondents were given the option of selecting “Other” if they believed a primary cause of hunger was absent from the list.
When “Other” was selected, and multiple respondents provided the same response
(i.e. lack of political access was listed multiple times), I created an additional category in the figure below. If only one respondent listed the given response for
“Other,” they are listed here: the quality/quantity of water (Action Against Hunger); the inability to either purchase or procure nutritious food either by markets, the national government or outside governments (MSF); wrong focus of aid programs
(too much emphasis on sustainability) (MSF); lack of “global regulation of companies”; poor nutrition practices (World Vision); lack of infrastructure (roads, access to markets) (CARE); mismanagement of natural resources at the household level (World Vision International), which is distinguished from mismanagement of natural resources at the country level more generally (which was mentioned by
GATES and World Vision respondents). FIAN’s respondent was deeply uncomfortable ranking or disaggregating causes from each other, noting that “I don’t prioritize as causes,” and that “[FIAN’s] understanding is that the causes are much more systematic than individual causes.” That said, she listed a variety of causes to consider, including governments engaging in harmful policies around the
34 production of agrofuels, poor bilateral trade agreements that destroy local agriculture, and governments not meeting their official development assistance commitments. She noted also that governments do not protect individuals from abuses to the right to food by TNCs, churches, and political parties. While I could have listed her responses as affirmative for the categories on gender inequality and poor trade agreements, I marked her response simply as “Other,” out of respect for her desire to not see these causes separated out from one another.
35 Figure 2.3: The Varied Causes of Hunger
*The number in ( ) represents the number of respondents from this organization. There were, for example, three respondents from the Gates Foundation. Only one line was provided linking an organization to a particular response. If multiple people from the same organization listed the same response only one line was provided for the sake of visual clarity.
Similarly, if we omit responses with low certainty scores (scores 1-5), we see significant variation in how executive and senior staff at these organizations understand what causes hunger (Table 2.2, below).
36 Table 2.2
What causes hunger?
(certainty scores of 6+)
# % of Respondents
Poverty 12 57%
Gender Inequality 8 38%
Other 9 43%
Poor Agricultural Development 6 29%
Insufficient Social Safety Nets 6 29%
Corruption (national government) 2 10%
Climate Change 2 10%
Unsustainable Population Size 2 10%
Insufficient Food Supply 1 5%
Exploitation of Natural Resources 1 5%
Total number of respondents with 18 86% certainty score of 6+ (on cause question)
While in the activist campaigns tracked by Risse, Ropp, and Sikkink (1999) and Keck and Sikkink (1998) the national government was the norm violator upon whom transnational advocacy networks could agree to focus blame, in the case of anti-hunger campaigns blame is not centered on a single actor nor is there agreement over what causes the problem that the activist community is attempting to solve.
37 One advantage of conducting all of the surveys myself was my ability to gauge the direct reaction of respondents to the survey. The majority of respondents were noticeably uncomfortable when taking the survey, particularly when asked to determine (and rank) primary causes of hunger. It was common for respondents to start to select a cause only to stop, pencil in mid-air, reconsider, and then select something else. While survey respondents were executives or senior level staff in their respective organizations--organizations tasked with solving this very problem of hunger--it was apparent that even they struggled to make sense of the hunger problem. The variety in their responses to the causes of hunger and the attribution of blame as well as their physical reaction to taking the survey and, in some cases, their low certainty scores indicate that among anti-hunger activists questions of causality and blame attribution are not simple, obvious, or universally agreed upon.
It is important to note that activist communities around issue areas like hunger (and many other economic and social problems) contain many different types of organizations. As briefly discussed earlier in the chapter, organizations can take on the following types: humanitarian, development, human rights organizations, or hybrids of multiple types. While in the case of civil and political rights advocacy campaigns may be limited to a singular type of organization (i.e. human rights organizations), this is not the case with the hunger issue area. Each of these organizations share the same objective (the amelioration of hunger) and they wage advocacy campaigns internationally to work towards this objective, but they may classify the nature of their organization in different ways.
38 This dissertation takes seriously the differences between organizations that make up the larger anti-hunger advocacy network, but it also takes seriously the need to consider more than just human rights organizations when discussing the advocacy network around hunger. Campaigns surrounding access to food, like those surrounding access to education, or health, or other economic and social rights, involve diverse organizations within its advocacy network. Frequently these organizations will partner together in missions, they attend similar international conventions and conferences, they often read each other’s reports, and at times they even hire each other’s employees. But each organization also retains its own autonomy in the network and their own flagship programs or campaigns that they direct. Moreover, while the boomerang model and spiral models focus in singular campaigns in isolation from other activist campaigns which may be taking place simultaneously (but with different frames and targets), the hunger case highlights the importance of widening the lens of our inquiry to better observe variation in activist strategies. Only when considering a larger universe of actors (and not focusing on only one singular campaign) are we able to observe the complexity and nuance of the advocacy network and in so doing better understand why activists
(and their campaigns in this particular issue area) behave the way they do.
In sum, there are a number of assumptions behind the boomerang and spiral models which invite scrutiny, particularly when these models are held up to anti- hunger campaigns. These include the following, paired with observations from anti- hunger campaigns:
39 Table 2.3: Underlying Assumptions behind Existing Models
*This is more relevant for the spiral model. For the boomerang model, Keck and Sikkink (1998) note that campaigns are more likely to be effective when there are short, clearly identifiable causal chains around the problem area that link a violator with the rights violation (pp.27-28). **The role of information and legitimacy is more relevant to the boomerang model than the spiral model ***This is more relevant to the spiral model, which does not distinguish between types of rights that may be explained by it than the boomerang model, which acknowledges the importance of clear causal chains for issue areas where the boomerang model will function.
While the diffusion of blame, diverse causal frames, and the existence of multiple campaigns taking place simultaneously has already been discussed, the nature of the relationship between local activist groups and larger NGO/INGO partners has not. In the case of the boomerang model, it is in part the need for information which solidifies partnerships between local activist groups and larger,
40 wealthier (and often more powerful) NGOs. While Keck and Sikkink acknowledge that information goes both ways (from grassroots organizations to larger NGOs and the reverse), they note that:
Most nongovernmental organizations cannot afford to maintain staff people in a variety of countries. In exceptional cases they send staff members on investigation missions, but this is not practical for keeping informed on routine developments. Forging links with local organizations allows groups to receive and monitor information from many countries at low cost. Local groups, in turn, depend on international contacts to get their information out and to help protect them in their work.49
In issue areas like hunger, however, the extent of the problem is already known at the international level, as international organizations (IOs) such as the
FAO control and disseminate the authoritative “hunger count” for each country.
While in the case of civil and political rights local groups may be needed to provide information about the extent of the rights violation (i.e. the existence (and extent) of forced disappearances or torture in a given country), the number of hungry people in each country is already readily available information to any NGO that cares to access it on the FAO website. In other words, the existence and even the scale of the problem of hunger (like the percentage of a given state population receiving an education, health care, or who have access to potable water) is already widely known thanks to UN statistics.50
49 Keck and Sikkink (1998), p. 22
50 That does not mean, however, that these statistics are without controversy or even that the data UN organizations provide is always reliable. See Finnemore and Jurkovich (2014); Lappé et al (2013); Svedberg (1999)
41 In practice, this means that local community organizations serve a slightly different purpose to larger INGOs. Instead of providing information on the existence or scale of hunger, these groups provide human stories and faces to the campaigns waged by INGOs. They may also provide details on specific farmer groups that have been displaced from their land or local land grabbing which has taken place in a given community. INGOs do not, however, need local groups for information on the existence (or extent) of the hunger problem in a given country. Local groups can be used by INGOs, however, to exert pressure on their own governments when INGOs fear government retaliation against campaigns which they themselves might wage.
Unlike some purely rights-based organizations, hybrid development-rights organizations like OXFAM find themselves torn between two objectives: encouraging anti-hunger advocacy and also protecting their already existing missions on the ground in developing countries. This results in greater hesitation to overtly shame or blame the national governments of developing countries for high hunger rates, for fear that governments will deny the organization’s staff members future visas and expel existing missions from the country.51 According to one executive at Oxfam America:
To launch a campaign in a country against…the corrupt, [those] seeking private interests, then we have to be convinced that the good we will do at that national campaign will exceed the risk we will throw our programs into, some of which are very traditional, because we do campaign but we also do some basic stuff. That is my battle…[Amnesty International] doesn’t have to balance this…
51 Interview with Oxfam America executive, May 14, 2013
42 Later on in our conversation, I asked this executive about the extent to which
Oxfam pressures national governments to improve hunger rates in their own countries. I asked, “what percentage [of your in-country campaigns] are the uncomfortable, pressure, ‘bad, bad Ethiopia! [sorts of campaigns]?” She responded:
Bad, bad, Ethiopia? That’s too much. Ethiopia gets you kicked out…..[if you mean] marching down the streets…if you’re asking me for extreme, like...we’re going bat shit against these people…I’m saying what Human Rights [Watch] and Amnesty do, there is none. 52
Because anti-hunger organizations like OXFAM straddle advocacy work with more traditional on the ground development missions, they require local partners for different reasons. Instead of providing information about high hunger rates on the ground (which OXFAM already knows about), OXFAM can use local groups to pressure their own government, instead of vocally leading the charge themselves.
Sometimes, as is the case with ActionAid, this takes the form of educating individuals about how to read national budgets and see if governments are providing the amount of agricultural assistance that they promised. Other times this means more overt rallies or lobbying. But the arrow between local activist groups and INGOs works both ways in the hunger issue area. At times local groups can contact INGOs as the boomerang model expects (though their value is not necessarily in information about the existence of a rights violation), but more frequently the INGO may take the initiative and reach out to local groups to help with advocacy work that they feel would be too risky to do on their own (in terms of
52 Interview with Oxfam America executive, May 14, 2013
43 endangering local projects) or that they would have no legitimacy to do on their own.53
Furthermore, international organizations (IOs), which serve in the boomerang and spiral models to empower advocacy NGO groups and join with them to apply pressure to “violating” states, play no such role in the hunger space. The
Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), established in 1945 with a mandate to ameliorate global hunger, has become the main authoritative voice in the UN for all matters related to chronic undernourishment. The World Food Programme (WFP), once a division within the FAO but now its own independent IO, serves as the UN’s largest humanitarian organization and authority on short-term food crises or famines. Neither organization overtly pressures governments to “respect, protect, and fulfill” the right to food in their countries, though the core purpose of both organizations is to assist in the realization of this human right. When asked about whether the FAO could blame or pressure a national government, one senior FAO employee responded, “But this we can’t do….no…[the FAO] cannot. It can support countries. It can raise awareness. It can support countries that are interested to implement the right to food….”54 The FAO can provide support and guidance if governments want help in developing agriculture or even implementing legislation on right to food provisions, but the organization does not use the mechanisms of shaming or blaming as might be expected in the boomerang or spiral models.
53 Keck and Sikkink (1998) acknowledge the importance of local groups in providing legitimacy to larger NGOs (pp.12-13). 54 Interview with senior FAO employee, May 25, 2012. Emphasis added.
44 Instead, the FAO highlights many varied possible causes of hunger and many possible solutions in their seemingly limitless reports, conventions, and summits.
Currently, climate change, gender inequalities, poverty, land tenure systems, and price speculation are all highlighted as “to blame” for global hunger. That is not to say that the FAO does not, on paper, embrace food as a right, for which national governments are responsible. Indeed, they helped to organize and pass the FAO
Voluntary Guidelines on the Right to Food in 2004. Yet despite the existence of the
“right to food” rhetoric and the Voluntary Guidelines, the FAO simply does not overtly shame or blame national governments for high hunger rates. The WFP, in charge of the provision of short-term food-aid (either through in-kind aid, cash, or vouchers) instead focuses on the need for developed states to be benevolent donors---arguing that advanced industrialized countries are responsible for providing for hunger in the developing world by giving in-kind food aid or cash donations through the WFP.
The Buckshot Model
In the case of anti-hunger campaign trajectories, therefore, instead of boomerangs or spirals we see buckshot:
45 Figure 2.4: The Buckshot Model
*Note: the model is not exhaustive in listing the universe of what actors may argue is “to blame” for hunger or the causal frames employed
There are a few significant differences between the “boomerang” and
“buckshot” model. Most notably, the “buckshot” model (above) does not have a second arm of the boomerang pattern focused squarely back on the “norm violating” national government (“State A” in the model). Instead, INGOs and IOs involved in the hunger space “buckshot” blame to multiple different actors, linking to different
46 causal frames. Individual INGOs may target two or three actors as “to blame” in any individual campaign and then start a new campaign a few months later that targets different actors. Or, alternatively, INGOs may run multiple campaigns at the same time around the hunger issue, focusing blame on varied actors and varied causes of hunger. It does, however, occasionally happen that an NGO will wage a campaign applying pressure and blame back at the national government, but overt, aggressive naming and shaming is comparatively rare in this issue space, for which reason they are marked with a “?” in the model.55 Furthermore, INGOs may choose to partner with IOs, like the FAO, but IOs in this issue space do not serve to focus pressure on a singular “violating” state. Rather, they fan out causes of hunger to several possible factors (climate change, price speculation, poverty, gender inequality, land tenure problems, land grabbing, etc.) and outside states, such as the United States, are left with a large menu of legitimate options of what and who to blame for hunger. In boomerang and spiral models, “State B” is presented with no such options. In the buckshot model and the hunger case, they are.
As authoritative voices for the hunger issue area, when IOs such as the FAO and WFP and INGOs like OXFAM, CARE, or FIAN vary in who they campaign as ultimately “to blame” for hunger, this both reflects (and perpetuates) a lack of consensus around who the primary legitimate target should be around these
55 FIAN is one NGO group that does consistently wage campaigns which take similar forms to the boomerang model (i.e. blame is centralized back on the national government), but not exclusively, and this practice is not common among anti-hunger NGOs. The case of FIAN and their campaigns will be discussed in both Chapters 4 and 5. It is more likely, particularly with hybrid development-rights INGOs like OXFAM that when national governments are “targeted” it will be with far less aggressive pressuring than the boomerang model would suggest (in other words, protests in the streets, etc. are quite rare) as INGOs in this issue space worry about protecting relationships with national governments in order to preserve their active in-country development missions.
47 campaigns. When these INGOs and IOs then turn to developed states to partner in their campaigns (“State B” in the model), they have already legitimated several alternative actors as “to blame” for hunger. “State B” can then choose from the menu of options available to it as to whether or not it will join the INGO in blaming their preferred target. If, for instance, the prospective target of a campaign is North
Korea’s Kim Jong-un for the extremely high hunger rates in his country, the US would likely join in his condemnation. For nearly any other state, however, it’s unlikely you would see the US point fingers at a national government as “to blame” for the hunger rates in their country. They would likely instead point to insufficient food supplies, insufficient free trade agreements, and poor agricultural development.
While retaining part of the first arm of the “boomerang,” the “buckshot” model predicts partnerships can be initiated by either local NGOs or international
NGOs, in part because local NGOs are not needed to provide information in the same way expected in the “boomerang model.” Most INGOs in the hunger issue area are just as likely to decide the direction of a campaign back in field office in the USA or
UK and then reach out for local partners as they are to be receptive to local partners taking the initiative.
The boomerang and spiral models assume not only that blame can be centralized on a common “norm violator,” but they also implicitly assume that there is a singular causal frame that resonates around the given problem area. Indeed, blame can be centralized in part because NGO partners can agree on a common
48 causal frame. Keck and Sikkink (1998) note that campaigns are more likely to be effective with the boomerang model when there are short, clearly identifiable causal chains around the problem area that link a violator with the rights violation.56 In the hunger case, blame is diffuse in part because causal frames are prolific in this issue area and dependent upon the causal frame used, INGOs will be lead to different actors as “to blame” for the hunger problem. In the case of civil and political rights, a common causal frame is often clearer, allowing for greater consensus around who is to blame for the problem. Under Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile, for example, INGO/NGO partnerships saw a short causal chain between
Pinochet giving orders for dissidents to be forcibly disappeared and those disappearances taking place. Pinochet and his orders caused the human rights violations of forced disappearances. Blame, then, could be centralized on Pinochet.
As evidenced in the surveys of executive and senior level staff in the hunger area, however, multiple causal frames exist around the hunger problem and INGOs vary in which causal frame they adopt and who they blame (if anyone at all).
When the IR literature discusses activist campaigns, it is generally assumes that the main mechanism at play is pressure and that this pressure comes in the form of blame or shame (or if activists are able to link with IOs or outside states, perhaps even threats of economic sanctions or military force). The utility of the buckshot model is in demonstrating that in certain issue areas, like hunger, the assumption of cohesion among activists in applying pressure to a singular actor as
“to blame” for a problem may not hold. IOs, moreover, are just as likely to fan out
56 Keck and Sikkink (1998), pp. 27-28.
49 campaigns as INGOs are, instead of centralizing pressure to State A (as would be expected in the boomerang model). Finally, partnerships between local groups and larger NGOs or INGOs may run both ways, with INGOs also initiating partnerships in their campaigns as they do not need to rely on local activist groups in the same way for information on the existence of the problem.
Why Diffusion?
Why is blame diffuse around the hunger issue area? And why do anti-hunger campaigns “buckshot” instead of “spiral” or “boomerang?”
There are a number of possible explanations for why this is the case.
Perhaps, some might say, hunger is inherently too complex of an issue area to ever have consensus around a singular actor as “to blame.” Alternatively, perhaps NGOs face resource constraints that inhibit them from blaming national governments. Put differently, perhaps NGO funding in this issue area comes largely from government sources and pointing fingers back at those governments would put future funding at risk.
And yet, while there is certainly some truth to both of these possible explanations, they are unable to provide a complete answer to why blame is diffuse in the hunger area. Yes, hunger as an issue area is complex, but as Shue argues in his Basic Rights, all rights are. While we may often talk of rights in terms of “positive rights” (as those that require governments to engage in positive action to address a
50 problem) or “negative rights” (those where governments are asked to refrain from action that is infringing on an individual’s right), Shue convincingly argues that all rights require positive action from the government to ensure their fulfillment.57
Take, for instance, the civil and political right to free and fair elections. This requires significant effort on the part of the state to decide how to ensure that discriminatory policies do not keep eligible voters from being able to cast ballots, that there are adequate voting stations to serve populations spread across the country, that the counting of ballots is fair, and that voters are free from intimidation while voting. The human right to “security of person” requires enormous effort on the part of states to establish functioning police forces and judicial systems to try and convict individuals who would threaten the physical security of individuals in the society. The right to food, like other economic and social rights, is certainly hard to achieve, but so are many civil and political rights where we have seen more cohesive, concentrated pressure on states as ultimately responsible for providing for the given right.
Similarly, NGOs certainly face resource constraints. Funding is often tied to government grants (though generally these are developed state grants in countries where hunger rates are comparatively lower) or to churches or individual donors who may be more attracted to the idea of their funding going towards the direct provision of food (or the ever-popular “child sponsorships”) than government lobbying. And yet, we see this variation in blame and causal frames in organizations which are not resource constrained (i.e. the Gates Foundation, which does not need
57 Shue (1980)
51 government grants or individual donations to stay afloat) as well as in organizations like Amnesty International, which bifurcates blame for the right to food between
TNCs and governments, but runs most of its civil/political campaigns as the
“boomerang” model would predict----directing centralized blame back solely to the national government. Amnesty International’s donors are clearly accepting of campaigns which blame national governments, as this is the dominant strategy that
Amnesty International is known for. Amnesty is not, in other words, a stranger to aggressive campaigns which blame national governments, and yet, they take a different approach when campaigning against hunger. Something else is at play.
