Foreign Investment, Law and Sustainable Development: A Handbook on Agriculture and Extractive Industries
Publisher: Lorenzo Cotula (IIED)
Date: 2013
Topics: Economic Recovery, Extractive Resources, Renewable Resources
Countries: Cambodia, Chad, El Salvador, Indonesia, Liberia, Mali, Peru, Philippines
This handbook is about how to use law to make foreign investment work for sustainable development. It aims to provide a rigorous yet accessible analysis of the law regulating foreign investment in low and middle-income countries – what this law is, how it works, and how to use it most effectively. The main target audience is government and civil society in low and middleincome countries. The ambition is to provide a resource that can assist government efforts to ensure that foreign investment contributes to sustainable development, and civil society efforts to influence decisions and hold government and investors to account. The handbook may also be of use to investment lawyers interested in sustainable development.Some of the issues discussed here are relevant to all sectors of the economy but the focus is on agriculture and extractive industries. These sectors account for a large share of investment flows to many low and middle-income countries. Investment in agriculture and extractives can exacerbate pressures on natural resources, in contexts where the livelihoods and culture of rural people crucially depend on those resources.Because several legal arenas are relevant to any given investment project, the handbook takes an integrated approach that cuts across areas of law typically treated in separate literatures and by different communities of practice – including investment treaties, extractive industry legislation, land tenure, human rights norms, environmental legislation and tax law. For both government and civil society, strategic use of a variety of legal tools is critical in harnessing the full potential of law.