The OPERA Framework demonstrated strengths in measuring a specific element of the obligation to fulfill, but used on their own, do not fully capture the range of human rights principles and standards that underpin the obligation. This briefing paper argues that, in fact, many of these tools are complementary, and, when used in combination, they can paint a more multi-dimensional picture of states’ compliance. An overarching methodological framework helps to integrate the wide variety of different tools and techniques in order to provide a more comprehensive assessment of how public policies comply with the obligation to fulfill ESC rights. Building on CESR’s earlier work on assessment methodologies,2 this briefing paper introduces such a framework, which CESR has developed in the context of rights-based policy monitoring and advocacy in different settings. Adopting the acronym OPERA, CESR’s framework sets out a four-step process for an integrated analysis of: Outcomes, Policy Efforts, and Resources ending with an overall Assessment of compliance with the state’s human rights obligations. To this end, the paper first examines recent conceptual advances in understanding the nature and scope of the obligations relevant to economic, social and cultural rights—focusing on the obligation to fulfill ESC rights—as well as highlighting the key human rights principles and standards that must be examined when assessing this obligation. It then reviews important efforts that have been made to develop new techniques and tools to monitor these concepts, for example the use of indicators and benchmarks to assess ‘progressive realization’ or the use of budget analysis and other methods to assess ‘maximum available resources’. Finally, we set out the OPERA framework, and illustrate how it might be used to eclectically combine a range of different tools and techniques, drawing on both quantitative and qualitative methods to provide a more comprehensive and integrated assessment of a government’s compliance with its obligation to fulfill ESC rights. The nature and scope of rights and obligations under the ICESCR Economic, social and cultural rights have traditionally been referred to as ‘second generation’ rights, a reference to their later conceptual development. Core civil and political rights, such as freedom from slavery and equality before the law, have been advanced and clarified through hundreds of years of jurisprudence and are thus presumed to be precise and enforceable. By contrast, ESC rights, with the exception of a handful of labor-related rights, have a more recent history, having been first recognized in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and then given greater specificity in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and other core human rights treaties.3 A consequence of this history—fuelled further by the ideological conflict between the East and West during the Cold War, which resulted in the drafting of separate covenants for civil and political rights and ESC rights in the 1960s—has been to view ESC rights as vague, imprecise and unenforceable.4 The long-standing perception that ESC rights were qualitatively different from civil and political rights reflected their limited normative elaboration through the courts and international human rights bodies in comparison to civil and political rights.5 However, much has changed over the past two decades to remedy this imbalance. The concluding observations on state reports and the general comments adopted by the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights have provided 2