A/71/302
Rapporteur is of the view that raising awareness of rights -holders by strengthening
participatory processes can lead to greater ownership, more involvement in
operations and maintenance and improved sustainability of sanitation and water
services. 18
2.
Conditionalities in development cooperation
34. Although part of the literature on conditionalities in development cooperation
identifies positive and negative outcomes, 19 there is a relevant body of research in
the water and sanitation sector that highlights the negative aspects of imposing
conditionalities. Various types of conditionalities, including ex ante or ex post,
policy-based, output-based and tied aid, are commonly used in development
cooperation projects in the water and sanitation sector. For example, a funder could
condition aid for a collective water supply system on the raising of tariffs paid by
users, a policy of full-cost recovery or the privatization of service provision. There
is a growing call to end those practices in the interest of ensuring country
ownership. For example, the intergovernmental International Conference on
Freshwater declared that private sector participation should not be imposed on
developing countries as a conditionality for funding, and that priority should be
given to catalysing other forms of financing, building capacity and targeting the
poor, especially in rural areas. 20 The Special Rapporteur received several statements
in response to the above-mentioned questionnaire that reinforced such calls.
35. Civil society organizations stressed that implementing development
cooperation in the water and sanitation sector does not only mean making financial
arrangements, but also establishing constructive relationships that coordinate to
produce regionally and culturally specific policy and programme frameworks.
Those affirmations embody serious, well-founded concerns that the orientation of
some projects and programmes in the sector continue to be towards profit-based
priorities. Civil society organizations also called for both funding and partner States
to be responsible for the adverse effects of development cooperation projects on
human rights. For example, when conditionalities imposed by funders requiring
full-cost recovery through tariffs have raised the cost of access to water and
sanitation services and cut off recourse for affected residents to petition those
measures, civil society may rightly criticize public authorities for not protecting
users from the adverse impact of unaffordable services, as well as the funder for
facilitating the creation of such circumstances.
3.
The human rights to water and sanitation in State and multilateral agency policies
36. The available general policy documents of the main funding States and
multilateral funders show that in most cases they implicitly recognize some of the
human rights principles, including equality and non -discrimination, access to
information, participation and accountability, in their policy frameworks for
development cooperation. In general, a number of human rights principles are
accepted and some funding agencies use compatible indicators and similar
__________________
18
19
20
16-13590
See WHO, UN-Water Global Analysis and Assessment of Sanitation and Drinking-Water
(GLAAS) 2012 Report: The Challenge of Extending and Sustaining Services (Geneva, 2012).
Svea Koch, “A typology of political conditionality beyond aid: conceptual horizons based on
lessons from the European Union”, World Development, vol. 75 (November 2015).
See Summary of the International Conference on Freshwater, held in Bonn, Germany from 3 to
7 December 2001, available from www.iisd.ca/crs/water/SDH20/sdvol66num5.html.
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