Instead, explaining the many varied campaigns targeting different actors requires understanding the normative environment in which activists find themselves. Of key importance is that there is no prescriptive anti-hunger norm in this issue space to help centralize advocacy campaigns. Such norms ascribe appropriate behavior to a specific actor and are often available for civil and political rights campaigns. Instead, in the hunger case activists are working in an environment without a viable norm. A lack of a hunger norm can make some behavior less likely (centralized advocacy around a common actor) and make it more likely that campaigns will instead “buckshot” to multiple targets.
Understanding why there is no viable prescriptive hunger norm requires examining the varied analytic frameworks under which anti-hunger organizations are working. Hunger is, and has been, conceptualized both as a development and a human rights problem and these frameworks are not always consistent with one
52 another. While a development problem tends to look to developed states (and their citizens) and international organizations for assistance in ameliorating conditions in developing states, “rights frameworks” tend to locate responsibility at the level of the national government for conditions within that country’s borders. Hunger as an issue area is caught between these two analytic frameworks. Moreover, for organizations with active in-country development missions, even if they have adopted a rights framework, targeting national governments is an especially risky strategy, as it would jeopardize the safety and longevity of their active in-country programs and staff. These organizations have strong incentives not to focus aggressive advocacy efforts on national governments.
Finally, international law does not substitute for a lack of prescriptive norm in this issue space. As discussed in the introduction, there are several binding international legal covenants that ascribe responsibility to national governments for hunger within their borders, but this has not served to focus advocacy in the hunger case. Chapter 5 examines reasons for this, linking back to the discussion of different analytic frameworks available in this issue space. Some activists simply do not conceptualize hunger as a rights violation, for which reason international human rights law is less relevant to them. Others may use rights rhetoric, but do not look to international law to ascribe responsibility, for varied reasons. Some doubt the justiciability of the right to food or its enforcement and others, as discussed above, finding blaming national governments too risky of a strategy for their in-country missions, regardless of how international human rights covenants ascribe responsibility.
53
Does it matter if blame is not focused on one single target?
There is a vibrant, ongoing conversation in the human rights literature on whether or not shaming and blaming can compel change in human rights behavior, particularly when directed at states. Several studies have indicated that it can, both through extensive qualitative evidence for this in focused case studies58 and quantitative support across a wide range of human rights and UN organizations.59
Murdie and Davis (2013), for example, develop a new data set of “shaming events” across 400 different human rights organizations, finding that shaming governments results in improved human rights conditions.60
Extant studies on shaming and blaming, however, do not test what happens if blame or shame for a particular rights violation is shared across multiple actors.
Instead, the literature generally assumes that such social pressure is focused only on one actor: the national government. Moreover, while this dissertation is designed to examine how international anti-hunger organizations construct their campaigns and how it is possible that they would target diffuse actors, it is not designed to test the effects of this “buckshotting” on target compliance (whether those targets are states,
58 Keck and Sikkink (1998); Risse, Ropp, and Sikkink (1999, 2013) 59 See especially, Murdie and Davis (2013); One scholar stands out as critical that “naming and shaming” can be effective, however, see: Hafner-Burton (2008). 60 Murdie and Davis (2013) note that this shaming should be coupled with a significant presence of human rights organizations in the country itself as well as pressure from outside organizations, individuals, and states (p.1). Ausderan (2014) finds that shaming by the UN or rights organizations of national governments results in citizens of that country holding a more negative view of their own government.
54 TNCs, or price speculators). To do so would have needed a very different research design.
That said, examining the logic of arguments showing that shaming and blaming can be effective can provide some reasons to believe that shared blame and responsibility across a host of actors may be less effective than centralized pressure on a single actor in terms of target compliance. For example, we know one reason that shaming and blaming works is due to reputational costs. Costs such as these are derived when an actor is targeted as to blame for a specific violation and he cannot convincingly deny such charges or deny responsibility for the violation that has occurred (which actors often try to do by redefining the problem, reinterpreting the law that they are alleged to have violated, finding a separate law that justifies their behavior, etc.). To the extent that you provide actors with ready-made alternative targets for the same violation we should expect it to be easier for them to deflect responsibility and lessen any reputational cost. As the old adage goes: “If everyone is responsible, nobody is accountable.”
Moreover, in the case of the boomerang and spiral models, blaming is made powerful when it is done by a partnership of activists, states, and/or IOs who can agree on a single actor that is to blame for a violation. In this way, groups can leverage their collective power in steam-lining one single message of condemnation shared across the network. These messages attract significant attention, show the resolve not only of one activist group but many, and can make a powerful case to the media and relevant audiences that there is singular actor that legitimate bodies
55 (NGOs, IOs, and states) agree is at fault. What is common across the many stories of successful blaming in the boomerang and spiral models in particular is that effective shaming and blaming requires a tremendous amount of coordinated pressure and a clear activist message. Successful campaigns, as reflected in the literature, are achieved through focused pressure on a single actor. There are no examples in the literature of activist campaigns that diffuse blame across multiple actors and are successful at using a blaming and shaming (social pressure) strategy. This does not rule out that such a thing could happen, however, but it does give reason for caution here.
Conclusion
Much of the human rights literature in IR assumes that blame can be focused in advocacy campaigns on a common “violator” (the national government). This is generally supported empirically because the literature tends to focus on cases of civil and political human rights but not economic or social rights. In the case of the right to food, we saw through surveys among senior and executive level NGO staff that blame is diffuse and causal frames are prolific. In order to account for this diffusion, I presented the “buckshot model” as a way to more accurately explain anti-hunger campaign trajectories.
The remaining three chapters seek to explain the scattering of campaigns targeting multiple actors as to blame in the hunger space. A brief chapter summary for each is provided below.
1. There is No Anti-Hunger Norm (Chapter 3)
56
If you were to tell the majority of the world’s population that they had a human right to food they would likely stare at you in disbelief. Should you tell them that their respective governments were obligated under international law to protect, fulfill, and defend this right, they might laugh at the very idea of it. In my hometown of Fresno, California, the US county with the highest rates of agricultural production but also the highest rates of concentrated poverty,61 citizens would lament that many of their neighbors go hungry, even when surrounded by bountiful and nutritious crops. It is a tragedy, they would likely say, but what can be done?
You would rarely, if ever, hear mention of any violation of a human right to food. In fact, the local newspaper for Fresno, CA, The Fresno Bee, has record of mentioning the “right to food” only twice since 1986, when they began digitizing their records.62
This is not because most individuals think food (or other economic and social rights like housing or healthcare) are unimportant. On the contrary, most individuals would heartily agree that nobody ought to be homeless, hungry, or without healthcare. But there is no norm around these human rights that dictates appropriate behavior. Who is supposed to do what in order to ensure that people have homes, food, and healthcare? The hunger case suggests that the absence of a norm surrounding a given human right can make centralized advocacy campaigns extremely difficult.
61 Berube and Katz (2005) 62 See the Fresno County Public Library Online Database of the Fresno Bee. Available online at: http://www.fresnolibrary.org/reference.html
57 If a norm is, to borrow Finnemore and Sikkink’s (1998) definition, "a standard of appropriate behavior for actors with a given identity,"63 many, if not most economic and social human rights lack a foundational norm, as there is no singular actor nor specific “appropriate behavior” linked to these rights. In the case of the more oft-studied civil, political, and physical integrity rights, there are established norms dictating appropriate behavior. Good governments ought not forcibly disappear their citizens. Good governments ought to ensure universal suffrage. Good governments regulate elections to ensure that they are free and fair.
In this way, norms over these sorts of rights have both subjects and verbs attached to them. Not only is an appropriate outcome known (i.e. free and fair elections through regulation), but the agent responsible for ensuring this is known as well
(i.e. the government). “Hunger=bad” is not a norm (at least not in the way the constructivist literature defines norms) but rather a vague principled belief.
Without knowing who to blame when individuals are hungry or what you want this actor to do to solve the problem there is no norm surrounding a given human right.
Without a norm, there will be no consensus among activists (or the society at large) regarding who is ultimately to blame for hunger.
Often implicit in the human rights literature in international relations, however, is the assumption that norms exist equally around all human rights. In this way scholars talk generally about “human rights norms,” as though there was either a norm that surrounded all codified human rights entirely or each right individually. It is these norms, in fact, that help to centralize and direct advocacy
63 Finnemore and Sikkink (1998), p. 891.
58 campaigns by telling activists who to blame and what, concretely, the given actor should do to fix a human right violation. We can see this assumption at work in the
“spiral model” and “boomerang model,” where IOs, NGOs, and outside states all join together to focus blame on a “norm violating” state. In the case of hunger and the right to food it is unclear who the norm violator is as it is unclear exactly who is supposed to do anything about hunger in the first place. Consequently, you see variation among activist communities in who they choose to target in their campaigns and what, specifically, they want this target to do. In this way, it may be that the right to food is stuck in a phase prior to what conditions need to be met in order to have an effective boomerang model---a phase prior to the establishment of a strong norm around the given human right.64
2. Hunger at the Intersection of Rights & Development (Chapter 4)
Understanding why hunger lacks a prescriptive norm requires understanding the issue’s placement between two (not always compatible) analytic frameworks: hunger as a development problem and hunger as a human rights problem. While development frameworks tend to look to developed states (or their citizens) and the UN for assistance in combatting hunger, rights frameworks conceptualize the hunger problem as the responsibility of a national government to its citizens. Anti-hunger campaigns are waged by different types of NGOs and foundations working under different analytic frameworks whose histories and programming work continue to affect the nature of their campaigning. Moreover,
64 Many thanks to Wayne Sandholtz for helpful comments to this effect.
59 hunger’s placement between these two analytic frameworks makes the development of a prescriptive norm less likely.
Even as development organizations have begun, in the last decade, to use the rhetoric of human rights (i.e. the language of the “right to food”) and identify as embodying a “rights-based approach,” they often retain active on-the ground missions, a legacy of their development past. Path dependence, in other words, matters here. The development framework of NGOs like Oxfam or ActionAid continues to affect contemporary campaigns, even as they have taken up “rights- based approaches.” NGOs such as these are hesitant to engage in direct blaming and shaming of national governments when they have active operations at stake, for fear of jeopardizing the mission itself and the safety of their employees, as well as any future work in the given country that requires the goodwill of the state (to provide entry visas, etc.). In the case of civil and political rights, activist groups are often not attempting to both protect longstanding operational missions on the ground. In the case of hunger, they are.
3. International Legal Frameworks
International law, in the case of the right to food, has not provided a viable prescriptive norm. One reason we might expect activists to centralize pressure on a single common actor would be the existence of international legal covenants that clearly assign responsibility for a specific right, and in so doing create a legal
60 expectation of specific behavior linked to a specific actor.. In the case of civil and political rights campaigns, we often see groups like Amnesty International leverage international law to hold states accountable for rights violations within their borders, as they have signed international treaties and covenants committing to specific responsibilities vis-à-vis these rights In this way, law serves to unify activists around a common campaign target (states) because these very states have made a public, legal commitment to specific behavior.
In the case of anti-hunger campaigns, however, international legal covenants are referenced far more sparingly by advocates. Many NGOs avoid “rights” language entirely when organizing their anti-hunger campaigns. Yet, the right to food has been established in several international covenants and conventions, including the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Economic,
Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), the Convention on the Rights of the Child
(CRC), the Convention on the Elimination of All forms of Discrimination against
Women (CEDAW), and the Voluntary Guidelines on the Right to Food (which even the US signed). With such a ready-made tools as international legal covenants already established, why don’t activists leverage them to hold national governments accountable when there are high hunger rates in their respective countries?
Chapter 5 examines the limitations of international law in the case of the right to food and questions our assumptions that norms derive directly from law.
61 CHAPTER 3:
Not All Human Rights Have Norms
In the previous chapter, I assessed dominant models available in the literature to explain the trajectories of human rights campaigns and, finding that they were unable to explain international anti-hunger campaigns, provided an alternative model (the “buckshot model”) to better account for advocacy in this issue area. This chapter argues that one key reason why anti-hunger campaigns
“buckshot” instead of “boomerang” or “spiral” is that they lack a viable prescriptive norm. I provide evidence for the lack of a prescriptive norm around hunger, derived from surveys of senior and executive staff at top anti-hunger organizations, and examine the implications for the lack of a norm on advocacy efforts.
A picture of a starving child with a swollen belly universally triggers strong moral convictions. Children ought not go hungry. It is morally wrong that children would starve in the modern day. In an age where there is a sufficient supply of food in the world to feed everyone, starvation is particularly morally repugnant.
And yet, for all the moral intuitions triggered by images of the hungry, there is no norm around hunger. If a norm is, to borrow Finnemore and Sikkink’s (1998) definition, "a standard of appropriate behavior for actors with a given identity,"65 hunger lacks such a norm, as there is no singular actor nor specific “appropriate behavior” linked to this problem. Put differently, norms require subjects and verbs.
Yet who ought to do what to ameliorate hunger? There is a gap between moral intuitions and norms, and it is a gap that requires significant agency to fill. There is
65 Finnemore and Sikkink (1998), p. 891.
62 nothing automatic, in other words, about translating moral intuitions into prescriptive norms.
Often implicit in the human rights literature in international relations, however, is the assumption that norms exist equally around all human rights. In this way scholars talk generally about “human rights norms,” as though there was either a norm that surrounded all codified human rights entirely or each right individually. The assumption appears to be that either prescriptive norms are inherently part of each human right, or, more likely, that by nature of codifying a human right in international law and ascribing a given actor as responsible for securing and protecting the right in international law, a viable norm is automatically constructed around that right. And yet, while the human right to food was established in international law in 1948 with the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights and reiterated in 1976 with the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), in 2004 with the Voluntary Guidelines on the Right to
Food, as well as numerous other international conventions and agreements, including the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) and the Convention on the
Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), no viable norm has emerged alongside this most fundamental of all human rights.
Why isn’t there a norm around hunger and why does it matter? Put differently, why should it matter if there is no agreed upon actor or appropriate action associated with hunger (or any social problem)? This chapter explores the challenge (and importance) of norm construction to enabling effective naming, shaming, and blaming from activists. A key weapon in the activist arsenal---
63 applying pressure---can only work when communities agree on a particular norm violator who can be shamed or blamed into compliance. But this presupposes a norm to be violated. When issue areas lack this norm, even when there are strong moral intuitions, activism can be fraught with difficulties.
This chapter begins by deconstructing what constitutes a norm, reviewing examples of their usefulness in shaming governments for civil and political rights violations, and discussing why they are difficult to construct in the case of economic and social rights. The chapter concludes by examining why a lack of a hunger norm matters, both theoretically and for activists on the ground, and how the lack of such a norm makes the centralized pressure expected in the boomerang model less likely and the scattering of campaigns in the boomerang model more likely.
The Power of Norms
Often, it is the sense of oughtness embedded in a norm that gets the most attention.
Perhaps this is because when the field of IR resurrected its interest in sociological approaches (which brought with it renewed interest in the power of norms), scholars were deeply invested in debating distinctions between the logic of consequence and the logic of appropriateness (i.e. oughtness).66 That individuals (or states) could act in accordance with social rules determining appropriate behavior
(and not solely on the basis of strategic calculations) was itself fodder for extensive
66 See March and Olsen (1998).
64 conversation.67 The idea that such a thing as social appropriateness mattered in enabling or constraining action was a key take away from these debates.
But norms do more than dictate standards of appropriateness. They link a specific actor to a specific action, and when they are well developed they may even link this behavior explicitly to a specific goal. It is in linking an actor to an action that the relevant social rule is constructed. And it is in linking a specific actor to a specific action that the norm becomes powerful and effective in enabling social pressure. Take, for instance, the following norm:
Actor Action Goal
Good governments ought to regulate elections to ensure they are free and fair.
Societies may agree that elections ought to be free and fair, or that it is appropriate that elections are free and fair. The construction of a norm around this goal, however, requires more than this sense of oughtness. Rather, a particular action (i.e. regulation) must be attributed to a particular actor (i.e. the government) in order to construct a viable norm. In the case of civil and political rights (such as in the example above), these links may be more obvious and long ago established by societies. In the case of economic and social rights---like the right to food, these connections are far more tenuous.
67 See Katzenstein (1996); Goertz and Diehl (1992); Price (1998).
65 The attribution of actors to specific actions matters because only in so doing can the violation of the norm be observed. Much of the power of norms comes in the ability to use them to socially sanction noncompliant behavior. Take, for instance,
Axelrod’s early definition of a norm: “A norm exists in a given social setting to the extent that individuals usually act in a certain way and are often punished when seen not to be acting in this way.”68 We can know that a norm exists when we see the response by members of the relevant society to its violation---responses that generally include shaming an actor for its inappropriate behavior. Sociologists and psychologists have studied extensively the response to norm violation among individuals in society,69 but sanctions from norm violations extend well beyond individual reprimand for cutting in lines or speaking out of turn. States, organizations, and firms can also be the subject of social shaming for noncompliant behavior. And this shaming is the raison d'être of activists.70
Norms around Civil and Political Rights
Our human rights literature is replete with examples of activist campaigns around civil and political rights, where activists call upon strong prescriptive norms and target the norm’s “violators.” It is these norms, in fact, that help to centralize and direct advocacy campaigns by telling activists who to blame and what, concretely, the given actor should do to fix a human right violation. We can see this
68 Axelrod (1986), p. 1097. 69 See Milgram et al (1986); Brauer and Chaurand (2010) 70 See especially: Keck and Sikkink (1998); Klotz, A. (1995, 1999); Risse, Ropp, and Sikkink (1999); Bob (2010).
66 assumption at work in the “spiral model” and “boomerang model” discussed in the previous chapter, where IOs, NGOs, and outside states all join together to focus blame on a “norm violating” state. In other words, activists are able to effectively join together to collectively shame and blame governments in these models because there is a viable norm that these specific governments have violated.
How has this naming, shaming, and blaming process worked in practice? In the case of civil and political rights, we have several empirical examples provided in the literature. Recall, for example, the case of South African apartheid, where transnational activists were able to shame the US Congress into sanctioning the
South African apartheid government by calling upon the norm of racial equality.
Good governments do not support policies of racial inequality. By successfully linking apartheid to domestic norms about racial inequality and the civil rights movement, activists were able to shame the US government into action, despite the strategic and material costs of sanctioning an important ally.71
Similarly, following the 1976 military coup in Argentina, international human rights advocacy NGO Amnesty International documented a deliberate state policy of forced disappearances. Detailing practices of torture, murder, and the disposal of the bodies of (alleged) political opposition members, Amnesty’s information led the
US, France, Italy, and Sweden to denounce the Argentine junta.72 The US cut all military aid to Argentina and the collective weight of economic and military sanctions by the US and European states eventually forced the Argentinian
71 Klotz (1995) 72 Keck and Sikkink (1998), p. 104.
67 government to comply with its human rights obligations.73 The Argentinian government had violated a norm: Good governments do not forcibly disappear their citizens. Information provided by Amnesty documented the violation of the
Argentinian government of this norm. Pressure to comply with this norm ultimately took the form of both social shaming and material coercion and the norm violator
(the Argentinian government) eventually complied.
Norms around Economic and Social Rights
There is nothing automatic about norm construction—of linking actors with appropriate action---even in the case of civil and political rights. But this can be an especially tricky enterprise with economic and social rights norm construction.
