Increased Rights Understanding through Conscientisation

Human right awareness training sessions were mostly provided by LWD as mentioned earlier. In particular, LWD conducts such training by utilising ‘applied’ exercises. During the training on climate change and RBA, LWD staff asked participants how climate change is related to human rights. Their answers are summarised as follows:

 Climate change affects people through floods, which relate to human rights [rights to life and security].

 Climate change causes illness and so is related to health [rights to health].

 Climate change causes lack of water [rights to water, rights to life and security, and rights to subsistence]. There will be no water for cows [rights to food and rights to subsistence].

 Temperature increases [rights to life and security and rights to food].  Forest fires affect land and we cannot grow vegetables [rights to food

and rights to subsistence] (Field notes, 13 September 2012, comments in brackets added).

Note that the participants did not explicitly mention particular rights related to the consequences of the climate change (such as rights to health), listed in the brackets. They did, however, show they understood that climate change affects their various rights, even though they could not express this in technical rights terms. This exercise also indicates that in addition to explaining human rights concepts, LWD tries to help PPs connect their realities with pertinent human rights. MASUM, an Indian NGO that aims at improving the conditions of rural women, takes an approach that enables those women to develop a ‘sense’ of personal rights through engaging with their immediate health problems, rather than an approach that didactically teaches them about rights in

abstract terms (Miwa, 2008). Through this approach that enables women to engage with their realities, they realise what it means to fulfill their rights based on their own

experiences (Miwa, 2008). Similarly, Harris-Curtis et al. (2005) find that some European NGOs recognise the importance of such an approach:

Some argue that one has to ‘feel’ rights before they can be realised. Human rights have to be pursued with considerable sensitivity to the existing, culturally embedded notions of what is right. (p. 42).

Such a method is likely to bring about TL (Hansman & Wright, 2009; Weimer, 2012), since it helps “the learners to develop a critical consciousness about themselves and the context and society in which they live” (Hansman & Wright, 2009, p. 124).

LWD also conducts rights-based training by utilising dialogical processes. Tagoe (2008) finds that in ActionAid Ghana’s operation, local facilitators, who lacked the capacity to facilitate the dialogical awareness-raising process inspired by Freire26, tended to focus on conventional service delivery, but shied away from addressing structural (rights-related) problems. Miller et al. (2005a) point out that the Freirean approach may not necessarily generate the intended outcomes, since its success “depends on the skilful facilitation of group discussions about complex social issues with people who are not accustomed to such conversations” (p. 54). However, I encountered a number of occasions where LWD staff were posing questions to bring about dialogical processes with PPs during rights-based training. Weimer (2012) asserts the power of questioning in TL: “questioning can be learner-centered and

transformative when…the questions offer learners the chance to figure things out for themselves” (p. 447). During the climate change and RBA training, the following interaction unfolded:

Programme support staff: Why are rights related to climate change? What is

the strategy in RBA? If we are afraid of making mistakes, factories do not need to make rubber [This is to encourage the participants not to be shy].

Participant: Strategies are ways to analyse, practise and solve problems. Programme support staff: What are human rights?

Participant: We all have rights since we were born. Programme support staff: What about babies? Some participants: No. Other participants: Yes.

26

ActionAid uses REFLECT (Regenerated Freirean Literacy through Empowering Community Techniques), a literacy programme inspired by Freire.

Programme support staff: If they [babies] do not have rights, they cannot live.

As a mother, she should know that a baby has rights, since a baby is in the womb. Mothers still take care of them even when babies are in the womb. Many people talk about rights, but they do not know (Field notes, 13 September 2012, comments in brackets added).

Linking human rights with realities and the dialogical processes resonates with Freire’s conscientisation where reality and social conditions are analysed dialogically and critically, thereby revealing dehumanising and oppressive structures (Freire, 1970).

The existing domestic and international legal and policy frameworks are the foundation of LWD’s RBA. More specifically, its RBA is based on international human rights instruments such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, domestic laws such as the Constitution of Cambodia, international development policy frameworks such as the Millennium Development Goals, and domestic development policy frameworks such as the Cambodian government’s rectangular strategies (Lutheran World Federation Cambodia, 2009). LWD formulated the manual and training materials for particular rights, such as rights to water, by consulting these legal and policy

documents together with RBA materials developed by other NGOs and UN agencies as well as by forming the working groups composed of LWD’s human resource

department personnel and project staff (for example, CEOs and Gender and Advocacy Liaison Officers (GALOs)) (Interview, Munny Sock 2).

