Multidisciplinary methods in the service of more effective advocacy
CESR is currently working in collaboration with the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), one of the UK’s leading think tanks on international development, to devise inter-disciplinary methods for monitoring economic and social rights.
CESR’s Methodology Project draws on the analytical tools used by development economists and social scientists and explores how they can inform the analysis of international human rights legal standards.
The project seeks to integrate quantitative analysis of economic data into the toolkit of methods through which human rights advocates can hold governments to their obligations to use the maximum resources available to them to progressively realize economic and social rights.
ODI research fellow Edward Anderson is CESR’s lead consultant on the methodology project. The work will be guided by an advisory committee composed of development economists, human rights practitioners, statisticians and other experts with extensive experience of research and analysis related to issues such as poverty, inequality, education and health. The committee includes prominent academic and practitioners from different fields, such as Frances Stewart (Director of the Centre for Research on Inequality, Human Security and Ethnicity at Oxford University), Christopher Colclough (Professor of the Economics of Education at Cambridge and founding Director of UNESCO’s Global Monitoring Report on Education for All), Adam Przeworski (Professor of Politics at New York University); Sakiko Fukuda-Parr (Research Fellow at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and former director of the Human Development Reports) and Philip Alston (Professor of Law at New York University and former Chair of the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights).
The first phase of the project will involve the elaboration of the conceptual framework, the definition of the proposed methodological tools, and a review of relevant literature. In a second phase, a set of countries in the global south will be the focus of preliminary case studies carried out in collaboration with local researchers and institutes to assess the utility of the methodology in different contexts.
The methodology project will lay the foundation for CESR’s program of research and advocacy covering specific economic and social rights issues in countries across the globe.
