Legal Rights of the Poor

This book seeks to be relevant to the call to address inequalities, injustice, human rights, and social exclusion in a more integrated, holistic, and transformative manner. It seeks to do so by looking at what we have learned in both the development and human rights communities. Further, it addresses fundamental obstacles that neither community has dealt with in this context, such as changing power relations. The book builds on the report of the Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor entitled Making the Law Work for Everyone and draws from a wide range of published literature on relevant issues not covered in the report. Calls for holistic and transformative approaches are familiar in development circles, but putting these approaches into practice require a knowledge base beyond that covered in the traditional development literature. The book brings together this diverse literature in one place at a time when the international community is about to embark on a new era of development cooperation commonly referred to as the post-2015 agenda.

The subjects covered therefore include a review of successful and unsuccessful approaches to reducing poverty and inequality; life in slums; the informal sector where the majority of the poor live; the legal empowerment of the poor; changing power relations between the haves and the have-nots; and the holistic, sustainable-livelihoods approach, in the development of which, the author has played a lead role.