Civil and political rights are often referred to as “negative rights” as they generally call for an actor to refrain from an action in contrast to the “positive rights” of the economic, social, and cultural variety, which are seen as requiring active participation of an actor to fulfill a given human right.74 That said, as Shue insightfully points out, the protection and fulfillment of all human rights, “positive” or “negative” requires positive action.75
Take, for instance, the example of a norm presented earlier in the chapter that good governments regulate elections to ensure they are free and fair. This norm is built around a civil and political right (the right to free and fair elections).
Generally, such a right would be classified as a negative right. But ensuring free and
73 Ibid, pp. 105 & 107 74 Donnelly (2007), p.26; Beetham (1995) 75 Shue (1980)
68 fair elections requires more than refraining from corrupt or discriminatory state policies. It requires active measures to regulate polling stations, count ballots, provide electoral oversight, etc. Similarly a right to life requires a state police force that can provide for one’s physical security. All human rights, whether civil, political, economic, social, or cultural require action to protect and fulfill.
We cannot say, therefore, that norms are more easily generated around civil and political rights simply because they require no positive action on the part of states. No right can be absolutely protected or fulfilled through pure abstention of action on the part of states. And yet, ascribing a particular action to a particular actor in order to fulfill economic and social rights has been far more difficult for activists than in the case of civil and political rights. In cases such as these, it is far less obvious to activists who ought to do what in order to fulfill rights such as the right to food, education, housing, or heath. According to Kenneth Roth, former
Executive Director of Human Rights Watch:
I have been to countless conferences and debates in which advice is freely offered about how international human rights organizations must do more to protect [Economic, Social, and Cultural rights]. Fair enough. Usually, the advice reduces to little more than sloganeering. People lack medical care; therefore, we should say that their right to health has been violated…People are hungry; therefore, we should say that their right to food has been violated. Such ‘analysis’ of course, wholly ignores key issues as who is responsible for the impoverished state of a population, whether the government in question is taking steps to progressively realize the relevant rights, and what the remedy should be for any violation that is found. More to the point, for our purposes, it also ignores which issues can effectively be taken up by international human rights organizations that rely on shaming and public pressure and which cannot.76
76 Roth (2004), pp. 64-65, emphasis added.
69 There is nothing automatic about a norm being established around these economic and social rights, and in order to construct such a norm, activists have to decide on the subject and verb of the norm, or as Roth notes, deciding “who is responsible” and “what the remedy is.”77
So why is it so difficult to ascribe a particular action to a particular actor in the case of economic and social rights, while it may be easier in the case of civil and political rights?
Constructing Responsibility
Assuming society agrees that a given economic or social right in fact ought to exist, in order for a norm to be constructed, an actor needs to be selected as responsible for behaving in a particular way to achieve this goal.
Attributing responsibility to a particular actor can happen as a result of different processes. Perhaps most obviously, if a specific actor is understood to be directly causing the violation of the specific human right, this culpability can allow activists to easily link responsibility to the particular actor who directly caused a violation to occur.78 In the case of hunger, for instance, if it is clear that a head of state is intentionally setting up a siege to starve members of the political opposition
(i.e. the Assad regime in Syria in the present day, particularly in the towns of Homs,
77 Roth (2004) continues, noting that in order to shame effectively, “clarity is needed around three issues: violation, violator, and remedy” (pp.67-68). 78 Keck and Sikkink (1998) note that campaigns are more likely to be effective when there are short, clearly identifiable causal chains around the problem area that link a violator with the rights violation (pp.27-28).
70 Aleppo, and Deir Ezzor),79 it can be relatively easy for activists to claim that this individual has caused, at least in the immediate term, the right to food to be violated.
For the vast majority of the world’s hungry, however, there is no clear actor who is directly culpable for their hunger. In other words, their hunger was not the intended consequence of a specific individual’s actions. In Deborah Stone’s (1989) typology of causal theories, there are two dimensions of causality: Was the action purposeful? and Were the consequences intended?80 When the purpose of an action is to bring about the violation of a human right (thus the act was purposeful and the consequences were intentional), it is far easier for activists to attribute responsibility to that particular actor. Stone argues that malnutrition and poverty are stories of “inadvertent cause,” where “…people do not understand the harmful consequences of their willful actions...Inadvertence here is ignorance; the consequences are predictable by experts but unappreciated by those taking the actions.”81
For the vast majority of the world’s hungry, there is no clear actor who is directly culpable and no singular action which caused their hunger. How then can a norm be formed? Theoretically, activists could rely on law to provide a legitimate target for their campaigns. In terms of international human rights law, national governments are obligated to “respect, protect, and fulfill” economic and social rights (including food) and to “progressively realize” these rights.82 And yet, in
79 Postel and Hashemi (2014, February 10) 80 Stone (1989), p. 285. 81 Stone (1989), 286 82 “Progressive realization” language applies to all economic and social rights listed in the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). “Respect, protect, fulfill” is
71 practice, many anti-hunger NGOs do not choose to blame or shame national governments for the high hunger rates in their countries. Returning to the survey results discussed last chapter, when asked who was to blame for hunger, senior and executive staff at the top anti-hunger organizations listed the following:
Figure 3.1: Diffusion of Blame
language provided in General Comment 12. See Chapter 5 for greater detail on international human rights law as it relates to food.
72
*The number in ( ) represents the number of respondents from this organization. There were, for example, three respondents from the Gates Foundation. Only one line was provided linking an organization to a particular response. If multiple people from the same organization listed the same response only one line was provided for the sake of visual clarity.
If there was a clear norm around the right to food, we would expect activists to centralize pressure on a singular actor as responsible for hunger (as we see in the boomerang and spiral models), but no such consensus exists. And if activists target diverse actors, it makes it more difficult for a norm to form in the first place.
When asked who is to blame for hunger, what do activists say? One executive at Oxfam America listed nine actors, all to blame for hunger, drawing the following diagram to explain responsibility across three sectors: governments, the private sector, and civil society, as it crossed local, national, and international spheres.83
83 Interview with Oxfam America executive, 5/13/2013
73 Figure 3.2 Oxfam Executive Response to Blame
Actors to blame for hunger (ranked in order): 1. National governments 2. National businesses and corporations 3. Outside governments (US) and IOs (World Bank and IMF) 4. Transnational corporations 5. Local governments 6. Local private sector 7. Global civil society organizations 8. National civil society organizations 9. Local civil society organizations
Nearly all respondents to the survey either listed multiple actors as to blame for hunger or they said nobody could be blamed at all.
But can “to blame” be conflated with “responsible for” an issue area? In other words, while there is no singular actor that is seen as to blame for hunger (or “right to food violations”), can there at least be an agreement around responsibility for the problem? In that case, could a norm be constructed linking the actor who is responsible (though not necessarily singularly “to blame”) to a particular appropriate action?
Yet, to activists, even responsibility is shared for economic and social rights like hunger. Take, for instance, Amnesty International’s Demand Dignity campaign.
Amnesty has never been weary of blaming governments for human rights violations, particularly in the civil and political realm. But in the case of economic and social rights, as explained in their Human Rights for Human Dignity: A Primer on Economic,
74 Social, and Cultural Rights, Amnesty notes, “Responsibility for denial of economic, social, and cultural rights frequently lies not only with governments but also with individuals, groups, and enterprises.”84 The report acknowledges that “Primary accountability in international law rests with the state in whose jurisdiction the violation occurs,” but that there should also be “corporate accountability for human rights abuses,” as well as responsibility by international financial institutions
(World Bank and IMF). Additionally, “states that provide international development assistance and cooperation should be held responsible for the human rights impact of their policies outside their borders.”85
The relatively recent push for the responsibility of corporations (particularly transnational corporations) for human rights is especially interesting. In 2003, the
UN Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights approved their “Norms on the Responsibilities of Transnational Corporations and Other
Business Enterprises with Regard to Human Rights” (“Norms”), which stated:
States have the primary responsibility to promote, secure the fulfillment of, respect, ensure respect of and protect human rights recognized in international as well as national law, including ensuring that transnational corporations and other business enterprises respect human rights. Within their respective spheres of activity and influence, transnational corporations and other business enterprises have the obligation to promote, secure the fulfillment of, respect, ensure respect of and protect human rights recognized in international as well as national law, including the rights and interests of indigenous peoples and other vulnerable groups.86
The Norms were, not surprisingly, a contentious proposal, pitting corporations— who argued that human rights protection was the exclusive domain of states (not
84 Human Rights for Human Dignity (2005), p. 43. Emphasis added. 85 Ibid, pp. 43-46. 86 “Commentary on the Norms on the Responsibilities of Transnational Corporations and Other Business Enterprises with Regard to Human Rights.” Emphasis added.
75 the private sector)--against human rights activists, who believed corporations should be obligated to protect and ensure human rights as well.87 Ultimately, the
UN Commission on Human Rights did not approve the Norms, instead asking for more research on the legality and history of involving the private sector in human rights protection.88
On recommendation of the UN Commission on Human Rights, UN Secretary
General Kofi Annan appointed a Special Representative for Business and Human
Rights, a position he gave to political scientist John Ruggie. According to the
Commission, an individual expert was needed to:
‘identify and clarify’ existing standards for, and best practices by, businesses, and for the role of states in regulating businesses in relation to human rights; and to research and clarify the meaning of the most hotly contested concepts in the debate, such as ‘corporate complicity’ in the commission of human rights abuses and ‘corporate spheres of influence’ within which companies might be expected to have special responsibilities.89
The rejection of the Norms initiative, even when coupled with the creation of a new Special Representative for Business and Human Rights, angered many human rights activists. According to Ruggie (2013), “the main international human rights organizations did not accept that the ‘Norms’ initiative had come to an end, having invested heavily in it. Amnesty International USA, for example, hailed the ‘Norms’ as
‘representing a major step toward a global legal framework for corporate accountability.’”90 Ultimately, Ruggie presented the UN Human Rights Council
87 Ruggie (2013), p. xvii. 88 For the response of the UN Commission on Human Rights, see “Responsibilities of transnational corporations and related business enterprises with regard to human rights” (April 2004) 89 Ruggie (2013),p. xviii. 90 Ruggie (2013), p. xix. Also, the International Federation for Human Rights, a federation of over 150 organizations, issued a public statement in which they “insist on the central role in the current debate of the Norms…” See Ruggie (2013), p. xix, and for a copy of the statement by the FIDH see:
76 (which was formerly the UN Human rights Commission) with his “Guiding
Principles,” which the Council unanimously endorsed.91 The Guiding Principles
(known informally as the “Ruggie Rules”) essentially recommended that in the realm of human rights “states must protect; companies must respect; and those who are harmed must have redress.”92 For human rights organizations such as Human
Rights Watch, the Ruggie Rules were a “woefully inadequate” as they provided no enforcement mechanism, either to ensuring corporations fulfill their human rights obligations or that governments ensure regulation of those corporations.93
What is interesting for our purposes here is that even responsibility for human rights can be a contentious issue, with activists pushing for donor states, national governments, and corporations to all share in the responsibility for ensuring human rights. While it is a fair point to distinguish blame (which may be reserved for individuals who are seen as directly causing a violation) from responsibility, both are contentious issues. This makes it difficult to solidify a norm around a singular actor who should do a singular action in order to ensure the right to food.
Constructing the “Appropriate Action”
As discussed earlier, norm construction requires both an actor and an action.
In the previous section I explained why identifying a specific actor around hunger was challenging, but it is equally challenging, if not more challenging, to determine
“Contribution of the FIDH to the Discussion with the UN Special Representative on Human Rights and Transnational Corporations” (September 2005). 91 Ruggie (2013), p. xx 92 Ruggie (2013), p.xxi 93 Albin-Lackey, “Without rules: A failed approach to Corporate Accountability,” p. 4.
77 an appropriate action the given actor should take. In the case of food, we have seen that it is difficult for activists to centralize pressure on one singular campaign target.
But even if they could, what would they want that actor to do?
Constructing a norm around a human right requires more than a consensus, at some basic level, about what a given actor ought not do. Certainly, there is a norm that I should not, as an individual, take food away from a starving child. And governments ought not deliberately withhold food from their citizens (i.e. the Syrian siege example discussed previously). But beyond this basic level, what action constitutes the appropriate behavior to ensure the human right to food? How would we know?
Ideally, consensus among expert communities (likely within the relevant
IO) would help to set the expected appropriate behavior and activists could reinforce this norm through collective shaming and blaming. In the hunger realm, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) is perhaps the most obvious expert body from which you might expect a clearly laid out “appropriate action” to be generated. And yet, there is no such consensus. The FAO hosts multiple conferences a week, linking hunger to such diverse problems as climate change, price speculation, the use (or non-use) of GMOs, problems in agricultural supply, problems in agricultural demand, government spending on agriculture, land tenure reform, sustainable farming techniques, and more.
In one interview with a senior FAO employee, I asked why it might be the case that we do not have a singular norm around hunger. She responded:
Senior FAO Employee: But what would you say? Good states give food to their people? No, that doesn’t work. Because giving
78 food to people doesn’t work….
Me: So maybe the problem is we don’t know what we want governments to do?
Senior FAO Employee: I don’t think we know what we want governments to do. I don’t think we know what governments can do. We know some things that help. We know that good property rights for farmers, effective property rights for farmers, help. We know that transparent and predicable markets help. Market information helps. We know, but it’s very difficult to do all of those things and its still doesn’t necessarily work.94
The senior FAO employee highlights two problems with constructing what the “appropriate behavior” for the construction of a norm around hunger or the right to food: 1) Doing so requires making judgment calls about state capacity (i.e. what can governments realistically do?); 2) It requires agreeing on what should concretely be done to fulfill the right to food in the first place. I take both in turn.
Constructing Capacity
This is a topic that will be discussed at greater length in the following chapter, as constructing capacity (or incapacity) is a central concern for issue areas that intersect development and human rights. For our purposes here, though, its worth noting that for many countries where there are high hunger rates, civil society organizations as well as IOs like the FAO, have to make judgment calls about how capable the state is to better the hunger condition in their country. In the case of civil and political rights, capacity is certainly still a concern, but it is even more so when dealing with economic and social rights.
94 Interview with senior FAO employee, May 29, 2012.
79 Take, for instance, the civil and political right to free speech. If we took the example of an organized protest vocalizing opposition to a given state policy, in order to fulfill the human right to free speech, the government would need to both:
1) Abstain from directly silencing the protesters and 2) Provide a police force to protect the protesters from others who might challenge their right to free speech. It is assumed that, baring the situation of a failed state, governments have the capacity to send adequate security forces to protect their citizens and should they fail to do so, they would be blamed for neglecting their responsibility (and likely blamed for being in league with the crowds obstructing the protest in the first place).
For economic and social rights, the positive action required by states has the potential to be far more costly. Providing education for your citizens, or food, or health care, or potable water, may require infrastructure, supplies, and technology that may be perceived to be outside of your capacity.95 And if activists make the judgment call that a given actor lacks capacity (whether or not this is objectively true), they may not pressure this actor to take the necessary steps to fulfill the given right.
Perhaps most importantly, however, constructing a norm around hunger requires complex problem-solving. Even if you believe that a state has capacity to act, if expert communities around you (like the FAO) provide a wide menu of options of things that can help to fulfill the right to food, which do you choose to
95 This becomes a subjective call, however, as we will find in the subsequent chapter. Most governments have the capacity to do more than they currently do to fulfill economic and social rights, but they do so selectively, fulfilling some rights (i.e. education) but not others (i.e. food). When deciding how to spend finite resources, the extent to which they are actively pressured to respond to a particular social or economic problem matters, and if activists choose not to pressure, they perpetuate a lack of state involvement (even if the state no longer lacks capacity).
80 focus on? For an effective norm to be constructed, a laundry list of ten different things states should do to ensure the right to food is far less likely to be successful in centralizing pressure than a singular ask. But when surveyed, activists provided
(again) diffuse understandings for how to solve the hunger problem in the first place.
Figure 3.3: The Many Varied Solutions to Hunger
*The number in ( ) represents the number of respondents from this organization. There were, for example, three respondents from the Gates Foundation. Only one line was provided linking an
81 organization to a particular response. If multiple people from the same organization listed the same response only one line was provided for the sake of visual clarity. Respondents were asked in this survey question to rank the top 3 solutions to hunger. “Other” was selected several times, with a wide range of additional solutions provided (including improving nutritional practices/behaviors, improving water and sanitation conditions, government regulations on land distribution, improving gender culture norms, providing employment outside of the farming sector, reduction of disparity, human rights accountability, the primacy of human rights law, universal social protection, and improving resilience of the food supply, among others).
There is, in short, no agreement on a singular “appropriate action” around which activists could generate a norm.
Why the lack of a norm matters
The primary mechanism by which activists enable and constrain the behavior of states is through pressure (generally in the form of shaming and blaming). And targets can most effectively be shamed if activists (and their audience), understand the target as having violated a particular norm or standard of appropriate behavior. This is useful, as it allows for activists to more readily identify a violation and join together to shame the actor into compliance. Yet only if a specific actor is linked to a specific appropriate behavior can such a norm be constructed. In the absence of a norm, where it is unclear who is to blame, we should expect shaming to be less effective. Roth (2004) notes how the struggle over ascribing blame and appropriate action has affected campaigns in his experience at
Human Rights Watch, and how diffuse blame may make shaming less effective:
Although there are various forms of public outrage, only certain types are sufficiently targeted to shame officials into action. That is, the public might be outraged about a state of affairs--for example, poverty in a region--but have no idea whom to blame. Or it might feel that blame is dispersed among a wide variety of actors. In such cases of diffuse responsibility, the stigma attached to any person, government, or institution is lessened, and with it the power of international human rights organizations to effect change. Similarly, stigma
82 weakens even in the case of a single violator if the remedy to a violation-- what the government should do to correct it--is unclear.96
In practical terms, norms are useful to activists in prioritizing an actor as responsible for a given action and rallying support in order to shame actors who violate their normative responsibilities.
In the hunger case, the lack of a prescriptive norm plays both constitutive and causal roles in understanding why blame is diffuse and why anti-hunger organizations target multiple actors as to blame for high hunger rates.
Understanding how it is possible that blame could be so diffuse in the hunger issue area requires looking at the presence or absence of any prescriptive social norms.97
As explored in this chapter, when prescriptive norms are present they can serve to effectively focus blame on a single actor, as is often the case with civil and political rights campaigns. They do this by informing the way that members of a given community understand a particular problem, who is responsible for it and what should be done about it. Separating out such a prescriptive norm in society from the attribution of blame to an individual who violated this norm is thus impossible, as the norm and the understanding of blame have a constitutive relationship.
The same logic applies when a norm is absent. When a prescriptive norm is present, it can constitute one type of environment (where blame is then understood to reside with a particular actor who violated the given norm). A lack of a
96 Roth (2004), p. 67. Emphasis added 97 Constitutive arguments in general often focus on “how possible?” questions and to answer them by “account[ing] for the properties of things by reference to the structures in virtue of which they exist” (Wendt, 1998, p. 105).
83 prescriptive norm constitutes a different kind of environment. In the hunger case, this is an environment where, while individuals may believe the outcome of hunger to be a morally wrong, no norm has been violated (as no norm exists for this around this problem). There is not, therefore, any clear actor who is to blame for this problem, as embedded in this environment there is no prior social understanding for who ought to have done what to prevent this moral wrong.
