Wescott, Holly and Ferri, Delia and MacLachlan, Malcolm (2023) Participation, Legal Capacity, and Gender: Reflections from the United Nations Partnership on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Project in Serbia. Disabilities, 3 (1). pp. 129-146. ISSN 2673-7272

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Abstract

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) establishes that people with disabilities shall enjoy their human rights on an equal basis with others. Those rights include the right to legal capacity and to protection against discrimination, including intersectional and multiple forms of discrimination on the basis of disability and gender. In an effort to support the realisation of the CRPD, the United Nations team in Serbia undertook a project to address the implementation of these rights under the UN Partnership on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNPRPD) programme. Namely, by bringing together stakeholders from the UN, government and civil society, the UNPRPD project in Serbia sought to create structural changes to uphold the rights of people with disabilities. With a view of understanding the process of change within, rather than the outcomes of, this UPRPD project, twenty-eight semi-structured interviews were conducted using the Most Significant Change Technique (MSCT) with key stakeholders involved in such a project. The interviews were analysed using Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) to preserve the unique and diverse perspectives of participants who had differing roles across the project. The analysis allowed us to identify a number of facets of the process that facilitate structural change: coalition-building events; strengthening stakeholder capacity and relationships; the participation of persons with disabilities; and innovation in terms of what made the project significant, novel and in itself a change. All these facets are discussed in this article, with the purpose of supporting global efforts in alignment with the CRPD. On the whole, this article aims to support a better understanding of disability-inclusive development projects in line with the CRPD and to give evidence on how countries may begin to tackle the structural exclusion of persons with disabilities in society.

Item Type:	Article
Keywords:	disability; CRPD; UNPRPD; civil society; United Nations; legal capacity; gender; disability; structural change;
Academic Unit:	Assisting Living & Learning,ALL institute Centre for European and Eurasian Studies Faculty of Social Sciences > Law
Item ID:	18192
Identification Number:	https://doi.org/10.3390/disabilities3010010
Depositing User:	Delia Ferri
Date Deposited:	20 Feb 2024 16:22
Journal or Publication Title:	Disabilities
Publisher:	MDPI
Refereed:	Yes
URI:	Publisher
Use Licence:	This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available here

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