Description
Efforts to reform investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) are well underway in Working Group III of the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL WGIII). Participants have made progress on a number of fronts and will ultimately reshape the way in which investment chapters in preferential trade agreements and investment treaties are enforced. In this paper, we examine state participation and ask who speaks most on the negotiating room floor. Combining quantitative analyses of speaking points and a content analysis of legal documents, we find that investor home-states continue to command the spotlight in formal discussions on the future of the ISDS system. However, their interests are not equally reflected in draft statutes and provisions. There appears to have been considerable room for multilateralism at the margins due in part to a handful of influential home country reformers and new alliance building. The politics of multilateralism of trade policy therefore continues to change as global south countries leverage formal sites of diplomacy to resist the inter-state hierarchies that drove consensus building in the past.
