Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- List of Contributors
- Introduction: Reflections on Dialogues between Practitioners and Theorists of Human Rights
- SECTION I NORTHERN INGOs AND SOUTHERN AID RECIPIENTS: THE CHALLENGE OF UNEQUAL POWER
- 1 The Pornography of Poverty: A Cautionary Fundraising Tale
- 2 An Imperfect Process: Funding Human Rights – A Case Study
- 3 Transformational Development as the Key to Housing Rights
- 4 Human Rights INGOs and the North–South Gap: The Challenge of Normative and Empirical Learning
- SECTION II INGOs AND GOVERNMENTS: THE CHALLENGE OF DEALING WITH STATES THAT RESTRICT THE ACTIVITIES OF INGOs
- SECTION III INGOs AND ECONOMIC RIGHTS: THE CHALLENGE OF DEALING WITH GLOBAL POVERTY
- Conclusion: INGOs as Collective Mobilization of Transnational Solidarity: Implications for Human Rights Work at the United Nations
- Index
2 - An Imperfect Process: Funding Human Rights – A Case Study
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 July 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- List of Contributors
- Introduction: Reflections on Dialogues between Practitioners and Theorists of Human Rights
- SECTION I NORTHERN INGOs AND SOUTHERN AID RECIPIENTS: THE CHALLENGE OF UNEQUAL POWER
- 1 The Pornography of Poverty: A Cautionary Fundraising Tale
- 2 An Imperfect Process: Funding Human Rights – A Case Study
- 3 Transformational Development as the Key to Housing Rights
- 4 Human Rights INGOs and the North–South Gap: The Challenge of Normative and Empirical Learning
- SECTION II INGOs AND GOVERNMENTS: THE CHALLENGE OF DEALING WITH STATES THAT RESTRICT THE ACTIVITIES OF INGOs
- SECTION III INGOs AND ECONOMIC RIGHTS: THE CHALLENGE OF DEALING WITH GLOBAL POVERTY
- Conclusion: INGOs as Collective Mobilization of Transnational Solidarity: Implications for Human Rights Work at the United Nations
- Index
Summary
U.S. foundations may well be guided by laudable values and visions. Legally, however, they are accountable to neither the public nor the community of groups that receive their funding, let alone the communities that those groups serve, with regard to what they fund. Given the prevailing political climate in the United States, the lack of program accountability to U.S. taxpayers and, indeed, the government may be a good thing; regrettably, international human rights norms do not appear to be at the top of either agenda. In fact, with only a minute percentage of the 68,000 registered U.S. foundations funding in this field in 2004, human rights is barely on the agenda of the philanthropic community itself. Leaving aside who is responsible for this, it suggests that there is something unusual about foundations that fund in this area: a vision, a sense of responsibility or sense of the possible, perhaps? Regardless of the motivation or inspiration, the actual grant-making process is far less agreeable than the world human rights grant makers endeavor to make possible.
Those concerned with the ethics of transnational interventions can justifiably ask about the process by which funders in the United States determine what is to be funded around the world. At the most fundamental level, how ethical are funding programs that affect people with no voice in what is funded? Human rights grant makers, although even more removed from the site than the organizations they support, are no less responsible for the interventions they make possible.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Ethics in ActionThe Ethical Challenges of International Human Rights Nongovernmental Organizations, pp. 38 - 53Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006