A/HRC/61/49/Add.1 F. Role of development partners 38. Many development partners, whether individual States, or regional or international organizations, including United Nations entities, are involved in projects aimed at improving the socioeconomic conditions of the Lao people. Some development partners are also investors. The programmes are numerous and too diverse to be summarized; they target many of the areas covered by the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, particularly work, food, water and sanitation, health and education. 39. The Special Rapporteur encourages these partners to tailor their programmes in order to move away from a needs-based approach towards a human rights-based approach. This means moving from delivering services to implementing rights. This requires improving efforts to ensure, as much as possible, a participatory approach in their encounters with communities, which, as the Special Rapporteur understands, is difficult in the Lao context. 40. Some efforts have been made in this regard. The German Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ) has developed projects on free, prior and informed consent in Hin Nam No National Park; however, discussions with local populations appear to point to the use of such projects to convince them to conform to prevailing nature conservation initiatives, even pushing village residents to patrol the areas from which they were relocated, rather than to ensure the implementation of their extensive right to participation. The World Bank explained its aim of ensuring benefit-sharing and community-driven development, including around the construction of dams, and referred to the applicability of the Bank’s Environmental and Social Standard 7. The Special Rapporteur was also informed of projects carried out by United Nations entities aimed at ensuring that communities identify their needs, with an emphasis on the participation of ethnic groups and women, and with grass-roots leadership training to ensure that needs and expectations are voiced, particularly around small infrastructure projects, such as schools and cultural houses. Human rights assessments and human rights evaluations of projects at all phases are essential to ensure that the projects fulfil the purposes for which they were created. 41. In the Lao context, there is a thin line for development partners, particularly United Nations entities, between ensuring a working relationship with the Government that enables progress in the implementation of human rights on the one hand, and ensuring a working relationship at all costs and supporting projects that fall short of complying with human rights on the other. Partners have a responsibility to proceed with real human rights impact assessments, including cultural rights impact assessments. All partners must abide by their international obligations to not support projects that contribute to human rights violations, for example through assimilation policies and/or a lack of real and meaningful participation by communities affected by development projects. When development projects involve commercial enterprises, partners should ensure that the latter follow the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. IV. Ensuring a cultural rights-based approach to development: a needed shift A. Ensuring cultural rights impact assessments 42. The Special Rapporteur appreciates the Government’s objectives to reduce poverty through economic development and to improve the livelihoods of people, with high priority placed on developing access to crucial infrastructure and essential services in the areas of health, water and sanitation, food and education, in particular for remote communities. She also appreciates the commitment to nature conservation. 43. In some respects, such priorities are in line with the State’s commitments under the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. However, government policies based on people’s needs, defined mostly through a top-down approach, fall short of implementing people’s rights. For example, the designation of 70% of the national territory as forestland may be a good step towards nature conservation, but this will affect over 8 GE.26-01463