How do actors undertake institutional design in complex systems? Scholars recognize that many international regimes are becoming increasingly complex. Yet relatively little is known about how actors ...design or redesign institutions amid this complexity. As participant-observers in the UN negotiations on investment treaty reform, we have watched state officials and other participants grapple with this question for several years. To help explain what we have observed, we conceptualize these participants as complex designers—actors who seek to design and redesign institutions within complex adaptive systems. We then formulate three emergent design principles that seem to guide their approach as they aim to create: flexible structures, balanced content, and adaptive management processes. In a dynamic era marked by unpredictability, division, and complex transnational challenges, we believe these concepts may prove to be increasingly relevant in global governance.
In recent years, several proposals by states to reform or displace investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) have gained prominence. While many factors shape which reform proposals states support, ...here we focus on one important, but often overlooked, factor: the 'insider' or 'outsider' status of the government officials who formulate states' proposals. Based on five years of para-ethnographic observation and interviews with officials involved in ISDS reform, and informed by the interdisciplinary innovation literature, we explore how individuals who have not spent their careers within the field of investment arbitration (and are perceived as 'outsiders' by those within that field) have developed more disruptive reform proposals while arbitral insiders have typically proposed sustaining reforms. We illuminate these dynamics in the ISDS reform debates with case studies of four actors: the USA, the European Union, Bahrain and Brazil.
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IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UL, UM, UPUK
Globally, 74 countries have domestic investment laws that mention investor-state arbitration and 42 of these laws provide consent to it. That is, they give foreign investors the right to bypass ...national courts and bring claims directly to arbitration. What explains this variation, and why do any governments include investor-state arbitration in domestic legislation? We argue that governments incorporate arbitration into their domestic laws because doing so was labelled 'international best practice' by specialist units at the World Bank. We introduce the concept of asymmetric diffusion, which occurs when a policy is framed as international best practice but only recommended to a subset of states. No developed state consents to arbitration in their domestic law, nor does the World Bank recommend that they do so. Yet we show that governments who receive technical assistance from the World Bank's Foreign Investment Advisory Service are more likely to include arbitration in their laws. We first use event history analysis and find that receiving World Bank technical assistance is an exceptionally strong predictor of domestic investment laws with arbitration. Then we illustrate our argument with a case study of the Kyrgyz Republic's 2003 law.
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BFBNIB, NUK, PILJ, SAZU, UL, UM, UPUK
Abstract
The ability to ensure compliance with investor-state arbitral awards is often regarded as one of the strengths of the international investment regime. Yet, there have been few systematic ...studies of compliance to assess the extent to which states have actually complied with adverse investor-state compensation awards. This paper presents a new dataset that enables empirical research on compliance with these decisions; it is the first publicly available dataset to focus on what happens after awards are handed down, and in this way complements other databases on international investment law. This paper explains the data collection process (and its associated challenges), discusses the design choices made in selecting inputs and variables, presents a descriptive overview of the data, and examines how variables can be used in future research. Moreover, various cases are used as illustrations of the challenges of collecting and coding data on post-award processes and we explore what missing data can tell us about compliance dynamics.
Plasma, the soluble component of the human blood, is believed to harbor thousands of distinct proteins, which originate from a variety of cells and tissues through either active secretion or leakage ...from blood cells or tissues. The dynamic range of plasma protein concentrations comprises at least nine orders of magnitude. Proteins involved in coagulation, immune defense, small molecule transport, and protease inhibition, many of them present in high abundance in this body fluid, have been functionally characterized and associated with disease processes. For example, protein sequence mutations in coagulation factors cause various serious disease states. Diagnosing and monitoring such diseases in blood plasma of affected individuals has typically been conducted by use of enzyme‐linked immunosorbent assays, which using a specific antibody quantitatively measure only the affected protein in the tested plasma samples. The discovery of protein biomarkers in plasma for diseases with no known correlations to genetic mutations is challenging. It requires a highly parallel display and quantitation strategy for proteins. We fractionated blood serum proteins prior to display on two‐dimensional electrophoresis (2‐DE) gels using immunoaffinity chromatography to remove the most abundant serum proteins, followed by sequential anion‐exchange and size‐exclusion chromatography. Serum proteins from 74 fractions were displayed on 2‐DE gels. This approach succeeded in resolving approximately 3700 distinct protein spots, many of them post‐translationally modified variants of plasma proteins. About 1800 distinct serum protein spots were identified by mass spectrometry. They collapsed into 325 distinct proteins, after sequence homology and similarity searches were carried out to eliminate redundant protein annotations. Although a relatively insensitive dye, Coomassie Brillant Blue G‐250, was used to visualize protein spots, several proteins known to be present in serum in < 10 ng/mL concentrations were identified such as interleukin‐6, cathepsins, and peptide hormones. Considering that our strategy allows highly parallel protein quantitation on 2‐DE gels, it holds promise to accelerate the discovery of novel serum protein biomarkers.
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BFBNIB, FZAB, GIS, IJS, KILJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, SBCE, SBMB, UL, UM, UPUK
Abstract
In recent years, several proposals by states to reform or displace investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) have gained prominence. While many factors shape which reform proposals states ...support, here we focus on one important, but often overlooked, factor: the ‘insider’ or ‘outsider’ status of the government officials who formulate states’ proposals. Based on five years of para-ethnographic observation and interviews with officials involved in ISDS reform, and informed by the interdisciplinary innovation literature, we explore how individuals who have not spent their careers within the field of investment arbitration (and are perceived as ‘outsiders’ by those within that field) have developed more disruptive reform proposals while arbitral insiders have typically proposed sustaining reforms. We illuminate these dynamics in the ISDS reform debates with case studies of four actors: the USA, the European Union, Bahrain and Brazil.
Full text
Available for:
IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UL, UM, UPUK
How do actors undertake institutional design in complex systems? Scholars recognize that many international regimes are becoming increasingly complex. Yet relatively little is known about how actors ...design or redesign institutions amid this complexity. As participant-observers in the UN negotiations on investment treaty reform, we have watched state officials and other participants grapple with this question for several years. To help explain what we have observed, we conceptualize these participants as complex designers—actors who seek to design and redesign institutions within complex adaptive systems. We then formulate three emergent design principles that seem to guide their approach as they aim to create: flexible structures, balanced content, and adaptive management processes. In a dynamic era marked by unpredictability, division, and complex transnational challenges, we believe these concepts may prove to be increasingly relevant in global governance.
Full text
Available for:
NUK, ODKLJ, PRFLJ, UL, UM, UPUK
Globally, 74 countries have domestic investment laws that mention investor-state arbitration and 42 of these laws provide consent to it. That is, they give foreign investors the right to bypass ...national courts and bring claims directly to arbitration. What explains this variation, and why do any governments include investor-state arbitration in domestic legislation? We argue that governments incorporate arbitration into their domestic laws because doing so was labelled ‘international best practice’ by specialist units at the World Bank. We introduce the concept of asymmetric diffusion, which occurs when a policy is framed as international best practice but only recommended to a subset of states. No developed state consents to arbitration in their domestic law, nor does the World Bank recommend that they do so. Yet we show that governments who receive technical assistance from the World Bank’s Foreign Investment Advisory Service are more likely to include arbitration in their laws. We first use event history analysis and find that receiving World Bank technical assistance is an exceptionally strong predictor of domestic investment laws with arbitration. Then we illustrate our argument with a case study of the Kyrgyz Republic’s 2003 law.
Full text
Available for:
BFBNIB, NUK, PILJ, SAZU, UL, UM, UPUK
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