This chapter spent a significant amount of time detailing the benefits of prescriptive norms to activists, but these benefits are forfeited when no such norm is present. The constructivist literature generally focuses on cases where there are viable prescriptive norms and these norms can be leveraged by activists. It rarely stops to ask what happens when there is no prescriptive norm to be leveraged in the first place.98
The lack of a prescriptive norm in the hunger case is not only constitutive of the environment in which activists work in this issue area but it also makes less possible some campaign outcomes (i.e. centralized pressure on one singular actor) and makes more possible, others (i.e. scattered campaigns blaming multiple actors for the hunger problem). Without a clear prior understanding in given community of who ought to do what to ameliorate hunger, activists share no obvious choice of target for their campaigns. The lack of a prescriptive norm around hunger is thus essential to understanding why anti-hunger organizations do not collectively partner together to “boomerang” pressure back onto a single campaign target, but instead diffuse blame across a wide variety of different campaign targets.
98 Though there is scholarship on how to generate new norms around human rights. See: Bob (2010)
84 Furthermore, the lack of a norm around some human rights (namely hunger) may call into question how the concept of a norm is used (or perhaps overused) in constructivist IR, particularly in our human rights literature. We may have, in other words, begun to stretch the concept of a norm too far away from its earlier definition of linking an appropriate actor to an appropriate action.
At least in the human rights literature, “human rights norms” are discussed very loosely, and “norms” are often conflated moral principles or understandings of what is good or just in society. But while there are a great many moral principles in society (people ought not be hungry; it is wrong to have high infant mortality due to preventable causes; homelessness is bad), norms are a different beast all together.
There is nothing automatic about the translation of moral principles into norms; their construction requires substantial work on the part of activists; and they are significantly more powerful in enabling activists to pressure and shame than are moral principles on their own, as they clearly ascribe an expected behavior to a specific actor who can then be shamed if that norm is violated.
It may be the case, then, that when we are trying to explain variation in why some norms matter and other do not, examining whether or not we are, in fact, comparing two norms might be useful. Are there clear actors linked with clear appropriate behaviors? If not, we might be dealing with a moral principle or moral intuition, but not a norm. And it may then be less puzzling to us why the moral principle fails to be useful to activists as they wage shaming campaigns when we understand that this moral principle is not linked to a specific actor and action. As we learned in the hunger case, it is this attribute of a norm (the linking of a specific
85 actor to a specific action) that gives activists the most leverage when they attempt to shame an actor into compliance.
86 CHAPTER 4:
Hunger at the Nexus of Rights and Development
In the previous chapter, we examined one reason why anti-hunger campaigns buckshot the way they do: the lack of a prescriptive norm.
Understanding why hunger lacks such a norm, however, requires examining how hunger is conceived of analytically by activists and the broader international community. Put differently, it requires asking of what is the hunger problem considered an instance?
Unfortunately for this issue area, hunger occupies a position at the nexus of human rights and development. This can be a challenging area to navigate, as development and human rights frameworks understand responsibility for hunger amelioration in different ways and for organizations with development legacies there are strong strategic interests not to blame national governments for high hunger rates for fear of jeopardizing the safety and security of their in-country missions. Food is a human right, codified in international law,99 but it is also seen as one of the world’s greatest development problems, even the development problem for the post-2015 development agenda.100 As it stands, halving the proportion of
99 The human right to food was established in international law in 1948 with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and reiterated in 1976 with the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), in 2004 with the Voluntary Guidelines on the Right to Food, as well as numerous other international conventions and agreements, including the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). 100 “Food security and nutrition should top development agenda after 2015 – UN officials” (February 2013).
87 people who are hungry in the world constitutes part of the first Millennium
Development Goal (MDG 1c).
But why should this be a problem? Are human rights and development not natural bedfellows? After all, according to Navi Pallay, UN High Commissioner for
Human Rights, “The litmus test of development is the degree to which any strategies and interventions satisfy the legitimate demands of the people for freedom from fear and want, for a voice in their own societies, and for a life of dignity.”101 These development objectives sound an awful lot like the objective of human rights campaigns, particularly in their focus on the empowerment of individuals in their own societies. UN member states affirmed the interdependence between rights and development in the 2010 World Summit Outcome document, stating, “We recognize that development, peace and security, and human rights are interlinked and mutually reinforcing.”102 In 2003, the UN Development Group adopted the Common
Understanding of a Human Rights-Based Approach to Development Programming
(also known as the “UN Common Understanding”). According to the Common
Understanding:
1. All programmes of development co-operation, policies and technical assistance should further the realisation of human rights as laid down in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international human rights instruments. 2. Human rights standards contained in, and principles derived from, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international human rights instruments guide all development cooperation and programming in
101 Human Rights and the Post-2015 Development Agenda. United Nations Human rights: Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (website), p.1. 102 Integrating Human Rights into Development: Donor Approaches, Experiences, and Challenges (2nd ed), p. xxix. emphasis added
88 all sectors and in all phases of the programming process. 3. Development cooperation contributes to the development of the capacities of ‘duty-bearers’ to meet their obligations and/or of ‘rights-holders’ to claim their rights.103
At least at the level of the UN, development and human rights approaches are perceived as inherently intertwined, ultimately interdependent, and internally consistent approaches.
But are these approaches truly consistent with each other? Do they encourage similar types of activism, a shared actor as responsible, or a common understanding of how the problem should be solved?
The hunger case suggests the intersection of rights and development can be a complicated place to navigate. Issue areas at the crossroads of rights and development share advocacy space across multiple types of NGOs and foundations
(namely humanitarian, development, human rights, and hybrid organizations).104 In the case of hunger, these organizations have had different histories dealing with the issue area, different mobilization strategies, and different types of programming and advocacy work. Most significantly for our purposes here, these different histories and conceptualizations of the problem lead to very different understandings of who is to blame for hunger (if anyone), and who should be targeted by advocacy campaigns, and how. As we will learn in this chapter, there is significant variation in how anti-hunger NGOs across these different types approach the hunger problem,
103 “The Human Rights Based Approach to Development Cooperation: Towards a Common Understanding Among UN Agencies,” p. 1. 104 We will discuss hybrid NGOs later on in the chapter. These generally refer to NGOs which began as “pure” development or humanitarian organizations but have recently added on a human rights dimension
89 and this contributes to the “buckshoting” trend described in Chapter 2 and makes it difficult for a dominant norm to emerge around the hunger issue area (Chapter 3).
Why should any of this matter? The intersection of rights and development is a relatively new phenomenon, and the challenges that this nexus brings to the hunger issue area are likely also experienced, or soon to be experienced, by campaigns around other economic and social rights. And these are challenges that are poorly understood, at least in the human rights literature.105 Put differently, issues that could theoretically be understood as economic and social rights (food, health care, housing, education) were dealt with internationally, until recently, exclusively as development concerns,106 but this is changing. International human rights organizations that had previously expressed little interest in claiming economic and social rights have entered the advocacy space over these issue areas, and the UN has begun intentionally linking rights with development concerns.
Understanding the effects of this new amalgamation of actors and approaches is important to burgeoning discussions on transnational advocacy surrounding on economic and social rights more broadly.
This chapter begins with a brief discussion of the history of the intersection of development and human rights within the UN and across anti-hunger NGOs in the
20th Century. It then examines human rights, development, and “hybrid” frames around the issue among anti-hunger NGOs and concludes with a discussion of how
105 The practice literature, however, has examined this intersection, particularly from the perspective of development and rights organizations and IOs. See: Hickey and Mitlin (2009). Alston and Robinson (2005); Tomasevski (1993); Integrating Human Rights into Development: Donor Approaches, Experiences, and Challenges (2nd ed) (2013); Gauri and Gloppen (2012). 106 There are some exceptions here, particularly in Communist countries where economic rights in particular took center stage early on in the Cold War.
90 these varied frameworks contribute to the “buckshotting” in this issue area and reduce the likelihood that a prescriptive norm around hunger will be established in the near future.
History of Linking Development and Rights
In 1997, the UN formally began “mainstreaming” human rights into its development work. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan singled out human rights as key to UN reform, noting that “the integration of human rights into all principal
United Nations activities and programmes” was to be a “priority area” for the UN going forward.107 In the following decade, UN agencies such as the UN Development
Programme (UNDP), the World Health Organization (WHO) and the UN Children’s
Fund (UNICEF) included rights language in their own mandates and programming.108
There had certainly been some, albeit gradual, movement towards the integration of rights and development in the UN prior to 1997. In 1986, the UN
General Assembly adopted the Declaration on the Right to Development, affirming:
the existence of serious obstacles to development, as well as to the complete fulfillment of human beings and of peoples, constituted, inter alia, by the denial of civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights, and considering that all human rights and fundamental freedoms are indivisible and interdependent and that, in order to promote development, equal attention and urgent consideration should be given to the implementation, promotion and protection of civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights…109
107 See: “Renewing the United Nations: A Programme for Reform,” (14 July 1997) 108 Robinson, “What Rights Can Add to Good Development Practice,” (2005), p. 29. 109 “Declaration on the Right to Development,” (4 December 1986).
91 Soon afterward, the key UN development organization for children, UNICEF, took up an active role in encouraging the successful adoption of the Convention on the
Rights of the Child (CRC), which resulted in the link between its development work and its support for the rights of children.110
That said, the integration of rights into development work (and vice versa) is a relatively new phenomenon. At the level of NGOs, development and human rights groups had, until recently, occupied distinct terrain, embodying very different strategies, programs, and understandings of their individual missions. As political scientist Peter Uvin aptly puts it,
Individual development practitioners may well have been card-carrying members of, say, Amnesty International; they may have discussed worrying human rights trends in the countries they worked in with colleagues during the evening, with a beer on the veranda, but they did not think that any of this was their job…they vaccinated, built schools, disseminated agricultural techniques, advised ministries. Human rights were…clearly somebody else’s job.111
Certainly, as specific donor governments (notably the Nordic states, the
Netherlands, the UK, and Switzerland)112 and the UN began to push for greater linkages between human rights and development work, NGOs and activists had incentives to blend their work as well. But there was another, perhaps even more powerful reason for this union that came as a shock within the development community: the Rwandan genocide.
110 Alston & Robinson, p.2. The CRC was adopted in 1989. Though ultimately the integration of rights language into UNICEF would be difficult. See: Munro, L.T. The ‘Human Rights-Based Approach to Programming:’ A Contradiction in Terms? In Sam Hickey and Diana Mitlin (Eds.). (2009). Rights- Based Approaches to Development: Exploring the Potential and Pitfalls. Kumarian Press: Sterling, VA, pp.187-206. 111 Uvin, P. (2004). Human Rights and Development. Kumarian Press: Bloomfield, CT, p.1 112 Robinson, “What Rights Can Add to Good Development Practice,” (2005), p.29 & fn 16.
92 In the months prior to the genocide, Rwanda was touted by the development community as a success story. It was experiencing steady economic growth. Social indicators of development looked promising as well: access to clean water, sanitation, and vaccination rates were all on the rise.113 It was more densely populated with NGOs than most African countries.114 According to development indicators, Rwanda was a model country. Then it shocked the development community by rapidly descending into mass violence. Uvin reflects, “If our model pupils turn out to be serial killers….I wondered, what does it say about our understanding of what we are doing in the development world?”115 The Rwandan case highlighted the danger of a development approach divorced from all concerns about human rights. And development NGOs (with Oxfam International leading the way), began to explicitly integrate rights work into their mandates. This is not to suggest that a rights framework among NGOs could have prevented the genocide, but rather that the development community took this incident as a sign that their work should incorporate “rights” elements. On the other side of the aisle, human rights advocacy groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch also publically committed to expanding their work into economic and social rights.116
Finally, the Millennium Declaration in 2000 solidified the new mentality of the international community that rights and development should be interlinked.117
The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) embody this union as the eight MDGs
113 Uvin, P. (1998), p. 47. Note where he derives this data. 114 Uvin (1998), p. 48 115 Uvin (2004), p. 2 116 Robinson, “What Rights Can Add to Good Development Practice,” (2005),p. 30. 117 “We will spare no effort to promote democracy and strengthen the rule of law, as well as respect for all internationally recognized human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the right to development.” See: UN Millennium Declaration (18 September 2000).
93 blend traditional development concerns like poverty amelioration with rights concerns such as the empowerment of women. Additionally, actors that had previously been more averse to engaging in “rights rhetoric,” such as the World
Bank, have begun to more explicitly link their development work to human rights objectives.118
Anti-Hunger NGOs in the 21st Century
Following the reemergence of interest in economic and social rights after the
Cold War and the UN’s efforts to integrate rights into development programming in the late 1990’s, the hunger issue space in particular found itself at the crossroads of rights and development frameworks. Practically, this meant that an issue space which had historically been dominated by humanitarian and development frameworks was now exposed to rights rhetoric in ways that had previously been quite rare. The result of this change was twofold: 1) Advocacy efforts now straddled humanitarian, development, and rights foci, dependent upon the particular anti- hunger organization and 2) A new breed of a “hybrid” NGO emerged---previously development oriented NGOs which began to classify themselves as “rights organizations” (i.e. Oxfam and ActionAid).
In terms of NGOs and activists, however, the union between rights and development has, at times, been a challenging one. Development NGOs worry that human rights approaches are too “political,” “unrealistic,” “abstract,” and “unable to cope with time…[as] it is never acceptable for policy makers to ‘go backwards’ at
118 See Wolfensohn(2005), pp.19-24.
94 one point in order to go forwards later on.”119 Human rights activists are also perceived as placing too great an emphasis on state responsibility and law, when the poor tend to avoid the state at all costs and seek assistance from local communities instead.120 From a rights perspective, development work is also suspect, as it may favor economic reforms that alienate or displace a few for the sake of the many. For rights activists, for example, moving a small indigenous group from their land, even if this means providing for a new highway that could modernize an economy, would be seen as a rights violation. For development workers, these decisions are less black and white, as collective benefit to a community may outweigh the cost to a few individuals.
Most significant for our purposes here, however, is that development and rights approaches are based on different analytic frameworks, rely on different campaign strategies, have historically taken different trajectories, rely on different understandings of blame and responsibility, and have very different practical considerations regarding programming. Issue areas that find themselves at the crossroads of these two approaches are likely to face varied (at times even competing) understandings of the problem. This makes the development of a single prescriptive norm around the issue area very difficult and encourages the
“buckshotting” of campaigns discussed in Chapter 2.
Human Rights Organizations
119 Robinson, “What Rights Can Add to Good Development Practice,” (2005), pp. 32-36. 120 Robinson, “What Rights Can Add to Good Development Practice,” (2005), pp. 36-37. On the difficulties of using law to fulfill economic and social rights, see also Gauri and Gloppen (2012), pp.498-499. The use (or nonuse) of law will be discussed in greater detail in the following chapter.
95 To human rights organizations, national government responsibility is central to traditional understandings of human rights law. National governments are responsible for ensuring the human rights of their own citizens, of “progressively realizing” economic and social rights, and of “respecting, protecting, and fulfilling” all human rights, whether civil, political, economic, or social. The buck, so to speak, stops with states, particularly the national government of the particular state where the specific human right is being violated. Whether the state itself is doing the violating directly, or simply failing to stop another actor from violating a right is of surprisingly little importance in terms of international law (i.e. acts of commission verses omission), at least in terms of the core human rights covenants. That said, acts of commission are far easier to organize campaigns around than acts of omission, as we will see below in how human rights organizations have campaigned in the hunger issue space.
FIAN International, founded in 1986, is one of the only organizations in the hunger space which takes a strong human rights approach to the issue area--though they are a relatively small organization in relation to organizations like OXFAM or
CARE.121 In their own words, “FIAN’s mission is to expose violations of people’s right to food wherever they may occur. FIAN stands up to unjust and oppressive practices that prevent people from being able to feed themselves.”122 When asked about their approach to hunger, one executive at FIAN International stated:
We are a human rights organization. Therefore we depart from a framework that is not defined by us—that is defined by human rights law…human rights
121 FIAN’s income for the year 2012 was roughly €1.64 million (approximately $2.3 million USD), compared to OXFAM America’s revenue of approximately $69 million (USD) in FY 2012. 122 Stronthenke and Carrigan (2013), p. 4.
96 is a way to regulate power, not only of the state but to regulate power of the private sector and any other big actor, you know, political parties, religious groups, that for any reason impinge on or abuse the human rights of other people. We say human rights are about the regulation of power. It is about the government not going beyond what it is supposed to do and impinging on rights. It is about asking the states and governments, as the manager of the public good, to guarantee that all people have equal rights…and the third level is demanding from states that they play their role to reduce inequality and to promote human dignity. This is what we believe is our mission. Let’s put it this way: it is defined by the framework of human rights. It is not decided by us, but by the peoples and committed by the governments to a certain extent.123
Naming and shaming is central to the work FIAN does, and the organization is not shy about focusing this pressure on national governments. Currently, for example, FIAN is waging an active campaign against the Philippine state for the right to food violations of the Hacienda Luisita farmers (which number roughly 6,200).124
They have initiated a letter-writing campaign, for individuals of all countries, to send letters to the President of the Philippines, the Secretary of Agriculture, and the
Secretary of Agrarian Reform to remind them that:
The Philippines is a State Party to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) and therefore obliged to protect and fulfil the right to food of its people, including the farmworker beneficiaries of Hacienda Luisita. Secured access to land is fundamental for the rural population who depend on cultivating land to feed themselves adequately. The Philippine government breached its protect-bound obligation under the right to food by not regulating the unjust arrangements of the ariendador that enforced farmworkers' dependency. Finally, the government of the Philippines has failed to fulfil the right to adequate food of the Hacienda Luisita farmers by not duly implementing the CARP - a program which aims to distribute land to landless farmers and to provide essential social
123 Interview with FIAN International executive 7/3/2013 124 “Philippines: Right to food of 6,212 farmers threatened despite the issuance of land titles.” FIAN International (website). Retrieved online from: http://www.fian.org/get-involved/take- action/urgent-actions/urgent-action-philippines-hacienda-luisita/#c1585
97 protection measures and support services to guarantee their right to adequate food.125
This is consistent with the behavior that the human rights literature has come to expect from human rights campaigns: activists assert pressure on governments to comply with their commitments under international law. FIAN does not only focus this pressure on national governments, however. They recently concluded a campaign against the Swedish government for financing tree plantations in the Niassa province in Mozambique.126 FIAN argued that these plantations displaced peasants from their land and infringed on their ability to grow their own food, thus violating the peasants right to food. Citing the Maastricht
Principles on Extraterritorial Obligations of States in the area of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights,127 FIAN urged individuals around the world to send letters to a variety of departments within the Swedish government to urge them to conduct a study to examine if there have been rights violations, stop the violations that have happened, and open up a complaint mechanism whereby local residents can appeal
125 Ibid 126 This campaign was active from October 2012 through April 2013. See: “Urgent Action- Mozambique: Swedish development cooperation violates the rights of peasants in Niassa province.” FIAN International (website). Retrieved online from: http://www.fian.org/get-involved/take- action/urgent-actions/urgent-action-mozambique-niassa-province 127 According to the Maastricht Principles, “A State has obligations to respect, protect and fulfill economic, social and cultural rights in any of the following: a) situations over which it exercises authority or effective control, whether or not such control is exercised in accordance with international law; b) situations over which State acts or omissions bring about foreseeable effects on the enjoyment of economic, social and cultural rights, whether within or outside its territory; c)situations in which the State, acting separately or jointly, whether through its executive, legislative or judicial branches, is in a position to exercise decisive influence or to take measures to realize economic, social and cultural rights extraterritorially, in accordance with international law.” This is only a small piece of the larger Principles. See: “Maastricht Principles on Extraterritorial Obligations of States in the area of Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights,” (29 February 2012).
