Introduction Despite the fact that more than 160 governments around the world are now party to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) and have committed to the progressive realization of these rights, millions of people worldwide continue to suffer from poverty, hunger, homelessness, illiteracy and early mortality. Poverty and deprivation are an assault on human dignity, but are all too often deemed to be unavoidable outcomes of ‘under-development’. A human rights perspective challenges this complacency by showing that, when they are the consequence of government policy or are caused by the failure of governments to act, poverty-related deprivations can also reflect a violation of human rights. Over the last two decades, these deprivations have increasingly begun to be addressed as failures to fulfill economic, social and cultural rights (ESC rights). But to increase accountability for such failures, it is necessary to uncover the shortcomings in the state’s social and economic policies that lead to large-scale deprivations. This serves to expose as a preventable injustice what may otherwise be seen as an inevitable tragedy. Holding institutions to account for these failures, through both judicial and non-judicial processes, is an essential step towards providing remedies to those affected. Accountability processes can, in turn, allow policymakers to know what works so that it can be repeated and what does not, so that it can be adjusted.1 The obligation to fulfill entails obligations of conduct, as well as obligations of result. As such, assessing compliance requires looking not only at the extent of deprivation of a particular right, but also at trends in public policies and resource allocations, in order to fully understand the efforts that the state has taken to fulfill it. Yet, human rights practitioners and activists face significant challenges in clearly demonstrating the complex causal links between poor human rights outcomes and shortcomings in states’ policy efforts. Such shortcomings are often systemic and entrenched, arising from institutional failures rather than the wrongdoings of individual officials. Attributing state responsibility for chronic problems, such as high rates of maternal death, involves more complex analysis of the link between conduct and result than establishing state accountability in cases of torture or forced eviction, for example. Further, relevant international standards underpinning states’ obligation to fulfill ESC rights—and against which to judge the adequacy of states’ actions—are themselves multifaceted and not always clearly defined. As a result, finding ways to meaningfully measure them has been difficult. Nevertheless, significant progress has been made in recent years in addressing these challenges. On the conceptual side, understanding of the nature and scope of the rights and obligations enshrined in the ICESCR has been increasingly elaborated, particularly through interpretations by the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (the UN treaty body mandated to monitor states’ progress in implementing the Covenant); jurisprudence of national courts and regional adjudication bodies; and increasing engagement between human rights and development experts. On the methodological side, a variety of different actors have developed or adapted tools and techniques to monitor states’ compliance with their obligation to fulfill ESC rights, moving beyond conventional ‘events-based’ human rights monitoring towards new methods that combine qualitative and quantitative approaches. While these tools and techniques offer considerable advances, they have tended to be developed in a fragmented way by different actors and in isolation from each other. Accordingly, they have generally Assessing compliance with the obligation to fulfill economic, social and cultural rights 1