Legal dimension of trade and investment impact assessments: the normative framework of sustainability

As recently made apparent in the food and financial crisis, deficiencies in regulatory frameworks have created a growing interest in adequate regulatory instruments assuring overall societal stability while seeking economic profit. The project aims to contribute to this balancing task by developing normative criteria for the best practices in informed decision making. The project draws on the concept of sustainable development that was adopted by the UN General Assembly as a development strategy during the 1990s. The concept demands to efficiently deal with interdependent, potentially complementary but also conflicting, economic, social and environmental, short and long term interests and objectives in a given regulatory field, exploiting synergies and counterbalancing trade offs. Normatively, the concept builds upon principles and standards that have been established during more than 50 years of UN development cooperation. The project aims to critically assess current impact assessment methodologies which reflect the idea of sustainable development (e.g. used by the EU, the OECD and the World Bank Group) and seeks to elaborate on model assessment patterns with regard to foreign direct investment. It also looks at the methodology of standard and indicator identification, and instruments of implementation. To test the developed criteria with regard to a specific policy field, the project will analyse SIA with regard to foreign direct investment (FDI) in agrofuels.