98 their right to food violations.128 In this instance, we observe the naming and shaming strategy that is common in human rights campaigns, but it is focused on outside governments. With no solid legal grounds in any of the state-ratified human rights covenants, FIAN points to the Maastricht Principles as legitimizing this campaign. These Principles, however, have never been signed by states, were largely a construct of human rights scholars and activists, and have zero enforcement mechanism (again, as no state has signed them).
What we observe with the case of FIAN is both the closest example to a
“pure” human rights approach to the hunger problem but also the appeal of campaigns around clear instances of commission (instead of omission). Particularly in issue areas that lack the benefit of a prescriptive norm clearly ascribing responsibility in a society to a given actor, the burden of proof for activists is higher to make a compelling case to justify their target selection. As we will discuss in
Chapter 5, this means that FIAN often finds it difficult to gather enough evidence to wage a compelling campaigns against governments for not fulfilling the right to food.129 FIAN does wage campaigns which blame national governments for failing to meet their obligations under international law vis-à-vis the right to food, but they also capitalize on acts of commission committed by other actors (outside governments or corporations) which they can leverage to construct compelling campaigns.
128 “Urgent Action-Mozambique: Swedish development cooperation violates the rights of peasants in Niassa province.” FIAN International (website). Retrieved online from: http://www.fian.org/get- involved/take-action/urgent-actions/urgent-action-mozambique-niassa-province
129 On the difficulty of making a compelling case for governments failing to fulfill the right to food, see: Windfuhr(2005), pp.340-341.
99
Development and Humanitarian Organizations
The development community, in contrast to a “pure” human rights approach, often places responsibility outside of national governments and onto development organizations themselves and the donations of developed states. This is due in part to the history of these organizations’ involvement in country missions. As we will discuss later in the chapter, path dependence keeps development organizations
(even those that recently have taken on rights frameworks, such as Oxfam) approaching hunger in relatively consistent ways over time, even if this varies from how traditional rights-based approaches would suggest.
Historically, development NGOs started constructing houses, irrigating fields, digging wells, and vaccinating children because the state was unable or unwilling to do so.130 Organizations such as Oxfam or CARE, for example, started on the heels of
World War II in order to provide relief to war-torn Europe. In the case of Oxfam
(originally the Oxford Famine Relief Committee), early meetings began in October
1942. With a membership of five, the committee discussed “the food situation in each of the plundered countries” noting that “our task needs be very difficult. The problem is to mitigate the famine without invalidating the Allies blockade.”131 In the aftermath of the war (and under blockade), states could hardly be expected to provide food or health care effectively for their populations, and NGOs helped to fill this gap. In order to do so, they developed very particular fundraising and mobilization strategies, encouraging the (comparatively) well-off in developed
130 Mitlin and Hickey, “Introduction,” (2009). 131 Oxford Famine Relief Committee minutes (handwritten), (1942, October 5).
100 states to provide cash or in-kind aid to the development organization which would then funnel necessary goods and services abroad to those in need. CARE in particular gained recognition for its delivery of “CARE packages”—where they would fly over war-torn areas and drop boxes of supplies from planes.
Often, as was especially the case in Latin America, development and humanitarian NGOs became active in countries on the heels of structural adjustment policies demanded by international financial institutions (notably the IMF) which required states to refrain from direct spending on such economic and social rights as food, housing, and health care. In the era of the Washington Consensus, these
NGOs served as the replacement for the state, who was prohibited from necessary social spending as a condition to their loans.132 Indeed, the raison d’etre of development and humanitarian organizations was generally to provide for services that they perceived national governments as unable (or often unwilling) to provide.
Shaming or blaming, as a strategy, makes little sense if you understand a problem as outside the capacity of the state to solve. When asked about who World
Vision blames (if anybody) for hunger while conducting the survey, one senior official responded:
Senior World Vision employee: That’s a tough question [laughs]. See, I wouldn’t say ‘nobody’s to blame,’ but I don’t think the groups you’ve listed here are to blame necessarily. I mean, it’s a combination of factors.
Me: …if blame doesn’t make sense, then it’s OK to say ‘we don’t think in terms of blame.’
132 See Mitlin and Hickey, “Introduction,” (2009).
101 Senior World Vision employee: Yeah, I’ll definitely mark that down.133
This official then wrote “blame is not a word we use, rather ‘causes’” on the survey question pertaining to blame, and selecting “Other” wrote in “poor productivity,” “poor knowledge, especially for nutrition and hygiene” and “gender disparities.”134 When given a list on the survey of national governments, outside states, transnational corporations, price speculators, etc., no particular actor resonated as “to blame” for hunger.
Similarly, when surveying a senior staff member at CARE USA135 about who the organization blames for hunger, the individual remarked:
I don’t think, you know, I’ve come across any kind of government or anybody who really wants, you know, to have a population that’s hungry. I think it’s a lack of capacity, actually.136
CARE works in 86 countries, including sponsoring child nutrition programs in comparatively developed states like Japan and India, agricultural programs in
Brazil, and food security initiatives in South Africa. They also work in places like
South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Gaza, where development and humanitarian assistance would be more expected than in the BRIC countries of
133 Interview with World Vision (USA) senior official (5/13/13) 134 Survey result, World Vision (USA) senior official, 5/13/13. (Note: check handwriting to see if ‘disparities’ is correct).
135 CARE was originally “The Cooperative for American Remittance to Europe” and is now called "The Cooperative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere." It classifies itself as a “humanitarian organization” but notes “CARE works in 86 countries around the world to support more than 900 poverty-fighting development and humanitarian-aid projects” See: Where We Work. CARE (website). Retrieved online from: http://www.care.org/work/where-we-work 136 Interview with CARE senior official (5/22/13)
102 Brazil or India, or comparatively economically advanced states like Japan and South
Africa.137
It might appear puzzling that a senior official for CARE USA could so easily dismiss the idea of blaming national governments for high hunger rates (citing a lack of capacity), when CARE works in places like India, where 48% of children are stunted, but the country is part of the G-20.138 But it is less puzzling when one considers the history of how the hunger issue has been understood within development and humanitarian organizations like CARE. In organizations such as these, hunger has, since the organization’s founding in 1945, been conceptualized as a development and humanitarian problem where the North is responsible for assisting the disadvantaged South in providing for their citizens. When anti-hunger missions began in organizations such as these, state capacity in the developing world was highly suspect and the charity of the North, not the obligations of
Southern states to ensure the rights of their citizens were fulfilled, was the primary organizing principle for these organizations. There is considerable path dependence at play as well, as in-country missions, once started, tend to be challenging to cancel or uproot. In this way, even as an outsider might question the argument that Japan, South Africa, India, or Brazil lack the capacity to improve the food security situation in their countries, to development and humanitarian organizations, it is consistent with their analytic framework to conceptualize hunger
137 For where CARE works, see: Where We Work. CARE (website). Retrieved online from: http://www.care.org/work/where-we-work
138 India: Nutrition. UNICEF(website). Retrieved online from: http://www.unicef.org/india/nutrition.html
103 the way they do. CARE is not the only organization to retain missions in relatively well-off countries. Doctors without Borders (MSF), an organization known for providing emergency relief, also retains active nutrition programs in Nigeria, a country which has the second highest GDP per capita in sub-Saharan Africa, behind
South Africa. What we observe in these countries are activists working within the framework that hunger is still largely a problem for the North to assist the South, where state incapacity keeps governments from being responsible for improving the food situation for their own citizens.
The construction of state (in)capacity is a particularly interesting feature of anti-hunger campaigns, and likely economic and social rights campaigns more broadly. In the case of civil and political human rights, the need for strong state capacity is less obvious to activists, though as we’ve discussed in previous chapters, all rights require state action to fulfill. In the case of economic and social rights, however, and the right to food in particular, the question of what measures a state can reasonably do hovers over activist efforts. Who decides if India can (and should) do more to ensure the right to food of its citizens? How do we know if South Africa has capacity to reduce malnutrition rates in its borders? Or Japan? Who makes these determinations?
Generally activists, either domestic or international, make the determination regarding what a state should be held accountable to doing for its citizens. It is these actors who historically pressure governments to pick up additional responsibilities and provide (new or better) programs and services. And this is inherently a subjective call. While we could imagine a world, in theory, where
104 international law demarcated these responsibilities clearly (and more objectively), this is not the world we live in for economic and social rights, as we will discuss in
Chapter 5. International law leaves states open to “progressively realize” the right to food and all economic and social rights. How fast they ought to realize this right, and through what means, is not codified in international law. Absent a state taking the initiative themselves, perhaps due to electoral incentives,139 it is left up to activists (and NGOs) to do so.140
For this reason, the analytic framework activists and NGOs use around the hunger problem is especially significant. If hunger is perceived through a development framework where state incapacity is generally assumed and reiterated through the perpetuation of in-country missions, even in economically more advanced countries, it shouldn’t be particularly surprising that such organizations don’t name or shame national governments to improve the hunger conditions in their countries. It may not be entirely clear who should improve these conditions
(beyond more vague understandings of “developed states” and private donations from the citizens of these states), but national governments in developing states are certainly not the actor that is targeted within this framework.
139 This was certainly the case with Lula da Silva, who championed the Bolsa Familia and Fome Zero (Zero Hunger) widespread conditional cash transfer programs in Brazil. He initiated these programs as part of a populist campaign designed to win him the presidency. And it worked. But such examples of state-initiated anti-hunger programs are comparatively rare. 140 Theoretically, we could also imagine a world where outside states demarcated these responsibilities clearly for other states…but absent blatant withholding of food we do not often see governments attempt to determine the capacity for other states to improve the right to food in their populations. Theoretically we could also imagine a world in which IOs served in this capacity, but in the hunger issue space guidelines from IOs like the FAO are still vague (which is not surprising, given member states have little incentive to lock themselves into clear responsibilities vis-à-vis food).
105 Contrast this traditional understanding of development (i.e. the providence of aid by the North to the South) to a traditional rights approach (i.e. demanding national governments to fulfill their obligations vis-à-vis their citizens under international law). The fundamental logics of both approaches are different. Their understandings of who ought to do the providing are different. Their campaign strategies (mobilizing citizens to blame governments vs. rallying citizens in developed states to give money directly, or through their governments to developing states) are fundamentally different.
When dealing with civil and political rights these realms could remain separate, as development organizations had little interest in these issues. And for most of the 20th Century, human rights groups were uninterested in economic and social rights in general, focusing almost exclusively on civil and political rights.
Development organizations thus reigned over issue areas like hunger, education, health care, and access to water. But in the mid-late 1990’s, with the rise of “rights rhetoric” in the UN, the mandate to focus on human rights across UN development programming, and the internal shock to the development community (in the case of the Rwandan genocide), things began to change. Development organizations like
Oxfam started to self-identify as “rights organizations.”
But what happens when NGOs traditionally perceived of as “development organizations” which historically dominated issue areas like hunger begin to broaden their mandate to include a “rights focus?” What does activism look like in these NGOs over issue areas like hunger?
106 New “hybrid” (development-rights) NGOs: Oxfam and ActionAid
Instead of engaging in the traditional human rights approaches of primarily naming and shaming national governments over right to food violations, Oxfam engages in a different strategy: a combination of continued active programming work and focused pressure campaigns on private corporations. In this way, they continue development work much as before through active in-country missions, but also take up the hallmark human rights strategy of naming and shaming, but with a twist. Instead of primarily blaming governments, Oxfam turns its gun sights on private corporations.
Oxfam now uses “rights rhetoric,” classifies itself as falling under a rights framework, but often does not direct their more aggressive naming and shaming to national governments or have a significant focus on international legal obligations of states vis-à-vis the right to food. What is interesting about the “rights-based” work in this new generation of hybrid NGOs is that they largely eschew the traditional aggressive state-centered campaign foci that the literature has come to expect from activist campaigns and embraced alternative strategies of shaming the private sector (and insufficient donations from developed states) for hunger in developing states. In NGOs such as these, in issue areas that cross rights and development frameworks, we see a new form of activism---one which uses rights rhetoric to legitimize the goal of the campaign (ending hunger) but chooses to leave behind the legal frameworks provided for human rights in international law.141
141 The relative lack of reliance on international law in anti-hunger campaigns will be discussed in detail in the following chapter (Chapter 5).
107 It is worth briefly reviewing the specifics of Oxfam’s anti-hunger programming and campaign work. Much of what Oxfam does one might expect of a traditional development agency. In fact, roughly 90% of all spending within Oxfam
(as aggregated across all Oxfam confederate offices) goes towards “development and humanitarian” programming, while only 10% is spent on what is referred to in the their annual report as “influencing” (i.e. advocacy) programs.142 They provide relief in the aftermath of natural disasters or war, in the case of Oxfam America, they support farmers associations,143 and they provide training and education on agricultural techniques,144 among many other development-oriented projects.
But in conjunction with their integration of a “rights approach,” Oxfam has expanded its focus on advocacy, in a way that is distinct from the work of traditional development agencies. Interestingly, however, the primary target to the largest unified advocacy effort within Oxfam is the private sector. Behind the Brands, part of Oxfam’s flagship GROW campaign, targets 10 powerhouse international food and beverage corporations (Associated British Foods (ABF), Coca-Cola, Danone, General
Mills, Kellogg, Mars, Mondelez International (previously Kraft Foods), Nestlé,
PepsiCo, and Unilever).
Figure 4.1: The “Big 10”
142 Oxfam International Annual Report (2012-2013), p. 70. 143 For instance they support two farmers associations in Haiti. See: Ferguson, K. (30 December 2013). 144 ibid
108
Source: Joki Gauthier for Oxfam 2012145
According to Oxfam, these “Big 10” control approximately 10% of the global economy, but “these companies have grown prosperous while the millions who supply the land, labor and water needed for their products face increased hardship.”146 What links the Big 10 to global hunger? Oxfam constructs the following causal chain in their campaign literature:
Overall, up to 80 percent of the global population considered ‘chronically hungry’ are farmers, and the use of valuable agricultural resources for the production of snacks and sodas means less fertile land and clean water is available to grow nutritious food for local communities. And changing
145 Hoffman (26 February 2013), p. 8. 146Ibid, p. 1.
109 weather patterns due to greenhouse gas emissions-a large percentage of which come from agricultural production-continue to make these small-scale farmers increasingly vulnerable.147
Essentially, Oxfam argues that the Big 10 use resources that, if allocated directly to hungry people, could be used to grow food and provide clean water, ergo reducing global hunger. Furthermore, these large corporations (or their supply chains) produce greenhouse gases, which leads to climate change, which in turn leads to volatile farming conditions for poor farmers and food price increases for consumers. Additionally, dependent on the particular corporation, Oxfam levies allegations ranging from the use of child labor, engaging in land or water grabs, abusing natural resources, and engaging in environmentally degrading practices.148
The solution to this problem, according to Oxfam, is to wage an international shaming and accountability campaign, where Oxfam ranks the Big 10 on a
“scorecard” based on the corporations’ policies on seven “themes”: transparency, women, laborers, farmers, use of land and water, and the production of green house emissions.149 Primarily, their interest is on investigating the agricultural supply chain upon which these corporations rely.150 Oxfam exposes poor corporate policies on the seven “themes” listed above and then encourages (in part through providing form letters) citizens around the world to pressure these corporations for change.
What is interesting, however, is how much effort is exerted to construct causal chains that link global hunger primarily to the actions of ten, albeit quite large,
147 Ibid, p. 9. Oxfam cites a wordpress blog for the statistic that 80% of the world’s chronically hungry are farmers. This number should be taken with extreme caution. 148 Ibid, p. 2 149 See: About: Behind the Brands: The Indicators. Oxfam America(website). Retrieved online from: http://www.behindthebrands.org/en-us/about 150 Ibid
110 food and beverage industries. When an international legal framework already exists to legitimate national governments as responsible for hunger within their countries, we might expect a group with a “rights focus” to leverage this to blame governments. Moreover, it would seem to be much easier to construct a short causal chain between government neglect and hunger within the state’s borders than argue that Kellogg’s or Mars is responsible for global hunger.151 But then why do we see comparatively little aggressive blaming of national governments and instead a focus on the private sector?152
Publically, Oxfam justifies its focus on the private sector as a target of the
Behind the Brands campaign in the following way:
Of course, these companies are not the only ones responsible for hunger and poverty in the world. But, as described in this report, their success has hinged on the availability of cheap land and labor supplied by poor communities around the world. Additionally, the Big 10 today have the power to exert substantial influence over the traders and governments which control and regulate global food supply chains. They are also the most visible part of the industry, and are putting their own reputations at risk as consumers grow more concerned about what they buy and from whom.153
In other words, the Big 10 take advantage of the poor and the natural resources in developing countries and they are extremely powerful actors, perhaps even more powerful than governments. Privately, however, when asked why
Oxfam engages in much more aggressive blaming of corporations than national
151 This is not at all to say that these corporations are free from any environmental or social wrong- doing in the communities in which their supply chains (or industries) are based. The point is only that linking these corporations to culpability for global hunger requires more effort. 152 There are, however, some individual campaigns (namely in Guatemala and the Philippines) where Oxfam partners with local groups to participate in rallies against national government land policies, linking the evictions of people off their lands to their subsequent hunger. (see: Oxfam International Annual Report, 2012-2013, pp. 16-17). Their international advocacy campaign places greater emphasis on the private sector than governments, however. 153 Hoffman (26 February 2013), p. 6
111 governments, one Oxfam America executive responded, essentially, that corporations cannot deny visas, though governments can. Oxfam retains active in- country missions in developing countries, and in contrast “don’t operate in the lobby of these [corporations].” Oxfam relies on the good will of national governments to maintain their more traditional development programming, but they have no such dependency on the goodwill of corporations.154
There was a marked tension and defensiveness expressed by the senior and executive staff I interviewed at Oxfam America regarding the extent of pressure
Oxfam places on national governments. As one executive put it:
We get our legitimacy, as opposed to a think tank, or a Bread for the World, or a One, by being based in these 92 countries. We also argue that we are not the same as World Vision because we are willing to hold the powerful accountable, like I said to you earlier. We’re willing to name names, to launch national campaigns. Yet to launch a campaign in a country against people… who are the corrupt, with private interests, then we have to be convinced that the good we will do with that national campaign will exceed the risk we will draw our programs into, which some of which are very traditional, because we do campaigning but we also do some basic stuff. That is my battle….[Amnesty International], they don’t have operations. They don’t have to balance that….but here’s my challenge to you. Here’s what I want from somebody like you, who is doing serious thinking about this, OK? I want you to call out the tension, but I want you to be thoughtful about how change happens….
She went on to explain that before 2010, Oxfam had “no work in countries holding national institutions accountable for the failure of a policy or to put in place a policy they don’t have.” Now, Oxfam is working in roughly 40 focus countries, in one third of which:
Somebody in that government wishes [Oxfam] would go away. I think a third of our work goes in that world. Like somebody in the government, if you asked them, they’d wish [Oxfam] wasn’t there because it creates a
154Interview with Oxfam America executive, May 14, 2013.
