Volume 4, Issue 1

Chinese investment in Africa has increased rapidly over the past two decades. This paper asks how, why, whether it is good or bad, and what Africans can do about it. On how, the Chinese government actively promotes liberal investment regulations in Africa. It also keeps close contact with major Chinese enterprises investing on the continent. On why, the motivation behind Chinese investment in Africa is self-interested: China primarily wants Africa’s natural resources. China also seeks to access local markets, and to capitalize on Africa's preferential trade access to the West. On whether Chinese investment is good or bad for Africa, African economies are growing at unprecedented rates, partly due to Chinese investment. This paper highlights seven reasons Chinese investment contributes to African growth. But it also reveals three drawbacks to Chinese investment in Africa. On what Africans can do about Chinese investment, Africa can capitalize on it by proactively promulgating a tax code that promotes African development. The tax code's goal should be to use Chinese investment and natural resource revenues to develop Africa’s manufacturing sector through infrastructure, special economic zones, and education. Thus, this paper maintains that although Chinese investment in Africa is not unambiguously advantageous, it presents major opportunities for African development.

On 11 December 2001, China officially became a Member of the World Trade Organization (WTO) after years of negotiations. The paper shows how a major developing country has used the WTO dispute settlement system by examining China’s participation in the WTO dispute settlement mechanism from its entry through 31 December 2010. It provides a comprehensive analysis of the WTO dispute cases in which China has participated as a complainant, a respondent, or a third party.

The importance of human rights in development is gaining prominence. In concrete settings and contexts, however, contesting development practices with human rights normative standards is controversial. The article outlines this controversy and complexity in Indonesia. It highlights tensions in human rights regulatory frameworks and development policies pertaining to housing and promotions of healthy environments. The main challenge faced by human rights to address development in Indonesia is to understand the complexity of state and market relationship, in designing the process and mitigating the negative impacts of development. Such a complexity is argued to shape the enforcement and susceptibility of international and national human rights laws.

Tied aid consists in tying development aid to the purchase of products from the donor country. Under a tied aid regime a developed country grants funds to a developing partner country on condition that the donation is spent by the latter through procurement procedures in which only companies established in former are able to tender. Is such practice compatible with the “right” to development as currently defined in international law? Moreover, what are the implications of tied aid on the principles of free trade and competition as affirmed in WTO and EU law? Leaving aside the ongoing debate on aid effectiveness and the harmonization of donors’ practices, this study attempts to provide plausible answers to these not extensively researched legal questions.

The World Bank's engagement with projects involving extractive industries has not proven particularly successful. Especially in Sub-Saharan Africa, it has actually often made matters worse. Borrower countries' economies failed to grow, and corruption increased; the poor did not benefit from the revenues that were generated. This paper assesses the complex legal and institutional framework of the World Bank project that many hoped would change this bleak record: in the highly publicized and controversial Chad-Cameroon Pipeline Project, the Bank catalyzed the largest private investment in the history of Sub-Saharan Africa. This model project featured new and untested contractual, statutory, institutional and fiscal mechanisms which were intended to make Chad's oil revenues transparent and compel the Government of Chad—one of the world's poorest—to expend its oil revenues on areas consistent with the project's agreed poverty reduction objective, such as education and health. Despite these heroic measures, in 2008 the revenue allocation program collapsed, and the Bank's projects in Chad terminated prematurely. Not for the first time, the government of Chad had unilaterally altered the underlying laws to enable more security and military spending. Yet again, the poor had not profited from the oil revenues. We analyse in this paper whether the Bank's failure in the Chad-Cameroon Pipeline Project was due to specific errors in the framework of contracts, laws and institutional structures the Bank deployed—errors which could, in theory, be taken as lessons for a future project making use of an improved revenue allocation system—or whether generally the Bank's entire concept of contractually imposing a revenue allocation system is flawed, such that any attempt to revive such a system on another occasion is misguided and futile.

Recent development challenges highlight a pressing need to re-evaluate whether the post-World War II behemoths of multilateral development finance are up to the tasks being demanded of them today. The institutions that dominate the current order, the United Nations (“UN”) and the World Bank, are undergoing a crisis of confidence as the world’s development aid donors engage in an ongoing quest to find alternatives to them. This quest takes the form of setting up numerous funds narrowly tailored to finance specific, narrowly-defined needs. Examples of these funds include the Global Environment Trust Fund (GEF) and the Global Fund to Fight HIV Aids, Malaria and Tuberculosis. The Climate Change Fund, proposed in the December 2009 Copenhagen Accord (and recently renamed the Green Climate Fund), is poised to follow this approach. This ad hoc special purpose fund approach lacks a coherent, unifying vision of how to meet today’s development challenges. The funds that have been created fill a need but suffer from several deficits, ranging from governance gaps and lacunae in accountability, to high transaction costs and uncertain status in the international political and legal order. These deficits generate new risks and costs for the international aid architecture. In this Article, I argue that the time has come to re-design the interrelationship between these special purpose funds and the UN and the World Bank so that these funds can operate in sync with these institutions rather than as bypasses of them.

Tenuous land access contributes to food and livelihood insecurity, and fuels conflicts in many rural societies. In such cases, the ability of government legal institutions to structure and ultimately transform the conflict depends not just on the adoption of laws favorable to progressive land redistribution, but also the effective implementation of those laws in the face of elite influence in local government. This paper presents a case study of an identity-based social movement for Outcastes in India (the Navsarjan Trust) struggling to bring about the successful implementation of land redistribution laws in Gujarat, India. I contend the Dalit land movement recognizes outcomes of state policy as products of caste struggles within a nested hierarchy of local government institutions. I argue Navsarjan’s strategy is to modify the strength of links between levels in this hierarchy in order to produce favorable results for the Dalit land rights movement. This strategy explodes the myth of human rights movements as necessarily antagonistic to government function, portraying government rather as a framework that structures social struggle.