A/HRC/45/11 9. The year 2020 also marks a juncture that points to the continued need to advocate for water and sanitation as human rights but, at the same time, to move beyond advocacy and to highlight the challenges in their implementation. It is necessary to move towards concrete steps to realize the human rights to water and sanitation. Those rights are reflective of the basic needs of humans and, therefore, are intuitive at first glance. For their full realization, an understanding of the in-depth substantive dimensions behind the intuitive understanding is essential, but unfortunately not yet widely shared. Throughout the campaign, the Special Rapporteur highlighted some of the substantive aspects, which he analysed in depth in his thematic reports. As a continuation of the campaign, which built bridges between the conceptual and theoretical aspects of the human rights to water and sanitation and their practical implementation on the ground, the Special Rapporteur highlights in the present report specific examples of those bridges. III. Human rights as a driver 10. A human rights-based approach to water and sanitation entails identifying the attributes of access to water and sanitation and identifying groups in vulnerable situations who do not have adequate access to water and sanitation. Such a rights-based approach further entails inquiring about the root causes of the attributes and the structural determinants, or drivers, of the exclusion. To do so, human rights is used as an analytical lens to identify the structural causes of inequalities in access to water and sanitation and other violations, including non-realization, of the human rights to water and sanitation. A. Development cooperation Special Rapporteur’s reports focused on development cooperation11 1. 11. In international cooperation and assistance, States, United Nations agencies, international development partners and funder agencies are important actors that support States in realizing the human rights to water and sanitation. In the past decade, development cooperation in the water and sanitation sector has gained more attention internationally. With the adoption of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development in 2015, development cooperation has been explicitly considered as a means of implementation for targets 6.1 and 6.2 of the Sustainable Development Goals, on water and sanitation. This increased attention is reflected in trends in aid commitments: during the 2010–2018 period, disbursements from States and multilateral organizations increased from $7.4 billion to $9.8 billion.12 This increase in water and sanitation commitments has slightly shifted the proportion of development cooperation allocated to water and sanitation with respect to other development priorities, from 4.6 per cent in 2010 to 4.8 per cent in 2018. 12. At the outset of his term, the Special Rapporteur noted his plan to reinforce the need to incorporate the content and principles of the rights to water and sanitation into State policies and programmes and to facilitate opportunities for United Nations agencies, international development partners and donor agencies to coordinate with States, service providers and civil society in the common goal of eliminating inequalities and realizing the human rights to water and sanitation for all. 13 The Special Rapporteur further notes that his inspiration for the two reports on development cooperation came from attending international conferences such as World Water Week, where he saw that funders had strong voices and a strong interest in water, sanitation and hygiene but were having conversations without any reference to human rights. In the two reports, the Special Rapporteur addressed that gap and explored ways in which the development process could include the human rights framework. 13. In the reports, the Special Rapporteur uses the term “development cooperation” to highlight the relevance of both components: “development” as the purpose of this kind of 11 12 13 A/71/302 and A/72/127. Data from the Creditor Reporting System of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Available at http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?QueryId=58195. A/HRC/30/39/Add.1, para. 10. 5