Sustainable Development Criteria for Investment

On 22 February, ICTSD and the World Economic Forum organised a workshop on “Sustainable Development Criteria for Investment” as part of its 2016/2017 series of investment policy dialogues, with the support of the Government of the Netherlands. These dialogues follow on from the work done by the E15 Initiative Task Force on Investment Policy, which paved the way for the discussions.

The dialogue sought to identify sustainability characteristics of FDI, which may be beneficial for host-country governments seeking guidance on the type of inward investment to attract; home-country governments wishing to support sustainable outward investment; and arbitrators in investor-state disputes who are increasingly called upon to account for the sustainable development impact of investment. Discussions charted the current landscape of existing sustainability criteria and then considered stakeholder and regional perspectives as a means to complement or build upon them. The workshop aimed to be supportive of the G20 priority of green finance, launched under the Chinese Presidency and acknowledged by the German Presidency as an area of continued importance.