How best to improve the position of the world's poorest people remains one of the major issues facing the human species. This book investigates the role that legal empowerment and rights (including human rights) can play in tackling poverty and enabling poor people in developing countries to take action to improve their positions.

This publication offers a framework for the empowerment of people living in poverty throughout the world that concentrates on increasing people's freedom of choice and action to shape their own lives. Based on analysis of practical experiences, the book identifies four key elements to support empowerment: information, inclusion and participation, improved accountability and local organisational capacity. This framework is then applied to five areas of action to improve development effectiveness: provision of basic services, improved local governance, improved national governance, pro-poor market development, and access to justice and legal aid. It also offers twenty 'tools and practices' which concentrate on a wide-range of topics to support the empowerment of the poor.

The vast majority of the world's people live outside the law and thus do not have a chance to better their lives and climb out of poverty. This causes national and global stagnation. The remedy for the exclusion is inclusion through Legal Empowerment of the Poor which is important economically, politically, socially, and morally. The Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor (2005) was the first global initiative to focus on the link between exclusion, poverty, and the law, and was hosted by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in New York. This first report of the Commission covers the following topics: making the law work for everyone; the four pillars of legal empowerment; legal empowerment is smart politics and good economics; agenda for change and implementation strategies. The report is based on research, analysis and consultations in more than 20 developing countries and encourages debates and discussions towards realisation of Millennium Development Goals.

First Published in 2006. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This important Research Handbook explores the nexus between human rights, poverty and inequality as a critical lens for understanding and addressing key challenges of the coming decades, including the objectives set out in the Sustainable Development Goals. The Research Handbook starts from the premise that poverty is not solely an issue of minimum income and explores the profound ways that deprivation and distributive inequality of power and capability relate to economic, social, cultural, civil and political rights.