2019 Reports

Alternatives to Investor-State Dispute Settlement

Johnson, Lise; Guven, Brooke S.; Sachs, Lisa E.

Proponents often explain support for international investment agreements (IIAs) for their ability to: (1) promote investment flows; (2) depoliticize disputes between investors and states; (3) promote the rule of law; and (4) provide compensation for certain harms to investors – objectives of varying degrees of importance to multinational enterprises, home states, host states, and other stakeholders.
While each of these objectives may seem desirable, it is important to consider what exactly they mean and whether IIAs are optimally tailored to achieve them.

This two-part series aims to consider just that. In the first blog installment, we asked of investor-state dispute settlement: "What Are We Trying to Achieve? Does ISDS Get Us There?"

To follow up, in this Working Paper we’ve considered a number of alternative tools that, when used alone or in combination, might better serve the above objectives as well as the goals of sustainable development more generally.