This paper, written jointly with the Human Rights Measurement Initiative (HRMI), discusses one branch of human rights—namely economic and social rights (ESRs), which are fundamental to countries’ long-run sustainability. While human rights are universal, inalienable, indivisible, interdependent, and interrelated, they can be realized on different time horizons. For instance, the obligations underpinning economic, social, and cultural rights are subject to the principle of progressive realization, which means that better performance is expected as countries grow their resources. It is common for countries to progress more on their obligations under one set of rights and less under another. Nevertheless, in the overall goal for all people to lead a life of dignity and to contribute to a country’s long-run sustainability, countries displaying weaknesses in specific areas of human rights ultimately have a weaker foundation than countries that do not.

This publication is the product of the World Bank’s ongoing proactive engagement with the finance industry on pertinent sovereign environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues. It forms part of a series disseminating practical, evidence-based recommendations for market participants.1 Our active dialogue with the industry reveals that investors seek evidencebased ways to reflect various aspects of sovereign sustainability in the investment process. Our previous publications identified structural issues in prevailing sovereign ESG approaches, such as the lack of clarity in objectives in developing sovereign ESG frameworks, the conflation of risk management and sustainability in the application of sovereign ESG methodologies in the investment process, difficulty with measuring investment impact at the sovereign level, and the perverse impact of an ingrained income bias that adversely affects many sovereign ESG metrics and industry practices (Gratcheva et al. 2021).

The World Bank’s ongoing engagement in sovereign ESG investing with market participants recalls the fact that human rights issues are complex. While the World Bank’s development mandate, derived from its Articles of Agreement, does not directly or explicitly relate to human rights, there are links between human rights and development. Subject to the limits of the World Bank’s mandate and the constraints imposed by the Articles on the organization’s decision-making with respect to political considerations, the World Bank can support its member countries in fulfilling their human rights obligations through the financial and technical support that it provides.