Human rights and development are two concepts often seen as mutually reinforcing. For development to be beneficial for people, people's basic rights must be guaranteed; and by guaranteeing basic rights, development can be facilitated. In this paper, we problematize the paradigm of human rights for development by arguing that transnational human rights norms, in their current shape, do not adequately reflect the daily realities of local rights-holders. On the basis of our case-study, we propose a new way of dealing with the universal human rights discourse which can render this discourse more locally relevant, and thus more relevant for development. We call this the localization of human rights. The paper adopts a radically bottom-up approach in order to better account for the voices from below in international human rights discourses. In doing so, we touch upon several conceptual controversies, such as individual vs. group rights, or local vs. global protection.
