Chapter 2: Building understanding of gender and rights I: The roots of rights 

This chapter begins from the position that rights-based approaches to development hold enormous potential to make development work for poor people. This is because they clarify the principle of social justice and help shift the focus to the people most excluded and discriminated against. But in order to fulfil this potential, particularly in relation to advancing the rights of women, some of the ways that rights have been conceptualised in the past need to be addressed and re-worked.

 The chapter explores some of the reasons that rights have not always furthered equality between women and men – the ‘missing links’ which have led to slippages in equal rights objectives. It discusses women’s position in social relations of power, why these are relevant to rights work and also the historical reasons why they have not always been sufficiently taken into account. Understanding the basis of challenges to rights work which forwards gender equality is important if we are to correctly diagnose specific difficulties in advancing women’s rights alongside men’s and identify how these difficulties can be addressed in practice.