Human Rights and Political Governance: The Problem of Monitoring and Compliance with the Human Rights NORM in a MULTI-Agent and MULTI-Scalar Perspective

The monitoring and compliance with human rights norm in domestic political contexts can be analyzed as a social risk. I intend to present results from a recent research that suggests that political governance structures could be a major improvement with regard to the regulation of this kind of risk. Political governance is defined in institutional terms as a negotiation structure between state and non-state agents that works as an interface between the domestic political system and regulation processes of the human rights problematic outside this system, mainly at the international level.

I present a case study of a negotiation process between the Colombian government and non-state agents from the system of international cooperation for development, the international human rights system, international NGOs and domestic civil society aimed at the regulation of human rights problematic in Colombia. The outcomes of this negotiation show how a political governance structure can emerge as a change in the political regulation model of this problematic at the national level.

This kind of negotiations entails the participation of plural social agents that act at different scales (national and international), with different interests and power capacity and that must solve a problem of inter-sectorial coordination (state agents and non-state agents) in order to overcome political conflicts and get at some point of agreement with regard to how regulate the social risk under consideration. In this research, I used a combination of the structuration theory (Giddens), the Coleman´s macro-micro-macro loop and the scalar approach to globalization (Sassen) in order to explain how this governance structure emerged as a new model for addressing the monitoring and compliance problem of the human rights norm by the Colombian government.