This is a profoundly disheartening time for human rights work. Democratic backsliding, widening inequality, accelerating ecological crises, and intensifying conflict have reshaped the context for advancing human rights. Civic space has shrunk, and human rights defenders are increasingly stigmatized, criminalized, and attacked. Funding for rights-based work is under strain just as authoritarian and exclusionary forces appear increasingly emboldened.
For many in the human rights field, this moment has prompted difficult questions. If conditions are deteriorating in so many places, what has human rights advocacy, movement-building, and investment achieved? How should we understand progress in a period that feels defined less by breakthrough and more by backlash?
A different way of conceiving positive change
A recent global survey of nearly 90 human rights organizations offers useful insights into these questions. In their reflections on change over the last decade, respondents challenged both the pessimistic narrative that international human rights frameworks have failed and the defensive impulse to double down on them. They point to the more complex reality that periods of regression and periods of transformation are often deeply intertwined. Resistance often emerges when entrenched interests feel threatened. The survey analysis reveals that, even amid mounting pressure, organizations around the world have secured important gains in law and policy, norms and narratives, accountability and remedy, and prevention and protection. These advances—which have meant simultaneously holding the line against regression, breaking new ground in critical areas, and laying foundations for longer-term structural change—defy conventional expectations of linear progress.
Across continents, human rights groups have helped stem democratic erosion, for example by shoring up the right to protest, defending hard-won legal guarantees, and ensuring these guarantees protect those most at risk. They have also broken new ground, including holding corporations increasingly accountable for climate harms and securing recognition of tax abuse as a human rights concern. And they have seeded longer-term societal shifts, from growing recognition of disability as a matter of justice to the increased prominence of “care” as a framing for economic and social priorities.
Many of these gains have been incremental, contested, and often the fruit of years of collective effort. Their enduring significance lies in expanding who is recognized as a rights holder, how state and corporate power can be challenged, and where accountability should be pursued—in all, profoundly shifting the terrain on which future struggles for rights and justice will unfold.
Understanding conditions for sustainable progress
The survey analysis offers insights into what enables effective change. Collaboration across movements, sectors, and borders, rather than isolated organizational initiatives, generates the most durable advances—whether in successfully prosecuting atrocity crimes or securing recognition of the right to a healthy environment. Strategies anchored in the leadership, participation, and lived experience of those most affected by injustice are also critical because solutions become harder to reverse when their beneficiaries are recognized not as victims but as protagonists.
Successful initiatives have deployed narratives and tactics aimed at reaching broader constituencies and connecting human rights to people’s everyday lives. The most effective strategies also take aim at the systemic drivers of injustice, not just its symptoms. Respondents cited corporate capture—the growing concentration of corporate power and its influence over politics, media, technology, the economy, and the environment—as a profound and common obstacle to rights realization across all fields. However, efforts to challenge this phenomenon remain fragmented and under-resourced.
The nuanced picture of progress that emerges from the survey suggests that the most consequential shifts in human rights are not always visible or valued in conventional measures of success. It is telling that one area in which respondents most consistently described progress is in building a more collaborative, inclusive, and adaptive movement whose leaders better reflect the constituencies it serves. This ecosystem-strengthening work is not incidental to progress on laws, policies, and narratives. It reinforces the capacities and connections needed to build collective power, and it is the foundation upon which every other dimension of human rights change rests. These efforts to build resilience in movements and communities are often the most enduring and difficult to reverse when the political winds change. Yet they are particularly vulnerable to shifting funder priorities.
Aligning resources with the long arc of change
The survey findings highlight a long-standing tension: while progress toward systemic change depends on cross-movement and intersectional approaches over a long timeline, funders often prioritize narrowly defined, short-term outcomes and pressure organizations to demonstrate discrete and measurable results. This can fragment strategies, discourage collaboration, and pull support away from exactly the efforts that the survey indicates are most foundational to durable change. Essential elements of movement sustainability—such as resilience, interconnection, or collective care—are rarely reflected in monitoring, evaluation, and learning frameworks or captured through conventional metrics.
At a time when resourcing human rights work requires a radical rethink, these findings from the field point to the kinds of investment that could make a lasting difference: funding ecosystems, not just individual organizations; supporting cross-sector strategies to tackle corporate capture and other systemic drivers of human rights abuses, not just their symptoms; and investing in the same long-term commitment to narrative and cultural work that anti-rights forces have shown for decades.
Fundamentally, these insights challenge funders and the human rights field more broadly to evolve frameworks for understanding progress so that they match the actual arc of change: often generations long, rarely linear, and always contested.