Rethinking International Investment Governance

IISD’s Investment team leads international efforts to rethink international investment law and policy. Our multi-year research and policy project Rethinking International Investment Governance explores how to move from the current, outdated investment regime to one that is fair, inclusive, and aligned with the urgent economic, social, climate, and technological issues facing governments today.

The Rethinking International Investment Governance project spans the key investment policy instruments, launching in-depth research and innovative solutions across international investment treaties, national investment laws, and investor-state contracts.

The research feed into a range of activities and outputs, in which we develop the ideas with the international investment community and together turn them into concrete policies. This includes events, webinars, government workshops, policy briefs, videos, articles, and media commentary.

In June 2025, we also launched a public consultation, inviting policy-makers, investors, experts, academics, and other investment stakeholders to contribute to the rethinking of investment treaties in line with their priorities. 

Rethinking International Investment Treaties

Over the last decade, investment treaties—agreements regulating investment between two or more states—have come under increasing scrutiny. Particularly, the ISDS system entrenched in over 2,000 treaties is in the spotlight, with citizens and governments alike rejecting a model that can obstruct climate, social, and environmental progress. In a high-profile example of this trend, the European Union, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and others have left the Energy Charter Treaty, which has generated more claims by fossil fuel investors than any other treaty.  

Several regional and multilateral processes, including at the United Nations, have been launched to address the glaring need for investment treaty reform. Now, it is critical that investment policy-makers continue to seek ambitious reform, so these initiatives can deliver fundamental change rather than cosmetic adjustments to the existing model.

This is the backdrop to the second report in our series, Rethinking Investment Treaties, published in May 2024, which explores how an alternative treaty system tailored to the challenges of our time would look, what policy problems treaties should seek to solve, and how they could help solve them. 

The paper initiates a conversation on how treaties could be redesigned to improve international cooperation on investment governance, align financial flows with the Paris Agreement, ensure that investments are aligned with the public interest, and promote strong human rights and environmental standards in investment projects. 

Since then, we have advanced the conversation through public webinars and sessions at the 2024 Investment Policy Forum, and for several months in 2025, we sought input on policy priorities and design from a wide range of international investment stakeholders through a public consultation.

We published the findings from the consultation in a summary report in March 2026. The consultation suggests that investment treaties should be redesigned to focus more on ensuring investments deliver genuine public goods—which is not the case with the current model focused on shielding foreign investors—and to better interact with national laws for settling disputes between investors and states.

Rethinking National Investment Laws 

National investment laws are a critical tool for governments to channel foreign investment toward sustainable development and public interest priorities. However, the vast majority of investment laws today fail to deliver on their promise due to a lack of awareness of the functions they can serve, misguided starting points (such as governments granting ineffective tax incentives), and widespread granting of outdated investor–state dispute settlements (ISDS).  

The first report of the series, Rethinking National Investment Laws, published in July 2023, addresses this knowledge gap by unpacking the evolution, functions, and potential of national investment laws. It provides a guide for decision-makers to understand and reform national investment laws to meet economic, social, and climate challenges and tailor them to domestic policy priorities. 

In 2026, we published a complementary policy brief unpacking dispute resolution through national investment laws—one of the seven functions identified in our flagship report—in more detail and proposing policy steps to support governments' efforts to establish fair investor-state dispute resolution in their jurisdictions.

Since the launch of our flagship 2023 report, we have supported change in line with its recommendations, including through webinars, government workshops, and sessions at the 2023 and 2024 Investment Policy Forums.

Rethinking Investment Contracts

Investor-state contracts—agreements between governments and investors—receive the least attention from the public, policy-makers, and media among the core investment policy tools. Partly due to this lack of transparency, contracts are prone to reflecting the power imbalance between developing countries and foreign investors, regularly leading to limited public benefits from investment projects. 

In 2026, we published a practical policy brief on how governments can understand, negotiate, and design investor-state contracts for sustainable development. We will follow up with more extensive research in the coming years. With the ongoing multilateral reform of investment treaties, it will become increasingly important to match this progress with contract reform—to ensure that advancements made on protecting public policy space through treaty reform is not jeopardized through outdated investor-state contracts.