Human rights-based approaches to sustainable water and sanitation services in Uganda and South Africa. A comparative study of the political and social context and the local, national and international development strategies Over the past decade, Uganda and South Africa have developed strong water and sanitation sector reform policies grounded in a constitutional guarantee to the human right to water. The two cases have yielded dissimilar results: while South Africa can be regarded as a fairly successful case, the circumstances in Uganda have improved to a much lesser extent. This project will analyze and critically evaluate these two rights-based water reform processes to identify the context-specific conditions for their successes and failures. It will, for example,investigate the formal and informal sectors of society; local, national, and international policies; and the links between the technical and social aspects of access to water and sanitation. Furthermore, the project will ask whether and how human rights-based arrangements and strategies can serve as a model for addressing the urgent water sector challenges throughout Sub-Saharan Africa, from the community level to the local and national levels, and whether such an approach can foster cooperation between these levels. In particular, the proposed project asks how knowledge and policy transfer, rights awareness, community mobilization, and struggles for water and other resources might be influenced. download link             The Corporation in Context: New Modes of Corporate Governance and Norm Compliance at the Local, National and International Levels Transnational corporations have gained inordinate influence over international market regulations and national legislative. At the same time they have become an important partner to states, intergovernmental agencies, and non-governmental organizations in the development of mechanisms to enforce human rights issues such as adequate wages and leisure time for workers, and environmental protection. This raises pressing and not yet explored questions: What modes of governance allow or hinder the compliance of local, national and international rules that respect human rights? What are conditions, e.g. possibilities and constraints, in the realm of market, legal systems, culture, national and transnational policies for a sustainable implementation of these human rights-sensitive modes of governance? And which normative yardsticks are applicable for their evaluation? The interdisciplinary project is unique as it aims at analyzing and evaluating new modes of governance (e.g. private, and private-public regulations) and its effects on local and other actors. It thereby concentrates on the cotton branch and its production, manufacturing and trade worldwide, focusing on exemplarily countries such as the United States as the world biggest producer, Greece for Europe, India as a threshold country and Tanzania as an emerging African market and their impact on the world market. Moreover, the project aims at exploring best modes and conditions of norm compliance of corporations that, in turn, may function as a model of a successful implementation of human rights-sensitive in other countries, internationally, and, moreover, in other fields, such as anti-corruption, ecological standards or state compliance in peace talks. The project is interdisciplinary as it has a political science, an economical science, a law as well as cultural science perspective on the issue of norm compliance of private actors. download