The concept of sustainable development in investment arbitration: A disconnect from investment policymaking and international adjudication
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Amidst initiatives and international agreements that call for a stronger consideration of sustainable development in international investment law, there is a need to assess whether the concept has found its way in decisions rendered by investment arbitration tribunals. References to the concept of sustainable development in investment arbitration can eventually make the adjudication of investment disputes more consistent with an increasingly important aspect of the context in which the terms of international investment agreements are embedded. Have arbitration tribunals acknowledged the relevance of the concept of sustainable development when adjudicating international investment disputes? To answer this question, this article adopts an exploratory research design and relies on a content analysis of 91 decisions that include at least one reference to the term ‘sustainable development’. It argues that the use of sustainable development by tribunals is both marginal and problematic, thus showing a strong disconnect from efforts deployed in investment policymaking and international adjudication. The article proceeds in three steps. First, it focuses on international initiatives encouraging the consideration of sustainable development in investment policymaking. Second, it briefly explores the reliance on sustainable development that has emerged in international adjudication, outside investment arbitration. Third, by analysing express references to sustainable development in international investment arbitration, it shows that these decisions demonstrate a general lack of engagement with the concept in the tribunals’ findings and a failure to fully acknowledge its integrative nature.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.039 | 0.065 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.072 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.018 | 0.018 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".