Fiddlers on the roof? International organisations in the international investment agreement regime as traditional global governance

The main elements of global investment governance include decentralised networks of thousands of international investment agreements (IIAs) and ad hoc investor-state dispute settlement tribunals. Nevertheless, a handful of international organisations (IOs) participate in this IIA regime, striving to shape its rules and direction. This chapter seeks to assess their role in context, taking into account recent theoretical insights regarding possible flexible and informal modes of global governance, such as experimentalism, orchestration, and public–private partnerships. After mapping several modes of governance, we examine and compare the role of two United Nations (UN) bodies, the UN Conference on Trade and Development and the UN Commission on International Trade Law, in the IIA regime. We find that they play important parts, but mostly in traditional IO capacities, such as the collection and dissemination of information, policy advice, training and technical assistance, and forums for inter-state negotiations and consensus-building. The functions of these IOs fit more comfortably with traditional IO roles of coordination and centralisation, rather than experimentalist and orchestrational governance.