RIGHTS, RESPONSIBILITIES AND SOCIAL PROTECTION. THE DYNAMICS OF SUPPLY AND DEMAND: AN ISSUES PAPER
This paper seeks to explore social protection from the perspective of social
and economic rights. The ‘supply’ of rights within any given context is the
responsibility of a number of institutional actors, with the state bearing
ultimate responsibility for ensuring these rights are respected. The ‘demand’
for rights comes, in principle, from the population at large, both as citizens
but also as workers, children, women and so oni. However, the ‘effective’
demand for rights, the capacity to ensure the translation of commitments into
reality, to ‘make rights real’, is most often generated by collective actions on
the part of citizens and civil society who use a variety of means to persuade
and pressure the state to fulfil its obligations. There is an important two?way
relationship between rights and social protection: the recognition and
realisation of basic human rights provides a stable foundation on which to
build social protection programmes while social protection programmes
provide an important means for the operationalisation of rights.
