In order to understand the original contribution of this "new frontier in economic and social rights advocacy" proposed by Felner, it may serve to recall its origins in a joint project of the Center for Economic and Social Rights and the Central American Institute for Fiscal Studies on the right to education in Guatemala.223 Guatemala is a country with potentially many resources that could be mobilized in order to address socio-economic deprivation, in particular access to members of the large indigenous community to education. It fails however, largely as a result of a regressive taxation system that an oligarchical minority refuses to change. In such a situation, it is of vital importance to demonstrate that poor outcomes can be traced back to State policy, in order to categorize such outcomes as violations of human rights obligations and thus to improve accountability. As its background illustrates, the principal merit of Felner's approach is that it allows for a highly contextualized analysis. Even when the levels of deprivation in certain areas (such as health, education or food) are identical in countries at a same level of development, different recipes will correspond to their respective conditions. Because the demarche proposed here is inductive, taking outcomes as a departure point and moving backwards along the causality chain to identify the policies that explain the outcomes, it avoids falling into the trap of presupposing that there are certain policies valid across time and geography to address social and economic deprivation. Instead, there is room for deliberation: where one country from a group underperforms, the question must be asked why it does not succeed, and whether, given the constraints that country faces and in the light of how other countries at a same level of development address similar constraints, it could perform better. However, even placing Felner's proposals under the best possible light, it fails on one point: it does not take into account that certain obstacles that appear in a static perspective as being constraints imposed on the State, can be treated in a dynamic perspective as a State's own creation.224 This is in part compensated by Felner's proposal to develop cross-country comparisons across time, in order to show, for instance, that "while India had a much higher income growth than its neighbors in South Asia, its reduction in the child mortality rate during the same period was one of the lowest in this sub-region", or that "the proportion of urban Kenyans with access to an improved water source has been declining since 1990, in contrast to many of Kenya’s neighbors that have made progress during the same period".225 But even that would not address explicitly the question of the shifting boundary between what the State may be held responsible for in the assessment of the duty of progressive realization, and what are factors beyond its control: if India were to impute its failure to reduce child mortality to inadequate feeding practices by women, and if Kenya were to attribute its poor record on access to water and sanitation to budgetary constraints, should these factors be treated as exogenous or as endogenous? And if treated as exogenous in the short run (India, say, was surprised to find that increases in food availability did not result in improved nutritional outcomes due to poor feeding practices), should they not be treated as endogenous in the long run (after India had time to conduct information campaigns towards the population about feeding infants)? This is the challenge associated, in legal thought, with the realist school of jurisprudence, which questions the apparent neutrality of baselines which, although they may seem pre-political, in fact are a creation of the State226; it is one that still must be met in scholarship on economic and social rights. 223 See Id., at 135; and the reference to a then forthcoming report, published since, by the Center for Economic and Social Rights and the Central American Institute for Fiscal Studies (ICEFI), Rights or Privileges? Fiscal Commitments to the Rights to Health, Education and Food in Guatemala (New York and Guatemala, 2009). 224 On the danger of treating the background of legal controversies as given rather than as shaped by State action -- and shaped, in particular, by legal norms --, see among many others Laurence H. Tribe, "The Curvature of Constitutional Space: What Lawyers Can Learn From Modern Physics", Harvard Law Review, vol. 103, No. 1 (1989), 1-39; or Cass Sunstein, "Lochner's Legacy", Harvard Law Review, vol. 87, No. 5 (1987), 873-919. 225 Felner, ‘A new frontier in economic and social rights advocacy ? Turning quantitative data into a tool for human rights accountability’, cited above, at 151 (note 49) (referring to the work of the Center for Economic and Social Rights and in particular to "Factsheets" it produced respectively on India and on Kenya). 226 For contemporary revivals, see for instance, Cass Sunstein, "Lochner's Legacy", Harvard Law Review, vol. 87, No. 5 (1987): 873-919; or Laurence H. Tribe, "The Curvature of Constitutional Space: What Lawyers Can Learn From Modern Physics", Harvard Law Review, vol. 103, No. 1 (1989): 1-39. 48