resource mobilisation. They should acknowledge that, in the past decade, there has been significant change in the development financing landscape. New actors and financing sources have gained importance, including donors that are not members of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) Development Assistance Committee: NGOs, climate funds, innovative financing mechanisms and South–South Cooperation initiatives. Private capital has also become an important financing source, via a diversified instruments range, including stock shares, bonds, debt securities, concessional loans and risk-hedging instruments (including guarantees), as well as workers’ remittances and voluntary private contributions.61 These new actors’ responsibilities, as well as their activities’ impact on human rights, will require a more sophisticated human rights analysis and will also require sharpening existing legal frameworks. That said, special procedures and treaty bodies have spelt out several elements. First, countries that provide international assistance and cooperation must do so in a way consistent with human rights.62 A first step towards this has been achieved at the international level with the recognition that aid should not be determined by donors’ interests,63 but by an objective assessment of identified needs, in partnership with the recipient country.64 Development aid is expected ‘to be aligned with strategies developed at the level of the partner country’.65 Every effort should be made, at each phase of a development project, to ensure that human rights are taken into account. This would apply from the initial assessment of a particular country’s priority needs, to project design, all the way through to project implementation and final evaluation. For instance, even donor states’ purely voluntary food aid contributions should comply with principles of non-retrogression, nondiscrimination and aid-provision predictability.66 Donors must ensure their aid is coordinated and effective, and should seek information about the human rights impacts of the funds they provide. Donor countries should make measurable progress towards contributing to full human rights realisation by supporting the efforts of governments in developing countries. Second, the work by human rights monitoring bodies suggests that, where states have made commitments to provide certain assistance levels, those commitments should be met.67 Any regression in the provided level of aid (eg, calculated as official development assistance in percentage of GDP) that is not fully justified should be treated, presumptively, as a violation of states’ obligations under 61 Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean: Financing the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development in Latin America and the Caribbean. The challenges of resource mobilisation, 2017. 62 CRC, General Comment No 5 (2003) on general measures of implementation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, para 61. 63 ‘Report of the Special Rapporteur on food, Olivier De Schutter’ (2009) UN Doc A/HRC/10/5, paras 10 and 43. 64 ‘Report of the Special Rapporteur on food, Olivier De Schutter’ (2009) UN Doc A/HRC/10/5, para 10. 65 ‘Report of the Independent Expert on international solidarity, Virginia Dandan’ (2015) UN Doc A/HRC/29/35. The Independent Expert on international solidarity observed that a new chapter in the history of international cooperation was initiated in Busan (at an OECD-convened Forum on Aid Effectiveness in 2011). 66 ‘Report of the Special Rapporteur on food, Olivier De Schutter’ (2009) UN Doc A/HRC/10/5, para 41; ‘Report of the Independent Expert on debt, mission to Japan’, (2014), A/HRC/25/50/Add. 2. 67 See, eg, CESCR Concluding Observations Sweden E/C.12/1/Add.70, para 7; Concluding Observations Germany E/2002/22, para 675. 34 The Obligation to Mobilise Resources: Bridging Human Rights, Sustainable Development Goals, and Economic and Fiscal Policies   December 2017