As foreign investments in agriculture and extractive industries increase pressures on land and natural resources, the effective use of legal tools, by government and advocates alike, has become an important ingredient of public efforts to ensure that foreign investment contributes to sustainable development.

This handbook is about how to use law to make foreign investment work for sustainable development. It aims to provide a rigorous yet accessible analysis of the law regulating foreign investment in low and middle-income countries – what this law is, how it works, and how to use it most effectively.

The handbook takes an integrated approach that cuts across areas of law typically treated in separate literatures – including investment treaties, extractive industry legislation, land tenure, human rights norms, environmental legislation and tax law. The main target audience is governments and advocates in low and middle-income countries.

This paper has been produced under IIED’s Legal tools for citizen empowerment project.