ABSTRACT
This chapter will:
address the questions: Are religious teachings compatible with human rights? What are the implications for ‘development’?;
examine the ways in which considerations of human rights have entered mainstream development discourse, including policy debates and the design and delivery of interventions;
assess the extent to which considerations of religion and culture have been marginalized from mainstream human rights debates and practice, including those within donor-driven development;
discuss the application of religious teachings to human rights;
specifically examine the tension between understandings of human rights as universal and culturally relative, and look at the role of religion in this;
examine the extent to which an approach that looks at ‘overlapping consensus’ in understandings of rights from different cultural perspectives can resolve this tension;
assess the implications of this for mainstream development policy and practice.