As seen above, instead of solely relying on the didactic preaching of human rights, LWD tries to help PPs connect their realities with pertinent human rights. LWD aims at enabling PPs to gradually and progressively move towards the understanding of existing human rights instruments. Thus one of LWD’s senior staff said:

If you directly introduce human rights to PPs, you will be rejected. Thus you need to gradually integrate human rights without being antagonistic to, for example, Islamic culture or Cambodian culture. Thus try to find common ground between human rights and Cambodian culture (Interview, Munny Sock 3). There is a debate as to how far RBA should accommodate local contexts. From other NGO fields, clashes have been reported in Uganda between the local practice of vigilantes to restore moral values in the Internally Displaced Persons camp and RBA’s moral imperatives (Mergelsberg, 2012) and in Rwanda between children’s agency in their daily lives and RBA’s uniform categorisation of children as vulnerable (Pells,

2012). Holland et al. (2004) suggest a middle way, namely: “the need to recognise the complexities of dialogue while moving away from binary ideas about methods and their appropriateness” and “validat[ing] alternative methods without essentialising them and so marginalising them” (p. 262). In a similar vein, moving away from binary ideas, Santos (2002) proposes cross-cultural dialogue, working towards a hybrid conception of human rights as a normative practice. This emulates the perspective of social

constructivists in which rights are shaped through actual interchange, struggle and contestation(Cowan et al., 2001; Nyamu-Musembi, 2005; Miller, 2010). In line with these thoughts, some rights-based NGOs employ locally acceptable concepts of human rights. For example, the Programme for Appropriate Technology for Health (PATH), an international NGO with experience in working with the issue of female genital

mutilation in the African continent, recognises as a manifestation of rights the communal maintenance of cultural practices, and effects change from within communities through dialogue (Ensor, 2005). Through these approaches, for

communities, “[b]y maintaining all aspects of the process apart from genital cutting, an important cultural commodity is retained,” whilst PATH escapes the risk of RBA becoming a top-down and confrontational strategy, which could shut down the communication between PATH and these communities (Ensor, 2005, p. 273).

It is interesting to hear from two PPs that claiming rights reasonably made them confident as well. One of them stated:

I think that I claim what is correct, clear and good, in which I have confidence in these points. I have to claim what is correct and appropriate according to what I need….basically I have confidence in that kind of claiming (Life story interview, Jorani Tan 2).

LWD’s RBA manual points out that one of the sources of power for advocating is “[w]orking in accordance with national and international laws and for common benefit” (Lutheran World Federation Cambodia, 2009, p. 47). In fact, a number of PPs as well as LWD staff from every organisational level mentioned that an understanding of human rights led to the PPs having increased confidence. The following PP indicated that whilst she still feared local government, she tried to cling to rights to overcome such fear:

Research Assistant: What do you think, aunty? For those who do not give any

idea yet, what do you think? If you, aunties or sisters, have to approach the CC and the DO as we just gave an example, what do you think?

Participant: I am afraid to approach them, but if there is any real urgent matter,

I will go, go to ask for help from them and they will solve it.

Research Assistant: Why are you afraid of them?

Participant: Because we are poor, that’s why we are afraid. Research Assistant: Because you think that you are poor?

Participant: Yes, but no matter how poor we are, there are still the laws and

they will solve it for us (FG, a female FFS member in the first research site whose name is unknown27, 3 April 2012).

Another PP said that women’s confidence in dealing with DV has been enhanced as a result of increased human rights understanding among women:

In the past, when husbands fought wives, women in the village were afraid to call the police. If they did so, their husbands would fight them even more fiercely than before. So they were afraid. But now, after the dissemination of information and training on equal rights between men and women [by LWD], if husbands fight their wives to the extent that the wives have wounds, the wives can call the police, who will arrest the husbands and put them in prison

(Interview, Kolab Pen, comments in brackets added).

It is when the marginalised acquire a knowledge of their rights, that they are able to become more agential in exercising their rights and implementing changes (Hansman & Wright, 2009; Kabeer, 2011; Bridwell, 2013). As discussed elsewhere, TL in

non-rights-based participatory approaches such as FFS can bring about social

engagement, for example in the form of questioning local authorities. Thus Duveskog (2013) claims that “FFS with its combination of impact on the individual level as well as social structures thereby seem well placed to serve as a platform for wider social change” (p. 108). However, the value added by RBA is that explicit knowledge of rights provides something that people can cling onto in exercising their rights.

6.7 Gradual Processes for Becoming Confident and Competent