2. The Sustainable Development Goals and solutions to statelessness and regional human rights mechanisms to encourage States to address statelessness,13 and the strengthening of the civil society sector in this area,14 have all contributed to establishing statelessness as a human rights issue, albeit one that still needs to be mainstreamed. Hitherto, statelessness has rarely been analysed or addressed as a development issue. Amal de Chickera, of the Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion, has offered a number of theories as to why statelessness and development have taken such an oil and water approach to each other.15 He has noted that statelessness has long been relegated to the “bottom shelf” of issues and causes, remaining largely the preserve of academic, technical and legal discussions. It is only now that its links with other disciplines and approaches, including development, are being unearthed. De Chickera has also argued that because “the development lexicon does not include the word ‘statelessness’, […] the development field can almost be excused for not noticing”.16 This lack of understanding of statelessness has led to it being rendered invisible in development contexts, as is often sadly the case for stateless people themselves. Even the United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) annual Human Development Report,17 recognised as one of the top ten sources of international development data,18 makes no mention of stateless persons, although interestingly the same report does count the number of refugees and internally displaced persons 13 14 15 16 17 18 and its partner organisations in a number of countries, UNHCR, RefWorld, Statelessness, http://www.refworld.org/statelessness.html. For a discussion of the use of these mechanisms to address statelessness see, M. Khanna and P. Brett, “Making effective use of UN human rights mechanisms to solve statelessness”, chapter 1 in this book. For example, the last five years alone have seen the establishment of regional civil society networks dedicated to statelessness in the Americas, Asia (including a dedicated network in Central Asia), Europe and Southern Africa, collectively working with more than 150 NGOs on the issue. A. de Chickera, Statelessness, Human Rights and Development: It’s time to Connect the Dots, European Network on Statelessness Blog, 8 November 2013, http://www.statelessness.eu/blog/statelessness-human-rights-anddevelopment-its-time-connect-dots. Ibid. United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Human Development Report, 2015. J. Holden, The Top 10 sources of data for international development research, The Guardian, 17 March 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/globaldevelopment-professionals-network/2016/mar/16/the-top-10-sources-ofdata-for-international-development-research. 50