Mavluda Sattorova, The Impact of Investment Treaty Law on Host States. Enabling Good Governance?
| Date | 01 May 2019 |
| Pages | 289-291 |
| Published date | 01 May 2019 |
| DOI | 10.3366/elr.2019.0563 |
| Author |
When confronted with the question “what is the purpose of international investment law”, the international investment community appears to have come up with further questions rather than answers. Different narratives have evolved in the last fifteen to twenty years, seeking to explain the main purpose for the conclusion of international investment agreements and to justify their existence. As Mavluda Sattorova observes in her new book, advocates of the investment treaty regime argue that its fundamental aim is to provide investors a treatment “in accordance with stronger, internationally recognised, good governance standards”; and in exchange, host states are promised capital inflows and economic development (4). However, a more recent, and different, narrative focuses instead on the virtuous effects or positive spill-overs of investment treaty law on the host state's good governance practices. Sattorova adopts the good governance narrative as the conceptual framework for this monograph (chapter two), and explores its legal foundations in order to ascertain its overall coherence. In so doing, she proposes important questions that juxtapose theory and reality: i.e. the theoretical ideals of the investment treaty regime to the reality of transforming standards of investment protection into applicable principles of governance used by government officials. She asks, for instance: what language does the good governance narrative mask; whether changes in domestic governance can at all be effectuated through international investment norms (10), and “what ‘good governance’ means for those governed” (10). While the book engages with these questions through doctrinal and comparative analysis, one of the novel contributions of this monograph is Sattorova's empirical approach to addressing the question of how host states are actually responding to, and modifying their behaviour, in relation to investment treaty law (chapter three).
In chapter two the author engages with good governance narratives developed in the context of investment treaty law and arbitration. The language of good governance in investment treaty practice, she observes, is, by necessity, going to be linked to the interpretation of standards of protection enshrined in international investment agreements; in particular the fair and equitable treatment standard. An important portion of the academic literature on this point has criticised the broad interpretation of the fair and equitable treatment...
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