Human rights are articulated through constitutions, international conventions and legal commitments, but their realisation depends substantially on public institutions. Access to education, healthcare, housing, social protection, information and other rights is shaped by administrative rules, budgets, organisational capacity, frontline officials and interactions between citizens and the state. Nevertheless, the administrative dimension of human rights remains comparatively underexplored in political science.
This panel examines public administration as a critical arena of human rights implementation. It moves the discussion from the recognition of rights towards the institutions, processes and actors through which rights become鈥攐r fail to become鈥攅veryday realities. It invites dialogue between human rights scholarship and research on public administration, governance, public policy and local government.
The panel is particularly interested in the gap between formal rights commitments and administrative implementation. Why do similar legal commitments produce different outcomes across countries, territories or policy sectors? How do administrative capacity, institutional design and bureaucratic discretion affect rights realisation? What happens when administrators confront tensions between political directives, resource constraints, professional norms and human rights obligations? How can participation, transparency and accountability strengthen rights-based administration?
The panel also invites examination of the role of subnational and local governments, where many rights-related services are delivered and where universal standards encounter different institutional, socioeconomic and cultural contexts. Comparative perspectives from democratic, hybrid and authoritarian political systems are particularly encouraged.
Contributions may address rights-based administration; street-level bureaucracy; administrative discretion; public service delivery; local government and human rights; administrative capacity; accountability and participation; social and economic rights; migration and refugee governance; digitalisation and artificial intelligence; crisis governance; or the role of public institutions during democratic backsliding.
The panel ultimately asks a fundamental question: what happens to human rights after they have been formally recognised? By focusing on administration as the link between rights on paper and rights in practice, it seeks to strengthen the study of human rights implementation within political science.
