Conference Agenda

A rights based economy (RBE) is gaining support from many actors, including academia, civil society and human rights bodies. This is a step forwards as until recently human rights and economics were not often spoken about in the same breath, and human rights were only considered to be State duties rather than systemic issues. Increasingly, human rights actors, human rights rapporteurs and independent experts, including the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, have called for a human rights economy both in the national and cross-border economic exchanges from debt, labour rights, tax and economic governance institutions to align with the realisation of human rights for all, building from a previously more limited discourse of a human rights based approach to development. In this panel, we examine how an economy would need to be structured in terms of both State duties, mandatory obligations of private sector, solidarity economies, and citizens to realise human rights.

We also advance some open questions regarding the limitations of a human rights approach in terms its alignment to a feminist and decolonial economic model that takes its analysis of the attainment of human rights based on the unpaid domestic and care work, while also embracing a post-growth model due to planetary boundaries of the current elite consumption driven economic model we have today that is incompatible in terms of dynamics of achieving the maximum available resources within the context of an unequal exchange - both historical and current - between the Global South and the Global North.

A rights-based economy also serves as a platform for advocating a post-neoliberal economy, as an alternative to the drive for austerity and cuts in the current climate of existing power relations, in emphasising the role of both the state and solidarity economies in reducing the power of the for-profit private sector and wealthy individuals in framing economic institutions.