National Plans on Human Rights: Debates and Reflections on Latin American Experiences

The texts gathered in this book reflect the tensions and challenges involved in creating inclusive human rights public policies that respond to effective and impactful citizen participation. They also highlight the tension—once again—between the short and long term: the temporalities of governments and states. Furthermore, these writings incorporate an analysis of contexts and policies from a human rights perspective, revealing that, very often, plans of this nature—as tools provided by international protection bodies—are not fully implemented at the national or subnational level. Instead, they are frequently constructed as ways to appease international agendas rather than as means of engaging and engaging communities in collective initiatives for transformation. Therefore, we try to build interpretive proposals that allow us to critically analyze—and also strengthen—human rights plans in these ambiguous paths of formulation, implementation, and evaluation, because we believe that these comprehensive and cross-cutting policies are, or can be, instruments for building more just and inclusive societies, but they require long-term work and commitment.