112 discomfort. I’d say 1/3…maybe it’s a massive transparency initiative ---all we’re trying to do is find out who’s buying up all the land. We’re not, you know, my line that I use a lot in this office is? ‘I want to hear your best passive aggressive approach to getting this solved.’ Aggressive will get you kicked out. Passive is ‘go do World Vision.’ I want passive aggressive. I want you to get shit done and change the power without being in peoples face.155
Oxfam carries over a strong development legacy even in its current rights focus. It maintains significant in-country operations that can only continue at the pleasure of the national government in question. Overtly naming and shaming many national governments would get Oxfam kicked out of the country, jeopardizing the security of their missions (and their staff in country). This is a serious liability to organizations which have historically viewed hunger as a development problem and are attempting to refocus to rights frameworks. Blaming and shaming is a dangerous business, and it is one that may not be well-suited to organizations which retain in country missions and programming. In the case of civil and political human rights campaigns, groups like Amnesty International do not have to worry about jeopardizing in-country programs, as they do not run any. In the case of activists around economic and social rights (like food), the safety and security of in-country missions is a very real concern. Refocusing blame towards corporations is one way to retain a naming and shaming mobilization strategy without running the risk of getting your staff members’ visas denied.
At the same time, there is a compulsion within these organizations, in using this rights rhetoric, to implicate the government in some way. But putting some degree of “discomfort” on national governments is a very different strategy than the
155 Interview with Oxfam America executive, May 14, 2013, emphasis added.
113 overt naming and shaming we have come to expect from human rights organizations which engage in civil and political campaigns. This tension came up when this Oxfam executive and I discussed the “facilitating” verses “pressuring” roles that Oxfam has when working with governments and I asked what percentage of their engagement with governments fell on the “pressure” end of the spectrum:
Oxfam America Executive: Pressure vs. facilitate? Um, honestly, honestly…
Me: Are we talking 5%? Are we talking less?
Oxfam America Executive: No, no. God no. On pressure?
Me: On pressure of the non-facilitating type.
Oxfam America Executive: Yes! Oh, well, hold on. I think you still mean marching down the streets.
Me: I kind of do, I mean—because I’m juxtaposing… to put it on a spectrum is what I’m trying to do. If one end is “Bad, bad Pinochet, stop forcibly disappearing your people. We’re going to hold protests in the street.” And the other end is we turn the other way….
Oxfam America Executive: …I think, if you’re asking me for extreme… I’d say zero…I’m saying what Human Rights and Amnesty do. There is none that fall in the top 10%. None in the top 10%. 156
There is considerable path dependence at work inside these “hybrid
NGOs.”157 They maintain active in-country missions and often very traditional development missions while at the same time beginning advocacy work under a
“rights framework.” These development legacies matter a great deal in shaping the
156 Interview with Oxfam America executive, May 14, 2013. 157 On the concept of path dependence, see: Pierson (2000); Hall and Taylor (1996).
114 nature of advocacy inside this new generation of NGOs, however. They use the language of human rights and adopt, to some extent, the hallmark mobilization strategy of rights organizations (naming and shaming), but need to protect their in- country programming, which means aggressive shaming of national governments is often too risky. This means these organizations need to find other actors to blame who do not jeopardize the security of their operations. As a result of the path dependence within these organizations, blame cannot be centralized in their campaigns on national governments. Instead, organizations like Oxfam engage in
“venue shopping,”158 where they may target a varied host of actors, currently focusing the majority of their efforts on the private sector.
ActionAid is another advocacy NGO who has comparatively recently made the transition from what they called a “charity” focused development work to one adopting a “human rights based approach” (HRBA) to programming.159 In an organizational handbook to staff, this “hybrid NGO” portrays its evolution from a
“charity” organization to one with a HRBA in the following way:
Figure 4.2: ActionAid as Charity Organization
158 This is how Anne Buffardi, employee at Oxfam International, described Oxfam’s campaign strategies in her ISA presentation (5/27/13). 159 Hargreaves(2010), p. 9.
115
Source: Hargreaves (2010), p. 11.
In the 1990’s, ActionAid understood itself primarily as an actor who would provide goods and services to meet the direct needs of specific communities. The national government, as you can see in the image, was not a part of their work:
“Instead we substituted for government by providing the services for which government was ultimately responsible.”160
This approach had changed by 2005, as illustrated in Figure 3 (below).
Figure 4.3: ActionAid “Empowerment Approach”
160 Hargreaves (2010), p. 11
116
Source: Hargreaves (2010), p. 14.
Using another example of an education campaign, ActionAid notes that by
2005, their philosophy had changed to incorporate greater partnerships with local communities and a greater level of engagement with governments. In their own words:
We worked to empower (build capacity and knowledge of) communities to fulfill governments’ responsibilities locally by providing public services, or by supporting state-community-ActionAID partnerships through which services were delivered and maintained. In addition to working on the feeder schools, we worked in partnership with government to improve infrastructure—classrooms and desks---in government schools. ActionAid topped up the money provided by government to upgrade schools.161
161 Hargreaves (2010), p. 13
117
Finally, they illustrate their current human rights approach in the following way (in Figure 4, below):
Figure 4.4: ActionAid Human Rights Approach
Source: Hargreaves (2010), p. 17.
Under their current philosophy, ActionAid states their understanding of the role of government has changed significantly. In their own words:
Government is not neutral, but is instead strongly influenced by those who have power. Because of this we need to be strategic in how we work with the different arms of the government. At times we helped build the capacity of government structures such as school management and school governing
118 bodies. At other times we needed to push government to change its polices and we needed to hold government accountable---so we entered into a campaign with others to influence a change in policy on user fees to hold government accountable to its commitments regarding the right to education.
When government introduced free primary education, the challenge shifted to ensuring quality education and retention of learners. The network focused on working closely with social audit groups to ensure government transparency and accountability in the use of education resources.162
While the empirical example given in the staff handbook was education campaigns (and feeding programs associated within broader educational objectives), it illustrates nicely how the organization perceived its own transformation between charity and HRBA programming over the past couple decades. At the same time, however, the manual highlights some of the murkiness over who constitute “duty-bearers” for the economic and social rights around which
ActionAid campaigns. Under their current paradigm, they encourage employees to
“Think and act globally and locally; constraints to social change lie beyond the local in a complex and interconnected global system.”163 Campaigns are not always targeting national level officials, but look to broader global injustices. Moreover,
ActionAid highlights that under their current HRBA, there are multiple “duty- bearers” to the given human right they are campaigning to realize. While the national government is “often the primary, or ultimate, duty bearer,” in cases where the government is weak (or failed), the international community (namely the UN or
NGOs) become duty bearers. Also, ActionAid perceives a secondary level of duty bearers to rights, noting: “Secondary duty bearers are non-state actors who also
162 Hargreaves, 2010, p. 17 163 Hargreaves, 2010, p. 19
119 have power and duties in relation to rights—for example, traditional and religious authorities, corporations and employers, and even individuals.”164
When considering the hunger issue area in particular, one senior ActionAid
USA official noted that blame is shared among five different actors (in order):
National governments, outside governments (such as the governments of developed states), TNCs, a lack of capacity for national governments, and price speculators.165
The understanding of blame in the hunger issue area within ActionAid (and economic and social rights more broadly) is more complicated than the neat diagrams in the manual suggest. Here, as was the case in Oxfam, there is a noticeable tension within the organization between the desire to use rights rhetoric and shaming strategies and the need to protect local programming.
In ActionAid, as in Oxfam, no national level shaming campaign can be approved without the consent of the local ActionAid office. If the local office perceives the risk and threat to be too high to blaming governments (or other actors) in a given country, they have the power to veto such an action. This was recently the case, for instance, in Tanzania, when ActionAid wanted to launch a campaign against a US company that was engaging in land grabbing. According to one senior ActionAid USA official:
If we wanted to work on any campaign that said anything about somebody else’s government, we’d have to ask them first….We actually had a case in Tanzania where we were about to, um, we were about to launch this huge report we had written on a US company that was grabbing land in Tanzania and basically the, like, moments before we, you know, we hit send, ActionAid Tanzania said you can’t send it, the Tanzanian government is going to retaliate. And, I mean, we’ve gotten almost kicked out of a number of, I mean,
164 Hargreaves, 2010, p. 36 165 Survey results, senior staff ActionAid USA, June 5, 2013.
120 ActionAid Uganda staff face violence from the Ugandan government for what they’re doing. So it’s really a pretty sensitive safety issue…..local offices can say ‘no, absolutely not. It’s too politically sensitive.’166
In these “hybrid NGOs,” overt naming and shaming is still a risky enterprise, and the need to protect local offices and programs means that the nature of advocacy will necessarily be guided by different calculations than by organizations who do not have such operations to protect. And these organizations will often target the global north in their anti-hunger campaigns. For instance, ActionAid recently supported a “caravan of women” who walked from West to South Africa to bring attention to the serious impact of climate change. The objective of this campaign was not to target national governments in Africa, but to make “global north governments to take action on climate change.”167 Similarly, the organization is currently engaging in a “tax justice” campaign, where they argue that corporations such as Barclays deprive African countries of necessary tax revenue by setting up tax havens. ActionAid recently supported a march in Zambia “to stop corporations like Barclays from depriving people living in poverty in Zambia of basic social services.”168 Here, again, a corporation is to blame for the lack of social services in
Zambia.
Even when ActionAid does feel it is safe to target a specific national government for high hunger rates, it often does so in ways that reflect its legacy as a development organization. Currently, for example, ActionAid is training citizens in developing countries in Africa, particularly women, on how to learn to read national
166 Interview with ActionAid USA senior official, June 5, 2013. 167 Interview with ActionAid USA senior official, June 5, 2013. 168 “The people of Zambia tell Barclays to clean up their act!” ((9 December 2013).
121 budgets and hold governments accountable to spending the 10% on agricultural development that they promised to do in 2003 with the Maputo Declaration.169
ActionAid works on Public Financing for Agriculture (PFA) campaigns in partnership with the Gates Foundation, as they see agricultural development (and state funding for agricultural development) as central to hunger relief. When asked why ActionAid prioritized spending in agricultural development as the solution to hunger as opposed to pressuring governments for social safety nets, one senior
ActionAid USA official responded:
Senior ActionAid official: I just don’t think it’s as big of need in many of these, to me it’s not the #1 need in many of these communities, social safety nets.
Me: So the bigger need, you were saying, is gender equality and dealing with small scale ag production.
Senior ActionAid official: Yeah, yeah.
Me: And do you mean it, is it ag development because the assumption is people can, whatever they generate on this plot of land, they can sell and make a better livelihood for their family? Or is the assumption, they’re not, these are subsistence farmers so, it’s that that they can better feed themselves? Or more interested in them growing a nutritionally balanced diet on their own land, right, than growing coffee and then selling it?
Senior ActionAid official: Yeah, we are more interested in that….we take a food sovereignty approach…people growing their own food on their own land.170
169 For more on Maputo Declaration see: http://www.nepad- caadp.net/pdf/CAADP_Forum_Reprint1.pdf 170 Interview with ActionAid USA senior official, June 5, 2013.
122 Agricultural development is a way for local communities to feed themselves and not need to rely on the government to provide assistance. It is, moreover, consistent with earlier developmental approaches to hunger where NGOs invested in irrigation training, seeds, etc. to help local communities improve agricultural industries. ActionAid, for instance, continues to help local communities create seed banks.171 But that the right to food is accomplished through pressuring governments to provide resources to agricultural development (as opposed to providing job training outside of subsistence farming, or social safety nets more generally), is consistent with previous development approaches to hunger. In the case of “hybrid” NGOs in the hunger space, such as ActionAid and Oxfam, development legacies shape the nature and structure of advocacy within the organizations in the present day.
Conclusion
If we want to understand why anti-hunger campaigns buckshot the way they do and why no prescriptive norm exists to centralize campaigns on one singular actor, we must first understand the varied conceptualizations of the problem across anti-hunger organizations. For issue areas like hunger, which can be (and are) conceptualized as both development and human rights problems, advocacy work will be shared across different types of organizations with inherent differences in the way they have historically mobilized and campaigned around the problem area.
Understandings of who is to blame for the problem will vary, and even as
171 Interview with ActionAid USA senior official, June 5, 2013.
123 organizations shift from development to human rights frameworks the legacy of prior development work will continue to affect the nature of their advocacy. Civil and political rights issue areas do not cross the (at times competing) frameworks of rights and development. Economic and social rights live at the intersection of these two frameworks.
The lack of a prescriptive norm around hunger makes it difficult (and unlikely) that campaigns will centralize around a single target, and the existence of multiple conceptual frameworks around the issue area perpetuates this lack of a coherent prescriptive norm. Put differently, when issue areas can be conceptualized as, at the same time, development and human rights problems, these frameworks will enable complex and varied understandings of blame, responsibility, cause, and solutions in the issue space. The existence of multiple viable frameworks around a problem area makes it difficult (and unlikely) that a single prescriptive norm will emerge around which activists can rally.
124 CHAPTER 5:
On International Human Rights Law
In theory, one of the great benefits of international law is its ability to ascribe responsibility to a specific actor for a specific action. For activists, this is an extremely useful trait of law, whether domestic or international. In the case of international human rights law, once a state has ratified a specific convention or treaty activists can then leverage this (very public) commitment to hold states accountable when they fail to live up to their commitments under law. As Beth
Simmons (2009) puts it, international law “provides the central ‘hook’ by which the oppressed and their allies can legitimately call for behavior change.”172
Much of our literature on human rights law is interested in explaining why states would ratify human rights treaties in the first place.173 Why limit state sovereignty and expose yourself to activist campaigns? Put more pithily by Nigel
Rodley, former Legal Advisor and Head of the Legal and Intergovernmental
Organizations Office at Amnesty International: “Why do states give us these whips to flagellate themselves with?”174 Yet, the use of international law as this “whip” is not constant across different types of human rights abuses. While in theory we could imagine a tool like international law serving as a substitute for a prescriptive norm by providing activists with a “whip” to use to “flagellate” states (and thus
172 Simmons, B. (2009), p. 6. 173 See Simmons (2009); Moravcsik (2000);Goodliffe and Hawkins (2006).
174 At the time of this quote, he was the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture. See Simmons (2009), p. 57 who attributes this quote to Clark (2010), p. 4.
125 centralizing campaigns to target national governments), it does not serve this purpose in the hunger case.
In the case of civil and political rights we frequently see activists leverage the authority and legitimacy that comes with international law in order to hold states accountable for their behavior. This has certainly been the case with recent campaigns against the use of torture and abuse of protestors.175 We can also imagine that international human rights law, in ascribing responsibility to a specific actor (which thus far is always a state), could also center advocacy efforts on a singular target. And this focus on a single actor could allow campaigns to
“boomerang” or “spiral” instead of “buckshot.” In the case of anti-hunger campaigns, however, international law has not served to focus international activism on a singular target actor, despite the fact that the vast majority of states have ratified at least one legally binding international covenant or treaty attributing responsibility to national governments for the right to food. Why is this the case?
This chapter examines three reasons why international law functions differently in the case of the right to food than it does for activists of civil and political rights. 1) In contrast to civil and political rights, many anti-hunger organizations still do not conceptualize food as a human right, making international
175 For instance, Amnesty International has shamed (and continues to shame) the United States government for its torture policies noting first and foremost that “the U.S. government has repeatedly violated both international and domestic prohibitions on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment in the name of fighting terrorism.” See: “Torture” (website under Our Work: Issues). Amnesty International. Retrieved online from:http://www.amnestyusa.org/our- work/issues/torture. Also, Human Rights Watch recently released their Punished for Protesting report, shaming the Venezuelan government for “violations of the right to life; the prohibition on torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment; the rights to bodily integrity, security and liberty; and due process rights.” See Punished for Protesting: Rights Violations in Venezuela’s Streets, Detention Centers and Justice System (2014), p. 1.
126 human rights law less relevant; 2) When activists do conceptualize food as a human right, they often root their understanding of this right outside of its strict legal interpretation; 3) Activists face the very practical concerns of continued debates
(particularly among the United States and Canada) regarding the justiciability of the right to food and continued debates over the precise definition of the right itself, which make leveraging this law challenging. Underlying each of these three explanations, however, is the apparent disconnect between the attribution of a responsibility in international law and the generation of any prescriptive norm. In other words, the hunger case suggests that there is nothing automatic about law generating norms among activists or society at large. And moreover, in the hunger case law cannot substitute for the lack of these norms.
Beginning with a discussion on the state of international law surrounding the right to food, this chapter will then turn to a more detailed examination of each of the three explanations provided above for the inability of international law to center activist campaigns on a single actor in the hunger issue space. The chapter will conclude with a discussion of potentially fruitful avenues for future research.
The History of the Right to Food in International Law
The idea that all people have a human right to food, and that the absence of adequate food for all citizens would reflect a failure of the state to meet its obligations to its people, is really quite profound. Indeed, the provision of subsistence goods was, until comparatively recently, the obligation of each individual family unit to themselves, or perhaps the moral obligation of the larger
127 social community to its members, but certainly not the responsibility of the government to all citizens.
The idea that governments should be responsible for hunger can be traced back to 1943 when the United States called for the United Nations Conference on
Food and Agriculture aimed at addressing global hunger and agricultural productivity. Prior to this conference, there had been some discussion of ameliorating hunger within the Mixed Committee on Nutrition in the League of
Nations, but these conversations were largely superficial and did not involve several key states, such as the United States, Brazil, and for a time, the USSR.
Announcement of the United Nations Conference on Food and Agriculture (which became known as the Hot Springs Conference as it was held in Hot Springs,
Virginia), came as a shock to even the United States’ closest ally at the time, the
United Kingdom. The conference opened, according to the Right Honorable Richard
K. Law, head of the British delegation, with a spirit of “absolute bewilderment.”176
President Roosevelt’s “unexpected decision to call an inter-Allied conference…to discuss post-war food problems aroused somewhat mixed feelings at Whitehall.”177
At the time, not even the United States, who called for the conference, had a domestic food program (food stamps had been introduced briefly during the Great
Depression, but were no longer provided by the government).178 It was not at all
176 “The Hot Springs Conference” p. 3. Also, for an extremely helpful overview of the history of the FAO from 1945-1965 see Staples (2006). 177 Ibid, p. 1. UK officials were also particularly offended that the US government had not waited for UK comments and observations regarding this conference before sending out the formal invitation to other states. See: “Telegram No. 1511 to Viscount Halifax,” (31 March 1943). 178 Food stamps were not reintroduced as a nation-wide program in the United States until 1964.
128 clear that governments were necessarily responsible for providing food for their own citizens, let alone worry about hunger outside of their borders.
The result of the Hot Springs Conference was the formation of the FAO. From the first meetings of what would become the flagship UN organization tasked with ameliorating hunger and ensuring the right to food for all citizens, it was unclear exactly which states were ultimately responsible for anti-hunger efforts. Certainly, early dialogues between United Nations countries articulated that ultimately the food situation inside a country was the responsibility of that specific national government. At the same time, however (and sometimes in the same sentence), responsibility was bifurcated with international actors on the one hand and domestic actors on the other.
According to the United States, advanced industrialized countries should
“undertake to assist other nations towards the progressive accomplishment [of securing food for their citizens].” In other words, the amelioration of hunger was not just a responsibility of national governments, but outside (developed) states as well. Moreover, “technical aid from the advanced to the more backward countries and the provision of capital assistance for the improvement of agriculture” will be necessary if the hunger problem is to be adequately addressed. Finally, a “sustained campaign conducted on both national and international plans” would be necessary if
“food adequate for health” were to be achieved.179
179 “Food and Agriculture: A Possible United Nations Approach to Economic Reconstruction,” p. 3.
