Law Commons^™

Legal Frameworks & Foreign Investment: A Primer On Governments’ Obligations, Kaitlin Y. Cordes, Lise Johnson, Sam Szoke-Burke, Rumbidzaii Mawen

Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment Staff Publications

Legal frameworks, and how they interact, are often invisible in the day to day. Yet they are powerful forces that influence government actions and that help to shape who benefits and who loses from foreign investment. Understanding these legal frameworks, and how they interact, is critical for anyone concerned with how foreign investment can be better harnessed to support, rather than weaken, sustainable development and human rights.

This primer provides a brief overview of host government obligations under international investment law, international human rights law, domestic law, and relevant investor-state contracts. It also highlights some of the ways in which …

Making Agricultural Investments Work For Land Users & Communities, Kaitlin Y. Cordes

Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment Staff Publications

Earlier this year, Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf made an unexpected commitment related to foreign investment in land and community land rights. In a meeting with communities who had raised concerns regarding a British company’s attempts to expand its palm oil production onto their customary land, the President effectively told those communities that they would have the right to say yes or no to further expansion, noting that the company could expand only with the affected communities’ approval.

Toward Win-Win Sustainable Development, Linda Moon

Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment Staff Publications

An interview with Lisa Sachs, Director of the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment.

Disclosure Of Foreign Direct Investment In United States Agricultural Property, Edward C. Brewer, Iii

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

On October 14, 1978, Congress passed the Agricultural Foreign Investment Disclosure Act, to require reports by foreign persons of their holdings in agricultural property. The Act directs the Secretary of Agriculture to compile data from these reports, and to analyze the effect of foreign investment upon the agricultural economy. In its 1976 survey of foreign direct investment in the United States, the Department of Commerce found that, although sufficient data existed in most areas of the economy to support an assessment of the effect of foreign direct investment, data on foreign ownership of real estate was insufficient. This was attributed …