Law, Sustainable Development, and Foreign Financing of Infrastructure: Legal Safeguards for Economic, Environmental and Social Sustainability of Foreign Funded Infrastructure Projects in the Philippines

This monograph, authored by Dr. Johanna Aleria P. Lorenzo (JSD, Yale), a supervising legal officer (2019-2020) at the U.P. Law Center’s Institute of International Legal Studies, highlights the positive and complementary roles of domestic and international law in ensuring the economic, environmental, and social sustainability of infrastructure projects and the international economic agreements underlying them.

It recommends reforms to the current Philippine legal and regulatory framework governing foreign-funded infrastructure projects – such as requiring the conduct of a sustainability impact assessment – based on international law, multilateral standards and global best practices that integrate environmental, social, and human rights concerns in economic decision-making and activities.

As the initial output of the Institute’s International Economic Law research program, this project in part responds to the invitation by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) for the academic community to assist in addressing the urgent need to draw the attention of policymakers to the issue of sustainable infrastructure and its centrality within the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Developments.