OECD-UNCTAD-UNCITRAL Investment Treaty Conference 2025

Investment treaties have been used for decades to pursue the objectives of governments of the time: Initially, mainly investment protection and the associated expectation to encourage foreign investment. Market access was added as a further objective by some jurisdictions later. While these objectives remain important and valid today, there is a growing consensus to consider new priorities, including:

• Attracting sustainable investment to contribute to the achievement of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and mobilise private finance into climate friendly investment projects.
• Rebalancing investment treaties: framings used in earlier generation treaties can undermine today’s objectives of ensuring balance between investment protection and the right to regulate.
• Reforming investor-State dispute settlement (ISDS): concerns commonly expressed about the existing ISDS regime include inconsistency in arbitral decisions, lack of predictability, lack of transparency or increasing costs, among others.

In light of these new objectives, governments are discussing how to modernise their stock of treaties and their treaty policies. This first session presents an opportunity to exchange on the reasons that are leading an increasing number of governments and stakeholders call for a reform of investment treaties.

International Organisations have contributed in different ways to reform efforts, especially where collective action and cooperation bring greater benefits or efficiency. OECD, UNCITRAL and UNCTAD are all mobilised to deliver these benefits for governments, building on their respective institutional strengths.

Recent investment treaty designs are different from the designs of older-generation investment treaties concluded up to the early 2000s: Newer treaties increasingly seek to preserve States Parties’ policy space by providing clearer contours of substantive protections and including specific exceptions or carve-outs for legitimate public policy measures; they also endeavour to mobilise and attract sustainable investment through provisions that seek to create a conducive environment for sustainable investment at domestic level. This session aims at providing an overview of these main recent trends in the design and content of investment treaties.

Various avenues are available and have been proposed and used to reform investment treaties. Governments have considered joint interpretations and plurilateral modification instruments as part of the OECD-hosted work programme on the Future of investment treaties. UNCITRAL Working Group III considers how investor-State dispute settlement could be reformed, and can draw on experience with the Mauritius Convention. UNCTAD’s technical assistance and multilateral consensus-building through its Annual IIA Conference and World Investment Forum seeks to find a common understating on key challenges and opportunities to accelerate IIA reform.