AV¶ÌÊÓƵ

Equipe:

• Thomas Schultz, Principal Investigator, Professor at the Law Faculty of the AV¶ÌÊÓƵ

• , Postdoctoral Researcher, PhD in Law

• , PhD Candidate in Political Science (viva June 2025) - note: Leopoldo was subsequently admitted into the world’s most prestigious postdoctoral programme in international political economy, at Princeton.

• , PhD Candidate in Law

We aim to answer the following questions: How does investment arbitration change in response to societal, governmental, and academic criticism? In which way, and by which processes, does investment arbitration change, and how should it?

Background: Investment arbitration is the object of widespread and growing criticism, in academic circles, political statements, and social demonstrations of up to 250’000 protestors. It is accused of significantly underperforming in its economic function of accelerating economic growth and of having important side-effects harming other societal values, by interfering in the protection of, e.g., the environment, public health, and human rights. Yet, while some important changes have occurred, the system has not undergone any meaningful transformation in reaction to the criticism. A mismatch exists between the criticism and the adaptation of the regime of investment arbitration: the question is whether the investment arbitration regime has become immune to societal attempts to change it.

Objectives: In this project, at the same time theoretical and based on the generation of rich empirical data, our objective is to provide a precise and comprehensive understanding of the system’s dynamics of change in response to the criticism. We evaluate the process of change as involving and affecting a plurality of actors and model their interaction. By doing so, we enable a better understanding of, first, possible ways to reduce the mismatch between criticism and adaptation and, second, of the likelihood of success of various reform projects.

Methods: We ground our understanding of the system’s costs and benefits in the available evidence and carry out several additional empirical studies on key points. We ground the model of the system’s dynamics in an analysis of the incentives and capabilities to change the regime of the regime’s key actors, including the manners in which changes would redistribute costs and benefits and thus provoke further changes in reaction from affected actors.

Organisation: The project proposes a sequence of interconnected interdisciplinary studies aimed at understanding the dynamics of change in global investment policy. Taken together, these studies will allow for the development of a solid theoretical model to account for these dynamics, unpacking their implications for a wide array of actors.

Significance: The results of the proposed studies will provide new bases for policy work at the national and international level, as well as for the current stream of scholarly work calling for the reform of investment arbitration. The significance of the project, which is interdisciplinary in nature, derives from the crucial economic and political role of investment arbitration noted above and from the need to empirically inform current treaty negotiations and other political agendas in the area.