The Investment Arbitration and its influence on sustainable development

Abstract

The investment arbitration has been conceived as an instrument that does not take into account the necessities of the civil society,4 understood as “the space for uncoerced human association and also the set of relational networks – formed for the sake of family, faith, interest and ideology – that fills this space”.5 This situation is caused by the fact that the investment arbitration is a system created to protect two high-income agents: States and foreign investors, excluding the rest of them, even in the cases that the decision affects them. Some people have questioned the legitimacy of these settlement of dispute mechanisms, alleging the exclusion of the civil society from a process that involves a party that should guarantee its well-being: The State6. In this way, a formal analysis about the foreign investment law can favour the interests of the foreign investors without taking into account other circumstances that merit to be considered. Seeking to solve this situation, this text pretends to show a series of different ways to analyse the foreign investment law, so it can be used as a way of supporting sustainable development.