A/HRC/32/31 rights. The main challenges in this regard are considered in the section below on accountability. 35. Although the topic cannot be dealt with in the present report, it should also be noted that the constitutional recognition of economic and social rights may well be overshadowed or undermined by parallel and far more effective processes involving the constitutional and legal enshrinement of austerity measures. 18 This refers primarily to the use of regional integration, bilateral and multilateral trade and investment agreements, or international financing arrangements, to privilege competing interests that effectively trump human rights considerations. B. Institutionalization 36. In terms of institutions for the promotion of economic and social rights, scholars and others have focused almost all of their attention in recent years on courts. The impact of courts will be examined below, under the rubric of accountability. Judicial enforcement is not the same, however, as institutional promotion. The courts are not equipped, and are understandably not willing, to perform the roles required to promote the deeper understanding of economic and social rights and their implementation by diverse governmental and other agencies. 37. In considering which institutions are most likely to be best placed to promote knowledge and understanding of economic and social rights at the domestic level, two types of actors seem most relevant. The first being the government agencies that are responsible for making and implementing policy in the relevant sectors. Thus, government ministries dealing with education, social protection, health, nutrition and so on might be expected to take the lead in promoting a rights-based understanding. This is not to argue, as is sometimes suggested in the literature on rights-based approaches to development, that everything these ministries do should be guided by and seen through the lens of human rights.19 Nonetheless, one might expect the ministry of education, for example, to acknowledge that there is a right to education and to spell out what that means in specific policy terms. While it is well beyond the scope of this report to explore how common such an approach is among sectoral ministries in most countries, it can be said by way of generalization that the phenomenon is not common. There are some indications that the health sector might be moving more in that direction under the impetus of the movement for universal health coverage. Similarly, social security is increasingly seen in terms of the right to social security as a result of the Social Protection Floor Initiative. 38. The second type of institutional actor that could be expected to play a key role in promoting economic and social rights is national human rights institutions, of which there are now almost 120. In 1998, the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights called upon national human rights institutions to take a more active role in the promotion of economic and social rights.20 The most detailed scholarly study of those institutions yet 18 19 20 Stephen McBride, “Constitutionalizing austerity: taking the public out of public policy”, Global Policy, vol. 7, No. 1 (February 2016), p. 5. For a powerful but nuanced argument as to how a country’s national health system “enshrines and communicates values in the overall society and is not merely a technical apparatus for the delivery of goods and services”, see Alicia Ely Yamin, Power, Suffering and the Struggle for Dignity: Human Rights Frameworks for Health and Why They Matter (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), p. 236. See the Committee’s general comment No. 10 (1998) on the role of national human rights institutions in the protection of economic, social and cultural rights. 13