It is not incumbent upon you to finish the task, but neither are you free to absolve yourself from it. Abraham Lincoln said: The probability that we may fail in the struggle ought not to deter us from the support of a cause we believe to be just. (cited by Michael Marmot)
Two things are indispensable here:
A. Leadership
1. Effective human rights (HR) action has a particular set of preconditions.
Coming from different organizations, contributors to this action need to explicitly identify their common interests, agree on a specific set of core actions and agree to invest the needed quality time and a modicum of their own resources (human, material, financial and organizational). These three conditions do not arise spontaneously; they are made to happen only with effective leadership –a leadership that can ultimately ‘flip the script’ to consolidate concerted and ever-expanding HR work.
2. Leaders may well be born with certain personality traits, but they can develop a range of additional skills to become more effective. A leadership team will be more effective if it draws upon the range of strengths from the different leaders. Leaders in HR work have to function efficiently across different domains: As committed advocates they need to fight for equity and justice using leadership in all its forms including personal leadership and team leadership –and do so at several levels (institutional, community, professional).
3. Their challenge is to find and project a common voice that can ultimately exert influence. This, departing from what impacts people in their every day lives so as to get them willingly organized and mobilized for the HR cause. (Solutions have to engage people that are to be represented, i.e., promoting a “let’s do it together” attitude).
4. To break a misunderstanding here, let us say that being soft-spoken (but firm) in this endeavor can be powerful.
B. Networking
-Networking is based on a communion of responsibilities and interests between individuals and groups connected by the ideal of justice, human rights and a notion of cooperation.
-When it comes to complex systemic challenges, any single organization is normally too small to have a meaningful impact. (O. Schrammer)
Other than clear and committed leadership, HR work further requires active efforts to network:
5. For HR networks to work and to be enduring, key traits to pursue are:
i) Clear governance agreements (setting objectives, identifying functions, defining membership structures, and setting decision-making norms and conflict resolution procedures).
ii) Since the larger the numbers involved in the network the greater its political clout, representativeness is key and the ultimate source of legitimacy and, therefore, of influence.
iii) The quality of the HR evidence used affects both credibility and legitimacy.
iv) Intelligently packaging of the HR evidence is crucial for effective communication.
v) Sustainability and staying power, especially during adversity, is vital since persistence over a period of time is required to influence HR-relevant policy.
vi) Key individuals in the network can boost policy influence. [But beware, network players within can dominate in proportion to their economic strength (or Anglo-Saxon and male base…)].
vii) Informal links can be as critical as formal ones in achieving network objectives.
viii) Complementing existing HR advocacy structures rather than duplicating them makes networks more effective.
ix) Information communication technologies have been recognized as one of the main drivers of the expansion of networks, facilitating cross-border communications and enabling convergent links with other ‘sister’ networks (social, economic, political, women’s, environmental). (Perkin and Court, 2005)
6. Moreover:
x) Staff continuity is key.
xi) Networks embarking in mostly ‘anti’ causes are no good; they must also ‘stand for’ something –and something concrete, perhaps in the form of an explicit shared platform with explicit benchmarks to monitor and achieve over time.
xii) Institutional inertia or constraints of network members are an important blockage …they need to be reversed/removed, the sooner the better.
xiii) Delayed or absence of needed decision-making plays into the hands of formal or informal opposing forces. (David Woodward)
7. Finally, HR networks have, as one of their primary goals, to proactively (or better pre-emptively) counter the prevailing negative attitude towards HR that is justified by HR opponents by asserting that international HR networks pursue a-bunch-of-moral-principles-that-are-not-legally-binding and thus not a legal obligation. (CETIM)
8. To close, it is fitting to paraphrase Vicente Navarro when he says: What has been happening in the world in the last 30 years is the forging of an alliance among the dominant classes in the rich and the poor countries, an alliance that has promoted neoliberal policies that go against the interests of the dominated classes of both the North and the South. There is thus an urgent need to develop similar alliances among the dominated classes of the North and the South. As HR workers, we simply have to facilitate the development of such alliances. (IJHS, 39:3, 2009).
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
cschuftan@phmovement.org