The situation is somewhat more complicated with regard to economic, social and cultural rights (ESC rights). Economic and social rights are increasingly under threat worldwide as a result of government retrenchment in social spending for both pragmatic and philosophical reasons. Government indebtedness increased rapidly during the 1980s and early 1990s, and the response was to cut deeply into social programmes. And further government retrenchment would seem inevitable in the coming decade, as the recession- and the massive stimulus spending to counter it- has pushed governments back into deficit positions. In many countries, the earlier cuts in social programmes were imposed by the international financial institutions (notably the IMF and the World Bank) through structural adjustment programmes that became part of every loan package. The cumulative effect of these changes on the social safety net as a whole compounded the effect of cuts to individual strands. Philosophically, a neoliberal, or market-based, approach to governance has been promoted by international lending institutions and others since at least the late 1980s, and is now followed in many countries including in Bangladesh. The effect of this two-pronged approach- imposing social spending cuts in the context of a market-based governance strategy- on the economic and social rights of the most vulnerable is increasingly questioned. But how to protect economic and social rights is difficult to conceptualise, as their legal effect is a matter of debate. The debate focuses mainly on the recognition of rights (i.e. their source and