Human rights in The Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper: Potential for enforcement

International human rights discourse and law have had little power to date to influence economic, social and cultural rights compliance of states or non-state actors. Today roughly half of the world's people live in poverty, but the declaratory regime's pleas for voluntary compliance with economic, social and cultural rights standards are mute. They continue to be overwhelmed in international institutions by the language of neoliberal economics and its rationalization for global capital accumulation.; This thesis analyzes whether the same vehicles that have helped to force neoliberal macroeconomic change on sovereign states could be used to enforce the protection and implementation of human rights in the global economy. The Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) represents one of the more promising tools. Since its inception in 1999 the World Bank's PRSP has gained legitimacy among international actors as a country planning document binding governments to social development as well as macroeconomic goals. Using human rights conditions as a trigger for World Bank funding would arguably place governments' human rights obligations to their citizens on the same footing as their contractual obligation to implement macroeconomic changes as demanded by Bretton Woods Institutions since the 1980s.; Through case study research focusing on the experience of the east African nation of Tanzania, this thesis compares the PRSP I and PRSP II (and intervening processes) to gauge changes in the human rights content of related legislation and development policies, and in the participatory processes surrounding the PRSP. The research findings show that while the World Bank and IMF have not and probably should not enforce human rights targets through the PRSP, the process conditions that the PRSP has set in motion promise to ultimately shift the state's accountability away from Bretton Woods Institutions, and toward citizens.; By making democratic and participatory processes in public policy development a condition for states to receive financial support, the PRSP has opened up spaces for other voices to be heard, and for citizens to become stronger and more expressive of their rights toward their governments and by extension the global economy. Whether or not they reference the international framework of human rights, process conditions can be seen to employ a human rights approach in shifting power relations between state and citizens. This approach may ultimately make it more difficult for institutions of the global economy to demand structural change that would limit states' ability to fulfil human rights obligations or cause them to retrogress. It would also require state and nonstate actors to acknowledge the authority of human rights claims---creating neoliberation as an answer to neoliberalism.