Evaluating participation from a human rights perspective

by Solana Yoma

From very early on in my professional training, I saw human rights as a tool for challenging and transforming ethically unjust realities. Accordingly, when I graduated as a psychologist, I did not focus on addressing people’s suffering on an individual basis, but rather on understanding it in its collective dimension, designing strategies that sought to transform the social conditions that generate this discomfort.

This motivated my interest in integrating contributions from clinical psychology into the design, planning, implementation and evaluation of health policies, plans and programmes. Later, while working on my doctoral thesis, I set out to evaluate a mechanism for citizen participation in mental health from a human rights perspective, and there I identified a gap that I managed to fill with my research. In this post, I will talk about this modest contribution.

When countries ratify a human rights treaty, they commit to submitting periodic reports to international monitoring bodies to demonstrate their progress in implementing human rights. To support this process, the United Nations and the Inter-American System has designed systems of human rights indicators which translate different human rights dimensions into variables that can be observed and evaluated.

However, even though citizen participation is recognised as a right and a tool for exercising other rights, the UN and OAS institutional matrices of indicators do not include specific citizen participation indicators to assess compliance.

Furthermore, in the literature on the evaluation of participatory processes, several authors propose mechanisms that evaluate citizen participation using criteria that measures the quality of democracy, but they do not integrate a human rights perspective.

Based on this diagnosis, I tried to build bridges between these two fields of enquiry and intervention (namely human rights-based evaluations and evaluations of participatory processes) between which connections had not hitherto been made either in academia or by international organisations.

To this end, I conducted a theoretical and regulatory review through which I identified the defining characteristics of human rights-based evaluations and how they could be applied to the evaluation of participatory mechanisms. As a result, I elaborated a conceptual and operational framework for the evaluation of citizen participation mechanisms based on human rights standards. I also constructed a matrix of indicators intended to contribute to international human rights monitoring processes.

This work is therefore an attempt to broaden the methodological tools used in human rights evaluation in a hitherto unexplored field: that of institutional citizen participation mechanisms. I believe that the development of such a matrix of indicators can help countries account for their progress in human rights while also providing citizens with a means of highlighting and reporting cases of non-compliance.

Click on the link to find the full paper and the proposed matrix of indicators (Spanish), which I hope will serve as a contribution.

Warm wishes to everyone in the EvalParticipativa community.