Despite the clear overlap in the aims and purposes of socio-economic human rights law protection and securing adequate access to essential public services for all in society, there is little academic literature that analyses these topics in tandem. This volume is the first comprehensive work to fill this gap by identifying the common challenges for essential public services provision and socio-economic human rights realisation, and by exploring how socio-economic rights law can be harnessed to reinforce better access to services. An important aim of this book is to understand how international socio-economic human rights law and guideposts can be used and strengthened to improve access to services, and assess socio-economic legal and policy decisions in this field.
The volume includes contributions on a range of different services (e.g. water, energy, health care, medicines, clean air, disaster management) and engages with the realities of different regulatory settings, e.g. on different continents, in different countries and in particular regimes (i.e. EU, WB, WTO, Uganda, Sweden, Mozambique, Colombia. China, India and Brazil). The key challenges engaged with in the volume include: sufficient (public and private) resources mobilisation, private actor involvement and regulation, planning for adequate services provision, and the underexplored themes of 'participation’ and ‘accountability'.
