The gap between strong political commitment to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and slow progress towards meeting them is often attributed to weak “ownership” by developing country governments. This Working Paper addresses the issue of ownership by analysing the substance of 22...

Global development goals have become increasingly used by the United Nations and the international community to promote priority global objectives. The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are the most prominent example of such goals, but many others have been set since the 1960s. Despite their...

The contemporary international investment legal regime represents the perfect embodiment of commercial cosmopolitanism. Foreign investors are protected by a thickening web of bilateral (and trilateral) investment and trade treaties that provide for expansive property rights backed by secluded,...

In debates over the democratic deficit of international institutions, transparency is usually the legitimacy criteria most easily satisfied. It is therefore a sign of the ongoing legitimacy crisis within international investment arbitration that this element has remained so elusive. While some...

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have been commonly understood as national targets. This interpretation has fostered the critique that the framework favours complacent middle-income countries, discriminates against low-income countries, provides a poor national planning tool and generally...

In Nepal, poverty is highly correlated with an individual's ethnicity, caste, language, religion or membership in an indigenous group. In the drafting of the new Constitution, many have called for inclusion of socio-economic and affirmative action rights in order to address social inequalities....