A/HRC/42/38 46. Civil society should play a greater role in informing populations about the right to development and what it means for their sustainable development. 47. Regional civil society networks should integrate the right to development into their human rights advocacy and seek to mainstream it at the local level. 48. Civil society should be mobilized and international solidarity networks should be engaged so that they can adopt unified positions in international negotiations. Building stronger networks of civil society and national human rights organizations would enable stakeholders to push forward common agendas at the regional and international levels. 49. Human rights advocates should emphasize the relationship between achieving the Sustainable Development Goals and meeting core human rights commitments. The impetus provided by the Goals should be used to strengthen cooperation between the development sector and the human rights community. 50. Development banks should conduct meaningful consultations to ensure that the development priorities of the intended beneficiaries are furthered by the projects they finance. The banks should also guarantee access to information about projects they have financed before the projects are authorized. 51. Development banks and other stakeholders involved in project management and finance should create mechanisms for holding regional and international consultations in respect of projects that will have cross-border impacts. C. Financing for development and mobilizing existing resources 52. While the Declaration on the Right to Development does not expressly include a list of the financial priorities that would serve to fulfil the right to development, it does nevertheless outline the principles that should guide policy decisions at the national and international levels. For example, in the Declaration it is stated that communities should have full sovereignty over their natural wealth and resources (art. 1) and that the benefits of development should be fairly distributed (art. 2). It calls on States to take all necessary measures for the realization of the right to development and to ensure equality of opportunity for all in their access to basic resources, education, health, food, housing and employment (art. 8). In addition, at the international level, the Declaration places a duty on States to cooperate with each other, both to promote more rapid development of developing countries and to remove obstacles to comprehensive development (arts. 3 (3) and 4 (2)). 53. The present guidelines therefore address the principle that development financing should be sustainable and carried out in the interests of the intended beneficiaries. Where community resources must be utilized for broader development goals, active, meaningful and informed participation is a means through which individuals and collectives can agree on the sharing of benefits. An example of good practice in this regard comes from a country in the Asia-Pacific region, where a community was at risk of relocation due to a flood-way project proposed in the capital city. In that case, through a civil society-led consultation, community members outlined their own resettlement plan. In particular, they agreed to resettle only if they could stay close to the city because of the benefits that such proximity brought the community. In the end, the community was able to use compensation given by the Government to obtain housing on land that had previously been owned by the Government. Most importantly, however, the flood-way project was implemented only after the priorities of the community had been actively sought out. This is important because the community would be required to forfeit its own resources for the project to go forward. 54. In light of the potential harms of States’ and international organizations’ reliance on austerity programmes2 and public-private partnerships3 for resource generation, the present 2 3 8 See, e.g., Maria José Romero, “What lies beneath? A critical assessment of PPPs and their impact on sustainable development” (European Network on Debt and Development, Brussels, 2015). See, e.g., E/2013/82 and A/HRC/37/54.