[New publication] Investment arbitration perpetuates environmental injustice
Published 24 February 2025
By @salajean
New research sheds light on how extractive foreign investment projects affect local communities and their environment. In their chapter "Polenta and Cyanide? Investment Arbitration as Prospective Environmental Injustice in Roșia Montană", researchers Stephanie Triefus and Irina Velicu (CES-UC, ULBS) talked to people affected by these projects and found that the system used to settle foreign investment disputes often excludes local community voices.
Communities worldwide, supported by national and global advocacy networks, are vigorously fighting to protect their homes and livelihoods from extractive projects that threaten their environments. This was the case in Roșia Montană, Romania, where a grassroots movement grew into a national and international effort that stopped a Canadian-owned gold and silver mining project after over twenty years of advocacy. The project itself threatened to displace over a thousand people, destroy thousands of years of cultural heritage, demolish four mountains, and pose serious environmental risks due to the use of cyanide.
Prospective environmental (in)justice
Drawing on empirical research from the Roșia Montană case in Romania, researchers Stephanie Triefus and Irina Velicu expand the theory of prospective environmental (in)justice (PEJ) to situations where communities have successfully halted a mining project. This case highlights that investment arbitration can threaten the success of grassroots movements fighting against damaging extractive projects, and prolong the “soft” extractive violence of the prospective mining project.
Investment arbitration is asymmetrical in the sense that foreign investors have strong and enforceable rights but few obligations. Those affected by investment projects are rendered invisible by the framing of investment arbitration cases as commercial disputes between only the state and the investor.
This publication is part of a growing body of research that investigates international investment law from the bottom up, centering the perspectives of affected communities and arguing for a reconceptualisation of the harms of such global legal structures.
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About Stephanie Triefus
Dr Stephanie Triefus is a Researcher at the T.M.C. Asser Instituut and the Academic Coordinator of the Netherlands Network for Human Rights Research. Her research interests include business and human rights, climate change and international economic law.
About the co-author
Dr Irina Velicu is a researcher working on political ecology and socio-environmental conflicts at CES-UC and ULBS.