129 Documents from the UK National Archives paint a similar image of a shared responsibility for the hunger issue between the developed and developing world. In a 1943 statement by the UK Ministry of Food:
All the world knows that mankind’s capacity to produce foodstuffs has not for many years been stretched to its full extent. That capacity has been further increased by technical developments festered during the war. We must find ways and means—and I see no other basis for them than in continuing international action—by which these increasing potentialities are applied to the lifting of standards of consumption in poverty-stricken areas or parts of national communities.180
Perhaps not surprisingly, developing countries who attended the Hot Springs
Conference shared a similar understanding of developed states sharing responsibility for the hunger issue.181
In part, governments understood responsibility for hunger to be shared because hunger was seen primarily as a problem of insufficient agricultural production. If hunger was to be solved by growing more food, the hunger problem became one for science and technology.182 And if ameliorating hunger was a technical problem, it was understandable that countries which had access to the necessary equipment and technology would be expected to assist developing countries in improving their ability to produce food.
Just three years after the initial Hot Springs Conference, with WWII finally at an end, the United Nations began to draft the Universal Declaration for Human
Rights, in which the right to food became a part of Article 25:
180 “Washington Food Talks,” p.3 added. 181 This was especially true of the delegation from Honduras. See: “Memorandum: Presented by the Delegation of the Republic of Honduras to the United Nations Conference on Food and Agriculture, held in Hot Springs, Virginia, United States of America,” (1943), p. 2. 182 On the importance of science linking to agriculture and its ability to ameliorate hunger, see: “Food and Agriculture: A Possible United Nations Approach to Economic Reconstruction,” (1943), p. 2.
130 Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.183
The Universal Declaration, however, was legally non-binding, and the Cold War soon made crafting a single, binding international covenant for human rights difficult, with Communist countries in the East favoring an emphasis on economic and social rights but less enthusiastic about civil and political rights and Western countries uncomfortable with economic and social rights, arguing instead that there should first be a greater emphasis on civil and political rights. Ultimately, the human rights articulated in the Universal Declaration were split into two Covenants: the
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International
Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). Both were adopted in
1966.184
Under Article 2.1 of the ICESCR (which includes the right to food under
Article 11), a signatory State is required to:
….to take steps…to the maximum of its available resources, with a view to achieving progressively the full realization of the rights recognized in the present Covenant.
What the right to food precisely constituted, however, was still quite vague.
At the 1996 World Food Summit (WFS), participants requested that the then UN
High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson provide greater clarity to this right. Under Robinson’s direction and with the help of legal scholar Asbjorn Eide,
183 Universal Declaration for Human Rights. Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, p. 7 (emphasis added). Retrieved online from: http://www.ohchr.org/EN/UDHR/Documents/UDHR_Translations/eng.pdf 184 On the history of the development of the right to food, see: Eide (2005),especially pp. 143-145.
131 who first developed what became known as the “tripartite typology of state obligations,” (i.e. respect, protect, fulfill), the United Nations Committee on
Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (CESCR) adopted General Comment No. 12 (GC
12) in 1999. According to GC 12:
[The] right to adequate food, like any other human right, imposes three types of levels of obligations on States parties: the obligations to respect, to protect and to fulfill.185
The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights explains the meaning of these obligations in Figure 1:
Figure 5.1: Human Rights Obligations under General Comment 12186
185 “Substantive Issues Arising in the Implementation of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights: General Comment 12,” (May 1999), paragraph 15 (emphasis added); Eide (2005), pp. 143-144; On Mary Robinson’s reflections of her (and the UN’s) work to develop the right to food, see: Robinson, “Forward,”(2005), pp. xix-xxi. 186 “Frequently Asked Questions on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights: Fact Sheet No. 33,” (December 2008), p. 11.
132
GC 12 was significant to the development of what the right to food constituted187 and served to elaborate on the different duties governments had vis-à-vis the right to food in international law (namely that they not only have to respect and protect this right, but fulfill it if necessary). GC 12, however, served as a recommendation adopted by the CESCR, which was technically non-binding under international law.
Perhaps the most comprehensive statement on the right to food was developed under the auspices of the FAO. Adopted by member states of the FAO (by consensus) in 2004, the Voluntary Guidelines on the Right to Food (the Guidelines) served to, “provide practical guidance to States in their implementation of the progressive realization of the right to adequate food in the context of national food security.”188 Interestingly, as Hartwig de Haen, former Assistant Director-General of the Economic and Social Department of FAO notes, the Guidelines serve as the “first attempt by governments to interpret an economic right and to recommend actions to be undertaken for its realization.”189 The Guidelines are not, however, legally binding.
As evident in Table 1 (below), in addition to the Universal Declaration, the
ICEPSR, and the Guidelines, the right to food has been included as a subset of other international covenants, including the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) and the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against
Women (CEDAW).
187 See Way (2005), pp.215-216. 188 Voluntary Guidelines to support the progressive realization of the right to adequate food in the context of national food security (2005), p. 9. 189 De Haen (2005), p.xxiii.
133
Table 5.1: International Human Rights Instruments which Include the Right to
Food190
Acronym Full Name Adopted Entered No. of Legally into states binding? Force that have ratified as of May 2014 UNHR Universal 1948 (UN N/A N/A No Declaration of General Human Rights Assembly) ICESCR International 1966 (UN 1976 162 Yes Covenant on General Economic, Social Assembly) and Cultural Rights CEDAW Convention on 1979 (UN 1981 188 Yes the Elimination General of all Forms of Assembly) Discrimination Against Women CRC Convention on 1989 (UN 1990 194 Yes the Rights of the General Child Assembly) N/A Voluntary 2004 N/A N/A No Guidelines to (FAO) Support the Progressive Realization of the Right to Adequate Food in the Context of National Food Security
190 Modified from the helpful chart in Eide and Kracht (2007), p.xxxix.
134
As the discussion above highlights, there is clearly a right to food codified in
(binding) international legal covenants. In terms of international law, in other words, there is a human right to food which national governments are responsible for “progressively realizing.” And yet, many anti-hunger organizations do not use
“rights rhetoric” in their campaigns. Hunger, like many economic and social rights, could be conceptualized in a variety of ways. As discussed in Chapter 4, it can be understood primarily as a human rights violation or as a humanitarian or development problem. International human rights covenants open up the door for anti-hunger organizations to leverage “right to food” language (or frame hunger as the observable implication of a violation of this human right). But it is not essential that this language be used. Activists can wage campaigns in this issue area without reference to any human right at all. And they do.
In the case of civil and political rights (such as torture, suffrage, physical integrity), it is far less common to see international advocacy campaigns that do not reference the violation of a specific human right. In the hunger issue area, however, rights rhetoric is used more sparingly across the network of anti-hunger organizations. Neither Bread for the World nor World Vision, for example, refer to hunger as a violation of a “right to food.” Neither group uses right to food language.
When a senior Gates Foundation official was asked if they used right to food language, she responded, “No…it’s just not the lens that we approach this work
135 with.”191 When asked why the organization did not use “right to food language” one senior Bread for the World employee responded:
Why is that? I don’t, do you think that it’s important that we use it internationally—‘right to food’? Well, we don’t see that, there’s not, there’s not, it’s not a food availability it’s a food access issue. Right? And so I don’t know if there is a rights issue there. I think those translate to gender issues, sociological issues….192
The reasons for why anti-hunger organizations did not use “rights rhetoric” or conceptualize hunger as a human rights issue are varied. Some organizations view rights language as too politically sensitive. Others, like the representative of Bread for the World quoted above, genuinely did not see hunger as a rights issue. The right to food may very well be codified in international law, but this does not automatically translate into an understanding among all activists that food is
(really) a human right. And if an organization does not view hunger as a human rights issue, it should not be surprising that international law regarding the right to food is not used to center advocacy on a single actor as responsible or to blame for violations of this right.
When “Rights” Have Little To Do With Law
While some anti-hunger organizations do not use rights rhetoric in their campaigns at all, others, like Oxfam, will champion a “right to food” and understand themselves as doing “rights-based” work, but pay little mind to international human rights law.
191 Interview with senior Gates Foundation employee 5/24/2013 192 Interview with senior Bread for the World employee 2/19/2013
136 This was especially apparent in discussion with one Oxfam America executive, as she spoke of the relatively recent turn towards a rights framework within Oxfam and the little faith she put in international human rights law:
Oxfam America Executive: ….If you go from an organization which in the 1990’s which is a relatively short period of time didn’t know rights from their elbow,
Me: [laughs] Though food has been a right since 1948. And Oxfam has been around since ….
Oxfam America Executive: Food has been a right since, I’m sorry, since,
Me: Well, legally, since 1948, in the UN Declaration,
Oxfam America Executive: We’re not that legal. I mean, the reason, honestly, honestly, the reason we do rights- based work is, I walk into every room….I go in to any place anywhere and just say, ‘Listen. I’m not going to tell you anything about the law. Who in here has the right to enough basic food to eat everyday so that they can live with dignity?’ Everybody. ‘What convention is it in?’ ‘I haven’t a clue, but I have the right!’ That’s what you need to know, OK? I don’t care if you know the name of the convention, I need you to know that the people we serve have that right and somebody is responsible….Sorry, I only have so much time. I’m a lawyer and I only have so much time, because, partly I don’t have that much faith in the international legal enforcement of human rights.193
Oxfam’s turn to a “rights approach” is relatively new, corresponding again to the reality in many anti-hunger organizations of non-rights frameworks around hunger in the first place. When the organization did turn towards such a rights
193 Interview with Oxfam America Executive 5/14/2013
137 approach (as discussed in Chapter 4), they did not choose to root their understanding of the right to food in human rights law. Instead, they claim the right to food is based largely on moral grounds, not legal ones. And these moral grounds do not single out national governments as solely responsible or to blame for hunger.
Rather, this executive noted above, “somebody is responsible.”
As discussed in depth in Chapter 4, Oxfam has focused much of its current efforts in to its Behind the Brands campaign, where they target transnational corporations as to blame for hunger. And blaming a corporation, according to
Oxfam, is seen as entirely consistent with a “rights approach.” When asked what a
“right to food” meant, the Oxfam America executive quoted above said:
Oxfam America Executive: It means that you are capable of identifying who is responsible, talking about the nature of their responsibilities, and doing something about it.
Me: So, who is responsible?
Oxfam America Executive: I’ve just told you.
Me: Lots of people, then?
Oxfam America Executive: Yeah, and you hold them all responsible…You launch Behind the Brands to hold corporations accountable. You launch national campaigns to hold governments accountable. You call out foundations like the Gates foundation even though they give you money…If you can’t blame anyone, you’re not rights-based.194
In our human rights literature, we often understand human rights as legitimated through international law and for this reason, to whomever that law
194 Interview with Oxfam America Executive 5/14/2013
138 ascribes responsibility we would assume activists would do the same.195 Here, however, we have an executive within Oxfam America, with a background in law, who does not attribute the “right to food” to a human rights legal framework, and a corresponding campaign within the entire Oxfam confederation (Behind the
Brands) which attributes blame for hunger to corporations.
This is not to say that international human rights law is never referenced in any anti-hunger campaigns. FIAN, as discussed in Chapter 4, will regularly cite international human rights law to legitimate their campaigns which target national governments. They are equally comfortable, however, with blaming transnational corporations or outside states that fund, to reference the example given in Chapter
4, tree plantations in Mozambique who displace peasant farmers for hunger.196
Similarly, Amnesty International certainly cites international human rights law in their economic and social rights campaigns. But they go above and beyond the attribution of responsibility to national governments in these covenants to claim responsibility of a great number of actors as well. As discussed in Chapter 3, they understand that “Responsibility for denial of economic, social, and cultural rights frequently lies not only with governments but also with individuals, groups, and
195 Indeed, we take as “human rights” that which has been codified in international law. Law, in other words is the authoritative voice in classifying what is, and what is not, a human right. Moreover, we expect the value of law to be in providing activists (and outside states) a public statement of commitment by governments that can then be used to hold these actors accountable. In this way, ratifying human rights treaties is seen as incurring sovereignty costs, as it allows for the state behavior to be constrained by outside actors. See Simmons (2009); Goodliffe and Hawkins (2006); Moravscik (2000).
196 See: Urgent Action-Mozambique: Swedish development cooperation violates the rights of peasants in Niassa province. FIAN International (website). Retrieved online from: http://www.fian.org/get-involved/take-action/urgent-actions/urgent-action-mozambique-niassa- province
139 enterprises.”197 International human rights law, in other words, provides one perspective on who is to blame for hunger, but is not the sole authoritative voice on the subject to anti-hunger organizations. Interestingly, even the former UN High
Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson claims that:
Human rights will not provide all of the answers, however. Some of the dilemmas we face today present moral and ethical questions which human rights standards help to identify but not always resolve. Consider, for example, the role of the food and agricultural industry. The actors involved in addressing hunger and access to food are not only states but also multinational corporations.198
Despite the existence of international legal frameworks which attribute responsibility to national governments for right to food violations, responsibility and blame for hunger continues to be shared across many actors, even among rights-based anti-hunger activists.199
Why might groups claim to have a “rights” focus and yet not necessarily legitimate their campaigns in international human rights law? Or restrict their campaigns to targeting actors to which binding international law ascribes responsibility? The Oxfam executive made passing reference to a lack of faith in any enforcement of human rights law, and this certainly is a concern. In the following section we will discuss continued debates over the scope of what the right to food even constitutes. Certainly it is difficult to enforce a right when the exact definition
197 Human Rights for Human Dignity: A Primer on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (2005), p. 43. 198 Robinson, “Forward,” (2005), p. xx. 199 Interestingly, however, it is not that international law, per se, is seen as useless in combatting hunger. Indeed, many NGOs were actively involved in the construction and promotion of the “Norms on the Responsibilities of Transnational Corporations and Other Business Enterprises with Regard to Human Rights,” as discussed in Chapter 3, though the “Norms” failed to gain the support of the Commission on Human Rights. Had they received support, however, they might have yielded a binding treaty. Moreover, FIAN invested significant resources in the construction of the Voluntary Guidelines on the Right to Adequate Food. On the “Norms” initiative, see: Ruggie (2013), p. xvii.
140 of that right is still a matter of debate, and when there is weak monitoring at the international level.
At a more foundational level, however, the relative lack of use of international human rights law in anti-hunger campaigns reflects again our discussion in Chapter 3 of the lack of a prescriptive anti-hunger norm. There is no consensus on a single actor as responsible for this problem. And law, moreover, has not provided an authoritative answer to the question of responsibility. Human rights law, in other words, does not necessarily create human rights norms, codify existing norms, nor can it substitute for a lack of a prescriptive norm in centering advocacy campaigns on a single target. Activists continue to construct campaigns blaming a diverse array of actors as there is no common consensus, despite the attribution of responsibility to national governments in human rights law, regarding a single appropriate target for hunger campaigns.
Mary Robinson’s quote above highlights one reason for this: there are simply more actors that may be, to use her words, “involved in addressing hunger and access to food” than national governments. If international law does not implicate all actors that activists (or societies) believe may be involved in both causing and solving a particular rights violation, then it will not be the sole authoritative voice in legitimizing campaign targets.
Moreover, as was discussed in previous chapters, campaigns against hunger continue to confront questions of capabilities. If activists do not believe a national government is capable of bettering the food situation in their country, they may be less likely to target them, even though they are responsible under international law.
141 Former Secretary-General of FIAN, Michael Windfuhr, notes the difficulty “of how to adequately measure the effective use of resources by a government.”200 For this reason, in FIAN, “there is a slight over-representation of victim groups that suffer from violations of respect- and protect- bound obligations” but not necessarily the final state obligation (under General Comment 12) to fulfill.201 According to
Windfuhr:
The proof of a violation of fulfillment-bound obligations is therefore more difficult, as it involves potentially complicated resource-and policy discussions, including, for example, the burden of proof that the government could in fact spend more resources for these groups than it actually does.202
In the case of economic and social rights like food, activists find themselves making the, somewhat subjective, determination regarding state capability to ensure this right.203
International human rights law does not lead anti-hunger organizations to centralize pressure on a single actor (the national government to whom responsibility is ascribed in law) in part because some anti-hunger organizations still do not see hunger as a human rights issue (World Vision, Bread for the World,
Gates Foundation) and in part because those that do conceptualize hunger as a rights violation root their understanding of these rights outside of a strict legal
200 Windfuhr (2005), p. 346. 201 Windfuhr (2005), pp.340-341. 202 Windfuhr (2005), p. 341, emphasis added. Windfuhr also notes that “Groups suffering from violations of the fulfillment-bound obligation are often weakly organized and unable to document their cases” (p.341). 203 While states certainly require resources to ensure civil and political rights within their borders, in the case of economic and social rights, international law was written to permit the “progressive realization” of these rights, noting however that states should use the “maximum of available resources” to do so. As Windfuhr (2005) notes, however, this clause (from Article 2 of the ICESCR) “makes it even more complex to assess if a government has fulfilled its obligation or not.” (p. 346, fn 27).
142 interpretation in international law, as other actors, notably corporations, are understood to be meaningful targets as well (Oxfam and FIAN). Additionally, activist groups like FIAN may find the burden of proof too steep to prove governments have failed to meet their fulfillment obligation under law.
Practical Concerns with Definitions and Justiciability
Activists also face very practical concerns when considering the usefulness
(or not) of international human rights law around food. What, precisely, does the right to food constitute? Since the right is to be only “progressively realized,” according to international law, how much “progress” is sufficient to show that governments are not in violation of “respecting, protecting, fulfilling” this right? Is the right to food judiciable? Should it be?204
Debates surrounding these questions were perhaps nowhere more apparent than in recent attempts at crafting the Voluntary Guidelines on the Right to Food.
In an effort to further operationalize the right to food and provide greater clarity to this right, the FAO, with the support of a few key civil society partners (including
FIAN) and states (notably Switzerland, Norway and Germany, with the active support of the G-77),205 facilitated a series of workshops from 2002-2004 to finalize wording on the Guidelines.
On the one hand, a gesture such as this signals at least some desire of participants to utilize a human rights approach to food, or else there would be no
204 For an excellent collection of essays on legal and political issues surrounding the right to food, see: Eide and Kracht (2005, 2007). See also, Dowell-Jones (2004). 205Oshaug (2005), especially p.267.
143 interest in hashing out specific guidelines on the subject. On the other hand, however, the two years of deliberations over these guidelines made apparent the very real disagreement among states about what the right to food constitutes and how it should be obtained (and by whom).
In terms of definition, the United States made clear in the lead-up to the negotiations of the Guidelines that they took a rather narrow interpretation of with the “right to food” constituted:
The United States believes that the issue of adequate food can only be viewed in the context of the right to a standard of living adequate for health and well-being, as set forth in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which includes the opportunity to secure food, clothing, housing, medical care and necessary social services. Further, the United States believes that the attainment of the right to an adequate standard of living is a goal or aspiration to be realized progressively that does not give rise to any international obligation or any domestic legal entitlement, and does not diminish the responsibilities of national governments towards their citizens. Additionally, the United States understands the right of access to food to mean the opportunity to secure food, and not guaranteed entitlement.206
Or, as put more bluntly in a recently leaked diplomatic cable from the US
Mission to the UN Agencies in Rome regarding their negotiations in the penultimate drafting session of the Guidelines:
The U.S. delegation was successful in restraining attempts to characterize such a right as entitlement or in defining it in a way that would be at variance with the long-standing USG position—that such ‘rights’ are to be progressively realized by a State and are non-justiciable in nature.207
206 “Annex II of the Report of the World Food Summit, Five Years Later: US Reservation,” (2002). 207 Interesting, too, that ‘rights’ is in quotation marks, as to suggest that the right to food isn’t a “real” human right. See: “Right to Food: Intergovernmental Working Group Makes Progress on Voluntary Guidelines,” (20 July 2004).
