Human Rights and Development Policies: Some Critical Issues regarding the Idea of "Community" in the Development Field.

This paper will take into account the relationship between human rights and development policies fousing on how the development field deals with the idea of “community”. We will focus especially in how anthropologycal view can be useful for “decontructing” and reflecting on some fixed categhories – as the idea of community and of “community rights” – embedded in the development projects. It will aim to demonstrate how the development project can be seen as a ‘space’ where different representations, understandings and meanings of human rights as well as community rights are negotiated among different social and institutional actors. We’ll take into account the significant relationship between ‘rights discourses’ and ‘development discourse’ and their political role to legitimate several kinds of Wenstern practices that are culturally and institutionally situated or embedded. We will discuss the hambiguous concept of “communities participation” in protecting and promoting their own rights taking into account how both human rights and development policies deal with a static and a-hystorical representations of “community’rights”. How does international bodies mean when they talk of indigenous participation? How does “community rights” mean in developers terms? If is important to analyse the institutions and developers’representations of community rights, we will also reflect on the anthropologists’interest in considering people’practices and representations of their own rights. In according to this view, the “rights” are not seen as a something of “fixed” and bounded belonging to individuals, but as dynamic processes embedded in social and power relations and situated in a hystorical and political change. We will be discussing the anthropological contribution to the understanding of these issues moving from two significant ethnographic studies which come from literature. The first one will take into account the rights to water and in controlling natural resourses access in a rural development project in Tamil Nadu (India), based on David Mosse fieldwork; the second one which focus in a ‘community health project’ which took place in Kenia focused on the relationship between the right to health and the “right to choose”.