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This text offers the first social-scientific account of investor-state arbitration, and examines the intellectual, political, and economic forces behind its rise.

Advance consent clauses are the crux of modern bilateral investment treaties. By giving investors direct access to arbitration against states, they make the substantive promises of the treaties credible. They are responsible for the exponential increase in the number of investor-state arbitrations. Despite the importance of advance consent clauses, fundamental international political economy questions about their origins and development remain unanswered. This paper probes why advance consent clauses were created and how they disseminated. On the basis of new archival material, I argue institutional entrepreneurship played a vital and underappreciated role in the spread of advance consent. I systematically compare the explanatory power of institutional entrepreneurship with the explanatory power of state leadership, an approach informed by existing rational choice scholarship on these clauses, across three stages in the development and spread of advance consent. Although institutional entrepreneurship and state leadership both have explanatory power, institutional entrepreneurship is dominant: states inserted these advance consent clauses only after an IO drafted and disseminated them aggressively. The organization's top officials acted as institutional entrepreneurs - attempting to shape state preferences, acting as a knowledgebroker, and encouraging convergence - in order to ensure the survival of their organization. Studying the initial spread of advance consent clauses offers powerful insights into the development of the international investment regime and suggests scholars look beyond bilateral bargaining to understand its contours.

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.

AbstractHow 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.

Stiansen's work was supported by the Research Council of Norway through its Centres of Excellence funding scheme, project number 223274 (PluriCourts). Financial support for Larsson's work was provided by the Swedish Research Council, project no. 2018-01693. ; This article summarizes insights from political science and empirical legal scholarship concerning selection and appointment of adjudicators to permanent international courts (ICs). This scholarship suggests that designers of ICs face challenging trade-offs in balancing judicial independence and accountability, as well as in promoting descriptive representation and necessary qualifications on the bench. The article considers different institutional design features related to appointment procedures: representation, reappointment, screening procedures and procedures for removing judges. Representation is discussed in a series of sections considering full or selective representation, voting rules and geographic and gender quotas and aspirational targets. Throughout, we draw on data on 24 ICs to illustrate the different appointment procedures and institutional features. ; Publisher PDF ; Peer reviewed

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.