144 That the United States wanted to ensure that the right to food was neither justiciable nor seen as an individual entitlement is not especially surprising. After all, the US has yet to ratify the ICESCR, rejects any legal standing to General
Comment 12, and continues to stress the voluntary nature of the Guidelines themselves. What is more intriguing is that a state such as Canada, who has ratified
ICESCR, also opposed reference to language used in General Comment 12 and rejected the justiciability of the right to food.208
There is, moreover, the very practical challenge of enforcement. At the most basic level, it is still extremely challenging for anyone to claim their right to food through any international body, as economic and social rights lacked an individual complaint procedure in the Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights
(CESCR) until May 2013, when the Optional Protocol went into force. In other words, individuals who were unable to feed themselves and their families had no legal grounds to submit any formal complaints to the CESCR to review state behavior or policies. Even now, the complaint procedure is limited in its usefulness, as only individuals in states that have signed onto the Optional Protocol to the International
Covenant to Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights can submit a complaint, and only for violations that occurred after May 2013 where the CESCR finds the given state in question has exhausted all domestic legal processes.209
There are very real practical challenges, therefore, to leveraging international law in the case of the right to food. There remains uncertainty regarding the scope of the right itself (particularly among the US, Canada, and EU),
208 Oshaug (2005), pp.268-269 and fn 17 209 For an excellent essay on the need for the Optional Protocol, see: Alston (1991).
145 countries like Canada and the US remain opposed to the right to food being justiciable, and international mechanisms for expressing individual grievances are limited.
Conclusion
We spend a considerable amount of time in the human rights literature focusing on the importance of law and courts for addressing human rights abuses.210
The case of the right to food suggests that such venues might not be the best suited for addressing violations of all human rights. Economic and social rights more broadly may share many common attributes with the hunger case: they are issue areas which activists can choose to frame in non-rights ways (i.e. as development problems), making human rights law less salient; international legal covenants surrounding economic and social rights place a higher burden of proof on activists as they try to document cases of violation (i.e. documenting that states are using the
“maximum available resources” to “progressively realize” the right in question, which requires judgment calls about state capacity); and economic and social rights covenants continue to be more politically contentious than civil and political rights at the level of definition of the right and whether or not the right is even justiciable.
Moreover, the hunger case highlights the disconnect between law and norms and the inability of law to substitute for a prescriptive norm in this issue space.
There are international laws that attribute responsibility to national governments
210 See, for example: Sikkink (2011).
146 for the problem of hunger. And while there is debate over the what the right precisely means, it is clear, at least in international human rights law, that the state is ultimately responsible for hunger within its borders. Despite this attribution of responsibility, we see active attempts by anti-hunger organizations to construct campaigns against a diverse array of actors (corporations, outside states, price speculators, etc.). As Chapter 3 discussed, there is clearly no prescriptive anti- hunger norm that serves to center responsibility on a single actor and international law in this issue space has neither generated one nor can it substitute for the lack of one.
The relative non-use of existing international human rights law in this issue space begs a number of questions for future research: Are there economic and social rights for which international human rights law does serve to mobilize activist campaigns much as the literature assumes it does for civil and political rights campaigns? If so, how do these economic and social rights differ from the right to food? Why might activists find value in leveraging human rights law for some economic and social rights but not others? Or is the relationship between international human rights law and activist campaigns comparable across all economic and social rights?
147 CHAPTER 6:
Conclusion
This dissertation served to map out the international advocacy space around hunger, provide a model (the “buckshot model”) to describe this space, and examined how it was possible that international anti-hunger campaigns would behave differently from civil and political rights campaigns already documented in the literature. Anti-hunger activists are working in an environment without a prescriptive norm around hunger. This lack of a norm is both constitutive of the diffusion of blame in this issue space but also makes less possible certain campaign outcomes (namely the centralized pressure on one target actor we have come to expect in the transnational advocacy literature). Hunger’s placement between two different analytic frameworks (development and rights) makes the construction of such a prescriptive norm difficult, and for anti-hunger organizations with in-country missions there are strong incentives not to blame national governments for fear of jeopardizing the safety and security of staff and active programs.
Moreover, international human rights law has not generated a prescriptive norm in this issue space. While in the case of civil and political rights campaigns activists often call upon international law in legitimizing one central actor on which to target advocacy campaigns, advocates reference law far more sparingly in the hunger issue area. Chapter 5 provided three reasons why, in the hunger case, international human rights law functions differently than it does for civil and political rights campaigns: 1) regardless of any mention of the right to food in
148 international law, some activists still do not perceive hunger as a human rights violation; 2) when activists do conceptualize food as a human right, they often consider this right in moral but not legal terms; and 3) ongoing disputes between states over the definition of the right to food and its justiciability make leveraging international human rights law challenging for anti-hunger activists.
Why does it matter if hunger campaigns “buckshot” instead of “boomerang” or “spiral”? The “boomerang” and “spiral” models are marketed very clearly as instances of campaign success. When campaigns fit these models, in other words, it is expected that the outcome of transnational advocacy is that the “violating” actor changes behavior and the human right is realized. These are happy stories.
In contrast to the boomerang and spiral models, blame is not centralized on a single actor in the buckshot model, as actors fan out blame among multiple campaign targets. Can blaming and shaming effectively work as an activist strategy if blame is diffuse? Human rights activists have expressed concern that it might not.
Returning to the words of Kenneth Roth, former Executive Director of Human Rights
Watch:
Although there are various forms of public outrage, only certain types are sufficiently targeted to shame officials into action. That is, the public might be outraged about a state of affairs--for example, poverty in a region--but have no idea whom to blame. Or it might feel that blame is dispersed among a wide variety of actors. In such cases of diffuse responsibility, the stigma attached to any person, government, or institution is lessened, and with it the power of international human rights organizations to effect change. Similarly, stigma weakens even in the case of a single violator if the remedy to a violation-- what the government should do to correct it--is unclear.211
211 Roth (2004), p. 67. Emphasis added
149
Roth articulates well the challenges that activists face when there is no prescriptive norm present. When it is unclear who ought to do what it may be difficult for activists to effectively shame a target into compliance. Furthermore, in the absence of such a norm, the burden of proof to make a compelling case to their respective audiences is high, as activists cannot rely on what Roth calls the “stigma” already attached to a specific actor through the prescriptive norm. We saw in
Chapter 5 the challenge FIAN in particular faced to provide enough evidence to sufficiently make the case that governments were failing to fulfill their right to food obligations. Our extant models assumed centralized blame on a single target actor, but now that we know there are instances where this blame is diffuse it opens up avenues for new study into the effects of this diffusion on campaign success or failure. As Roth articulated from his experience as Executive Director of one of the most dominant human rights NGOs, there are good reasons to believe the diffusion of blame makes successful shaming more difficult and ultimately less effective.
Moreover, the lack of a prescriptive norm which enables the buckshotting of campaigns across multiple targets may pose challenges for activist efforts at maintaining anti-hunger programs even once they have been successfully implemented. Brazil, for example, experienced an impressive reduction in malnutrition domestically after President Lula da Silva launched his signature Bolsa
Familia conditional cash transfer program (and his related Fome Zero (“Zero
150 Hunger”) program.212 Despite the success of this program, however, public support in Brazil is beginning to wane, dropping from 81% of popular approval in 2010 to
75% in 2014. Support among individuals who have received post-secondary education is particularly low---with less than 50% supporting the Bolsa Familia program in 2014.213 Interestingly, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff is expected to only narrowly defeat her opponents in the upcoming presidential election, as “more
Brazilians disapprove of her policies in reducing poverty (53 percent versus 41 percent), the singular area of achievement by her Workers' Party since it was led to power a decade ago by labour leader Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.”214 Despite the fact that there is strong evidence that Bolsa Familia is a remarkably effective program in reducing hunger and poverty, it is facing growing opposition domestically. If there is no viable prescriptive norm in society ascribing responsibility to national governments for the right to food, it should be less surprising that even effective social safety net programs may struggle to gain (and retain) popular support. This may be problematic for activists down the line, as programs to combat hunger require substantial resources (and the approval of relevant domestic populations that these resources should be tasked to this purpose). Without a clear norm linking government responsibility to the amelioration of hunger, sustaining such initiatives may prove very difficult for activists.
212 In fact, Brazil met the MDG goal 1C (to halve the number of hungry by 2015) several years ahead of schedule. Additionally, stunting rates among children under the age of five dropped from 19.9% in 1989 to 6.8% in 2006. See: Lutter, Chaparro, & Munoz (2010), p. 23.
213 Brazilian Discontent Ahead of World Cup (2014), pp.12-16.
214 Boadle (2014, June 19), p. 2
151 The theoretical takeaways from this project may apply to more issue areas than the hunger case. For rights that share similar characteristics (i.e. also sit at the intersection of development and rights frameworks, encompass activist groups that retain on the ground missions, and focus on an area in international law that is comparatively rarely leveraged by activists), it would be reasonable to expect that these rights would also lack of a viable prescriptive norm and be characterized by a corresponding “buckshot” pattern of advocacy. Economic and social rights
(especially rights like health care and housing) are likely to share these characteristics with the hunger issue area.
This project, moreover, calls attention to the divide between civil and political rights campaigns and economic and social rights campaigns. How should we think about these two types of rights? Why might we expect economic and social rights campaigns to behave differently from their civil and political counterparts?
Are differences in their campaign trajectories rooted in inherent differences in a given type of rights? Or something else entirely?
We do know that in practice economic and social rights are treated differently, by states, activists, and even UN organizations. In 1993, at the Vienna
World Conference on Human Rights, the Committee on Economic, Social, and
Cultural Rights issued a statement that:
The shocking reality….is that states and the international community as a whole continue to tolerate all too often breaches of economic, social, and cultural rights which, if they occurred in relation to civil and political rights, would provoke expressions of horror and outrage and would lead to concerted calls for immediate remedial action. In effect, despite the rhetoric, violations of civil and political rights continue to be treated as though they
152 were far more serious, and more patently intolerable, than massive and direct denials of economic, social, and cultural rights.215
It would be easy to think that the reason why economic and social rights are treated differently than civil and political rights could be found in some inherent difference between the two types of rights. Perhaps economic and social rights are just inherently more complex, or inherently more difficult and expensive to realize than civil and political rights. After all, as a short hand, scholars often refer to civil and political rights as “negative rights” (implying that they simply require states to refrain from acting in a particular way, such as refrain from torturing their citizens, infringing on an individual’s freedom of religion, etc.) and economic and social rights as “positive rights” (requiring states to engage in action, such as provide education, food, or shelter). Engaging in positive action certainly sounds more complex and costly than refraining from action. And yet, as discussed throughout this dissertation, and explored more fully in Shue (1980) and Beetham (1995), all rights, whether economic and social or civil and political are costly to realize. There is, to look at one example, nothing cheap or easy about ensuring free and fair elections. The United States spent over $35 million on “elections support” in Iraq alone in 2011, not including a host of broader (and far more expensive)
“democratization” efforts.216 Similarly, when fulfilling civil and political rights may well lead to the collapse of a given authoritarian regime, it would be foolish to say that ensuring these rights would be easy. Allowing citizens to vote in legitimate
215 UN Doc E/C.12/1992/2, p.83. As quoted in Beetham (1995), p. 41.
216 http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2011/dec/15/war-iraq-costs-us-lives
153 elections, for instance, might be one of the most costly choices a regime could make, as it might threaten its very existence. The closer we examine any human right, the more likely we are to see how challenging and costly its realization would be. The right to food is difficult and expensive to protect, fulfill, and defend, but so are all human rights.
Instead of arguing that it is hunger’s relative cost or complexity that makes its campaigns behave the way they do, this project looks at the lack of a prescriptive norm in enabling anti-hunger campaigns to “buckshot” instead of “spiral” or
“boomerang,” and this lack of a norm is explained by competing analytic frameworks around the problem, strategic interests brought upon by the need to protect on the ground missions by advocacy organizations, and the inability of international human rights law to generate a prescriptive norm for this issue area.
These are characteristics that are more likely to be found in the case of economic and social rights as, for instance, these rights frequently cross development and human rights frameworks and struggle to protect active on the ground missions.
While it is my hope that this study has contributed in meaningful ways to our theories of international human rights advocacy and to our empirical knowledge of international hunger campaigns, it has also raised a number of important questions worthy of future study. To human rights and transnational advocacy scholars, this study highlights the need for additional research on economic and social rights and their advocacy campaigns. International anti-hunger campaigns do not fit the models expected in our literature but to what other rights campaigns does the
154 alterative “buckshot model” apply? Moreover, can issue areas transition from a
“buckshot” to “boomerang” model of advocacy? If so, how? It may be the case that in the evolution of advocacy campaigns, issue areas “buckshot” (when there is no prescriptive norm present) before they “boomerang” (when there is a viable prescriptive norm). Preliminary research (albeit on a more localized level of domestic activism in the US) indicates this to be true for the anti-HIV/AIDS issue space, where in the early years of campaigns it was unclear to activists (and society) who to target in their campaigns as well as of what the problem was an instance.
According to sociologist Josh Gamson, who conducted deep participant-observation research with ACT UP San Francisco from September 1988-February 1989, “ACT UP members often [had] trouble finding their ‘enemies.’”217 The state, pharmaceutical corporations, the mass media, and even medical research were targeted.218
Overtime, however, campaigns seemed to focus on just two primary targets, pharmaceutical corporations and developed states, and once activism was more focused, campaigns were successful in commanding significant funding.219 A structured comparison between anti-HIV/AIDS campaigns and anti-hunger
217 Gamson (1989), p. 352 218 Ibid, p. 354 219 As of 2012, the US government provided $6.4 billion in international assistance for HIV/AIDS relief while hunger received significantly less assistance (approximately $3.5 billion), though HIV/AIDS affects only 4% of the number of people globally who are affected by hunger. HIV/AIDS campaigns have certainly been more successful than their hunger counterparts in securing funding, but to what extent do advocacy strategies explain this variation? We do not yet have an answer. For funding data on HIV/AIDS assistance see “The Global HIV/AIDS Epidemic,” (10 October 2013), p. 2. The hunger funding statistic of $3.5 billion is amalgamated from data from a couple different years, so caution should be used in seeing this as a precise figure. This data includes estimates of $968.2 million (Feed the Future), an average of $2.2 billion in int'l food aid (Ho 2010), estimates of $225 million in dues to FAO standard budget and $80 million in FAO voluntary contributions. Neither hunger nor HIV data include private foundation or NGO funding (from non-state grants). This data is entirely for international efforts and does not include domestic spending on anti-hunger efforts.
155 campaigns could provide useful variation over time (as HIV/AIDS moves from fragmented to centralized advocacy campaigns) and variation across issue areas in order to explore how issue areas may move towards centralized advocacy and the role of prescriptive norms in this process.
To constructivist scholars, this dissertation highlighted the importance of prescriptive norms in advocacy campaigns and argued that the lack of such a norm can make centralized pressure by activists on a single actor less likely. The human rights literature often discusses “human rights norms” as though there either was a norm that surrounded all human rights collectively or each human right individually, but the hunger case begs caution on this point. Not all human rights have prescriptive norms. Chapter 3 deconstructed the key component parts of norms, arguing that their power is not in a vague sense of appropriateness but instead in ascribing a specific appropriate action to a specific actor. In the constructivist literature, this important function of norms is often overlooked and the concept of a norm is stretched to cover principled beliefs or moral sentiments.
Aside from the risk of stretching the concept of the norm so far as to render it meaningless, the conflation of prescriptive norms with principled beliefs makes it possible to ignore the very difficult task of linking appropriate behavior to a specific appropriate actor. In the case of hunger, and likely other economic and social rights, constructing prescriptive norms is extremely challenging.
As the constructivist literature continues to probe questions like why some norms affect policy change while others do not, it is worth asking if we are really
156 comparing like cases. A society (such as the United States) may believe that everyone ought to have housing, for instance, but be unclear about who should do what about it. That same society may believe that universal primary education is morally good and believe that good governments ought to provide free primary education to all of its citizens. Moral principles are at play in both issue areas, but they do not both have viable prescriptive norms. If we conflate moral principles with norms we would fail to understand why, in the case of education, activists may have an easier time isolating and shaming a “norm violator” (the national government) than they would in shaming the same government for failing to provide, for instance, adequate low-income housing.
For legal scholars, this dissertation documented an important issue area for which international law is often not leveraged by NGOs and activists to legitimize a specific campaign target. Certainly, there are some instances where it is used
(namely by FIAN), but as Chapters 4 and 5 detailed, often anti-hunger campaigns refrain from any mention of international human rights law.
An important value of international human rights law is generally understood to be in providing a clear public commitment by national governments such that outside states, activists, and citizen groups can then use this commitment to shame these governments into compliance, or rally outside states to support economic sanctions. On its own, international human rights law, whether for civil and political rights in the ICCPR or economic, social, and cultural rights in the
ICESCR is relatively weak in terms of enforcement, at least within its own
157 institutional bodies.220 In order for international human rights law to be effective, activist campaigns are essential. But if international human rights law is not leveraged by activists, what then is its purpose? Are there instances of economic and social rights where international human rights law is used to justify focused pressure on national governments across advocacy organizations? If so, how did law become a legitimizing tool for activists with these rights but not others (like the right to food)?
Finally, there has been increasing interest among human rights lawyers and some activists in constructing international law ascribing responsibility to private corporations for human rights. Early efforts have included the construction of the
“Norms on the Responsibilities of Transnational Corporations and Other Business
Enterprises with Regard to Human Rights” as well as the "Guiding Principles on
Business and Human Rights: Implementing the United Nations 'Protect, Respect and
Remedy' Framework," spearheaded by political scientist John Ruggie, both of which were discussed in Chapter 3.221 To date, no legally binding frameworks have been adopted, but this movement warrants additional theorizing from within the legal community and human rights scholars more broadly. What are the implications for economic and social rights if responsibility is bifurcated in international law
220 In 2003, Libya was even elected chair to the UN Commission on Human Rights, despite a track record of significant human rights abuses. While the UN General Assembly eventually removed Libya from the UN Human Rights Council (the successor to the Commission on Human Rights) in 2011, this removal was “unprecedented.” While some regional human rights councils (notably the ECHR) have greater enforcement powers, such powers are comparatively weak at the ICCPR and ICESCR. On the “unprecedented move” to suspend Libya from the Human Rights Council see: “General Assembly suspends Libya from Human Rights Council,” (1 March 2011). 221 On the attribution of responsibility to corporations for human rights, see: Ruggie (2013); Mantilla (2009).
158 between the public and private spheres? How might the attribution of responsibility to the private sector for economic and social rights affect efforts to name and shame national governments? Does attributing responsibility to the private sector reduce government obligation to ensuring human rights? Might it provide governments with an actor on whom to credibly deflect such responsibility?
Additional research on both the causes and implications of ascribing responsibility to the private sector for human rights protection is needed.
In the end, no single study can definitively explain the ins and outs of international advocacy around any single issue area, let alone one as complex as global hunger. My more modest aim with this dissertation has been to use this terrain to highlight assumptions in our human rights literature (especially about the nature of blame in advocacy campaigns) which may not hold across all human rights, to provide an alternative model of advocacy, and to explain how it is possible that international anti-hunger campaigns look the way they do. In doing so, I was confronted with far more questions than I expected and certainly than I could provide answers to, many of which I outlined above. It is my hope that this study encourages future research into these important questions and that more political scientists will see the case of hunger (and economic and social rights more broadly) as valuable empirical domains worthy of further research.
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177 Appendix
Spiral Model (1999)222
222 Risse and Sikkink (1999), p. 20.
178