Introduction
Decoding Injustice is a powerful way to use research to advance a range of economic, environmental, and social issues. The approach was created by the Center for Economic and Social Rights (CESR).
It helps activists shed new light on how economic policies harm people’s human rights. It does this by organising tools and methods for collecting, analysing, and presenting data in three steps. This helps analyse not just what’s happening, but why.
The goal is to to build evidence that makes the case for redistributing resources and balancing power in our economies.
Decoding Injustice
What are the three steps of Decoding Injustice?
1. Interrogate
Some of the deepest injustices we face today — poverty, inequality, environmental destruction — harm a vast range of human rights. But they don’t fit within a simple cause-and-effect analysis. They’re highly complex and interconnected due to how our economies are organised. Adopting a systems thinking approach, this step translates human rights norms into more measurable criteria that can be of help in identifying the various elements in our economies. It also introduces OPERA, an analytical framework for unpacking how these elements interconnect and interact and understanding how they create particular dynamics that sustain injustice. OPERA groups human rights norms into four dimensions: Outcomes, Policy Efforts, Resources, and Assessment. It sets out questions to ask for each, which can be answered using indicators and benchmarks.
2. Illuminate
This step draws together a range of methods that help answer the questions mapped out through using OPERA in the first step. It focuses on various data sources, as a type of knowledge that can be highly effective in making the case for change.
When it comes to analysing how resources are distributed, “crunching the numbers” can be especially valuable in uncovering patterns and trends that might otherwise remain hidden. However, this step also takes a critical approach to data, acknowledging its potential to conceal as well as reveal, and suggests ways to analyse and contextualise data.
3. Inspire
This step builds collective power for change, by leveraging evidence creatively in both formal and informal accountability processes.
It recognizes that change in complex systems is messy, unpredictable, and beyond the control of any single organisation or even groups of organisations.
Change can occur by tiny increments, or by large leaps forward. For this reason, we need to identify entry points in the accountability ecosystem. These can be legal, administrative, political, or social; they can be formal or informal; and they can operate at local, national, regional, and international levels.
Who is Decoding Injustice for?
Decoding Injustice is an approach that can be adapted for use by a wide range of groups — from local activists and community groups to academics and policy analysts. Our introductory modules (described further below) are designed to serve an equally diverse set of readers.
How is Decoding Injustice different from other types of human rights research?
Human rights research has traditionally been quite legalistic, aiming to build evidence that can establish whether or not a human rights violation has occurred. To do so, it draws on a fairly fixed repertoire of fact-finding methods, such as interviewing victims and witnesses, collecting physical evidence, and reviewing relevant documents. In this way, it zooms in on smaller and smaller parts of a complex issue to identify their direct cause and effect — and to attribute responsibility for them.
But examining only one part of a system leads to fragmentation and silos. The whole of a system is different from the sum of its parts, because of the interactions between those parts. It also tends to oversimplify the diagnosis of a problem. This, in turn, limits the prescriptions that can be made. Center for Economic and Social Rights
For this reason, Decoding Injustice starts from specific problems facing particular groups — but then zooms out beyond the immediate problem to look carefully at its underlying causes. It aims to understand not just what is happening, but why. In particular, it focuses on scrutinising how governments raise and spend resources and uncoves the configurations of power within our dominant economic system that shape them. To do this, it draws on a broad repertoire of methods from multiple disciplines.
Decoding Injustice introductory notes
To start exploring Decoding Injustice, CESR has put together a set of introductory notes that will guide you in the process of researching an issue, spotlight its causes, and help you hold decision-makers accountable. The notes have a skill-building focus — introducing concepts that can strengthen economic literacy and responsible data practices, for example. We know that some notes will likely be more relevant for particular readers than others. For this reason, we encourage you to dip in and out of them and keep them on hand as references as you experiment with different methods in your work.
- Interrogate 1: Understanding How the Economy Affects Human Rights
- Interrogate 2: Economic, Social and Cultural Rights Standards
- Interrogate 3: The OPERA Framework
- Interrogate 4: Indicators and Benchmarks
- Illuminate 1: Drawing on Secondary Data
- Illuminate 2: Collecting Primary Data
- Illuminate 3: Analyzing Data
- Illuminate 4: Data and Design
- Illuminate 5: Evaluating Contextual Factors and Making Conclusions
- Inspire 1: Advocacy and Follow-up
- Inspire 2: Engaging Human Rights Treaty Bodies
- Inspire 3: Litigation and ESCR
Explore Further
- The Decoding Injustice Tools Hub
- Campaign Research 101
- 10 things to know about how to influence policy with research
- Research Methodologies Comparison Sheet
- Guide to publicly available data sources
- Citizen Generated Data: Toolkits and Guides
- The Research & Archiving Topic on the Commons Library
- Systems Thinking for Campaigning and Organising