Legal Rights of the Poor

About the Book

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.

About the Author

Naresh Singh is currently an independent consultant in international development working mainly in the areas of sustainable livelihoods and resilience building in crisis and post crisis situations as well as Honorary Visiting Professor in the School of Government and Public Policy at the OP Jindal Global University, Haryana, India. He is the former Executive Director of the Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor co-chaired by Madeleine Albright and Hernando De Soto and was Principal Adviser on Poverty and Sustainable Livelihoods at the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). He was also a Director General at the Canadian International Development Agency and Program Director for Community Adaptation and Sustainable Livelihoods at the International Institute for Sustainable Development.
Dr. Singh holds an MSc from the Indian Agricultural Research Institute in New Delhi and a PhD from the University of the West Indies in Jamaica. He is the author of six books, several book chapters, and numerous journal articles on governance, poverty, and sustainable livelihoods. He was an adjunct professor at Boston University School of Public Health, the Canada Trust visiting professor at University of Waterloo and visiting scholar at Harvard University’s Global Equity Initiative, Fordham University School of Law, and McGill University among others.
He has advised several organizations including the Commonwealth Secretariat, the Pan American Health Organization, and the Foundation of International Environmental Law and Development.