Policies with Rights Approach and its Incidence in the Public Institutions

The focus on which this paper is centered is the kind of public institution that needs to be built in order to implement policies with rights approach. It tries to provide a conceptual framework in order to design institutions that are consistent with the guarantee of rights and, therefore, to endow feasibility to its real exercise.

The institutional reforms that have occurred in recent years in most Latin American public sectors on behalf of client power, have sought to alter relations of accountability in the public sector by adopting a target value to cost-efficiency and prescribing emulation type of accountability relationships and logic that operate in the market.

The literature agrees that the principles, on which public policies with rights approach are based, in addition to universality, include liability, social participation, inclusiveness and progressiveness. These principles create, at least nominally, a new field of social power.

Such exercise of this new field of citizen power is directly dependent on the type of institutions that is designed to implement this new policy, as well as by the values and practices of the actors who are part of this institutional framework. The values and institutions are not independent of each other.

Therefore, each of these principles must have its counterpart in an organizational attribute and the corresponding institutional incentives to lead to new public institutions that can cope with the implementation of public policy with emphasis on rights.

Systemic governance, accountability and a vigorous public space are the attributes that, respectively, can give consistency to the principles of comprehensiveness, the enforcement and social participation, in pursuit of increased citizen power and the construction of a so called social citizenship. The article is devoted to show how these attributes could be deployed to give substance to new public institutions.

Key words: Public Policy; Human Rights; Citizen Participation; Governance; Public Accountability; Institutional Analysis