Integrating Sustainable Development in International Investment Law by Manjiao Chi

Part I 
The sustainable development
challenge for IIAs

1 Sustainable development and IIA

The ideal of sustainable development enjoys a long history and has gained a
status comparable to that of democracy, freedom and justice: it is universally
desired, differ ently understood, complex in scope, extremely difficult to establish
and impossible to do away with. Today, sustainable development has evolved
into a com prehensive concept that captures environmental, economic and social
dimensions, and has become an unavoidable paradigm underpinning almost all
human actions and pervading the environmental, social, political, economic and
cultural discourses from the local through to the “global” level by both the public
and private sectors.
Sustainable development has been widely recognized in a number of interna-

tional treaties, especially in international environmental treaties (IETs). In
international investment law, sustainable development has also gradually pene -
trated into modern IIAs, despite the fact that IIAs are originally designed for
investment protection. As a matter of fact, an investment–development
relation ship that is evolutive in nature can be identified in international
investment law.
To provide necessary background information, this chapter briefly reviews the
evolution and legal status of sustainable development, the historical develop -
ment of IIAs, as well as the evolutive investment–development relationship in
international investment law.
The concept and legal status of sustainable development 
The concept of sustainable development is intrinsically evolutive, and is
adaptive to the circumstances according to the time, the area or the subjects
concerned. Although it originated from international environmental law
discourse, today it has evolved from the original meaning of sustainable use of
natural resources, to a concept with more anthropocentric and socioeconomic
substance. Despite the universal acceptance of this concept, whether and to
what extent sustainable development could amount to a legal norm is not a
settled issue.

Integrating Sustainable Development in International Investment Law by Manjiao Chi