A/71/302 equity 42 and reducing poverty. As indicated previously, such goals may claim to produce outcomes that contribute to improved access to water and sanitation. However, it may result in part from a lack of concrete human rights consistency that programmes and projects are oriented to hastily pushing money out of the door (see A/70/274, para. 36). A framework with solid grounding in human rights, backed by the commitment of the staff and boards of those institutions, would provide safeguards against such risks, ensuring that loans for water and sanitation projects and programmes do not produce negative outcomes for some individuals or groups , but rather increase the realization of the rights of the most disadvantaged. 48. Moreover, it has been rightly pointed out that recent uprisings have highlighted the need for development to go hand -in-hand with the defence of human rights and freedoms. 43 It is in that vein that the African Development Bank, in its strategic plan for delivering basic water supply and sanitation to rural Africa for the period 2012-2015, explicitly referred to the realization of the human right s to water and sanitation as a component of an enabling environment for the improvement of governance in the subsector. 44 B. Evolution of development cooperation in water and sanitation 1. Development cooperation from the 1990s to 2015: “Pro-poor agendas” and development goals 49. The main frameworks for development cooperation in water and sanitation have been set by various meetings and policy documents, including the report of the International Conference on Water and the Environment, held in Dublin in January 1992, and the Agenda 21 of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in June 1992. 50. The Dublin Conference report sets out principles for action at the local, national and international levels. One of the very influe ntial principles contained therein is relatively ambiguous regarding the role of the human right s to water and sanitation in development cooperation and supports the strongly criticized policies of multilateral agencies. According to the principle, on the one hand, it is vital to recognize first the basic right of all human beings to have access to clean water and sanitation at an affordable price; on the other hand, managing water as an economic good is an important way of achieving efficient and equitable use of water resources and of encouraging conservation and protection of those resources. The definition of water as an economic good has led to a set of cooperation programmes in developing countries with radical conditionalities that impose privatizatio n of services and commodification of water, with little consideration for the human rights framework. In a sense, the second part of the principle, the “economic side”, has triumphed over the first part, the “rights side”. __________________ 42 43 44 16/24 See World Bank, “Shared prosperity: a new goal for a changing world”, 8 May 2013, available from www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2013/05/08/shared-prosperity-goal-for-changing-world. See European Union, The European Union Explained: International Cooperation and Development (Luxembourg, 2014). See African Development Bank, “Strategic plan 2012-2015: delivering basic water supply and sanitation to rural Africa”. 16-13590