This book is the culmination of the International Sustainable and Ethical Investment Rules Project, a collaboration of researchers from the following five non-governmental organization (NGO) think-tanks:
- African Centre for Technology Studies, Nairobi, Kenya;
- Fundacion ECOS, Punta del Este, Uruguay;
- International Institute for Sustainable Development, Winnipeg, Canada;
- Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainability, Berkeley, California, US;
- Singapore Institute for International Affairs, Singapore.
Conceived and directed by Lyuba Zarsky and Sandy Buffett of the Nautilus Institute, the project aimed to articulate a framework for the governance of international investment that promotes economic development, environmental sustainability, human rights and global security. At the centre of such an investment regime is the fundamental principle that private investor rights must be balanced by investor responsibilities and public goods.
Project collaborators worked together in two meetings in 2001. An initial working group meeting, held in Berkeley in April, defined the objectives and sketched broad terms of reference for research papers. The second meeting brought project researchers together with a wider group of policy experts, activists and business representatives for a strategic consultation on ethics, security and international investment. Held at the Rockefeller Brother Fund’s Pocantico Conference Center in New York shortly after the September 11, 2001, bombings of the World Trade Center, the consultation generated ten-year scenarios about the governance of investment that helped to deepen the thinking behind the papers in this volume (the scenarios are available on www.nautilus.org/enviro/).
About the Authors
Monica Araya is the director of the Sustainable Americas Project at the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy and the Global Environment and Trade Study (GETS). She has worked at the Ministry of Foreign Trade in Costa Rica and as a consultant to a variety of international organizations. She is currently a PhD candidate at Yale University, where she is completing a dissertation on corporate environmental disclosure and multinational enterprises.
Sandy Buffett is a consultant on corporate social responsibility and has consulted to the OECD, US EPA, World Resources Institute and UN Environment Program. She was programme manager at the Nautilus Institute where she managed the International Investment Rules Project and the California Global Corporate Accountability Project. She is the editor of Whose Business? An Activist Guide to Corporate Responsibility for Human Rights and the Environment (Nautilus Institute, 2001]) and co-author of Leverage for the Environment: A Guide to the Private Financial Services Industry (World Resources Institute, 1998).