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This chapter considers the experiences of practitioners who work inside and around the international human rights legal system. Those insider views—many of them from lawyers who have one foot in academia and another in the practical efforts of nongovernmental organizations and international legal bodies—point to many similar findings. They see a system in which legal obligations and membership have expanded much faster than the capacity to yield practical improvements in human rights. According to many of these practitioners, the legal system has been extremely successful at declaring universal values, yet has fallen quite short in practical implementation. The chapter discusses some good news regarding the impact of international treaties and legal customs on constitutions, national law, and domestic politics, as well as some barriers to a more effective human rights legal system; for example, insider politics and underused or ineffective complaints mechanisms.

This chapter analyses the environmental performance standards utilized by international financial institutions working with the private sector, with a view to suggest further means to strengthen their application and integration in contractual loan agreements. In addition, the role of international financial institutions' complaints mechanisms is also considered as avenue for victims of corporate environmental damage. Once again, the specific case of the International Finance Corporation is analysed in detail to formulate recommendations that may be of interest for other international financial institutions.

This chapter assesses the oversight role of human rights monitoring bodies: the United Nations and in particular the Security Council, and the OECD national contact points. It also addresses the question of their increased cooperation. Recommendations are then formulated to enhance the impact of international organizations' monitoring activities, whether direct or indirect, upon private companies. The importance of systematically documenting corporate harmful conducts and the actual limits of home and host States in controlling, preventing or responding to them is underscored. So is the need to ensure closer collaboration between the different international organizations currently monitoring the environmental conduct of private companies through exchange of information, joint investigations and follow-up actions.

This chapter explores the accountability challenges of Frontex, a supranational agency with operational character which exercises executive powers with far-reaching impacts on individuals. It investigates the administrative mechanisms and internal procedures through which responsibilities for alleged fundamental rights abuses are linked to decisions, actions, or inactions by the various EU and national authorities participating in Frontex operations. The chapter points out that Frontex has neither Board of Appeals (BoAs), nor anything that closely resembles it. Such state of affairs reflects the nature of EU cooperation in the area of external border management, which combines intergovernmental and supranational logics of allocation of operational responsibility, without a coherent and effective oversight and accountability system.

Sourcing information about the outcomes of projects from local people might provide an alternative pathway to better performance and more selective decisions about the allocation of development assistance. This chapter assesses whether the establishment of citizen complaint mechanisms has provided a pathway to selectivity in allocation of environmentally risky projects. It demonstrates that two conditions must hold to achieve more selective allocation: (1) civil society groups must be available to provide monitoring; and (2) they must provide monitoring about lending that is subject to high levels of oversight from donor countries. Civil society groups are more likely to be available as monitors when there is more organization around environmental issues in a country and where political freedoms are protected. Donor countries have more oversight over concessional lending resources that require regular replenishments. These results demonstrate that harnessing information from civil society groups can promote accountability for performance and selectivity.

In this chapter, a comparative review of over regional trade and investment agreements (RTAs) provides analysis of how innovative mechanisms to address sustainable development issues can be interpreted in the context of a free trade agreement (FTA). The chapter explains how the measures identified through the volume’s analytical framework (typology) may assist Parties to a trade or investment agreement to deliver on a commitment to sustainable development in their treaty. The chapter then explains and analyses how States are starting to signal a commitment to sustainable development in carefully worded introductory provisions in their RTAs and investment treaties. It then moves to examine innovative operational provisions from bilateral or regional economic treaties discussed in this volume which explicitly mention sustainable development. The provisions are examined in light of their potential to respond to the three tensions identified earlier in this volume, and the corresponding rationale and opportunities for integration identified, including the potential interpretations of the mechanisms in light of the integration principle. Finally, the chapter considers examples highlighted from the survey of trade and investment liberalization impact assessments discussed earlier in this volume: sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) measures, government procurement and investment liberalization, before exploring more advanced and innovative new measures.

Until the foundation of Frontex (and the current EBCG), operational border management was subject to limited inter-governmental cooperation between the Member States. Therefore, the introduction of a supranational structure for the coordination of control and surveillance activities constitutes a crucial development. The agency has undergone profound changes, reflected in a substantial expansion of funds, human resources, and powers since becoming operational back in 2005. This chapter analyses the structure, role, and functioning of the current European Border and Coast Guard (as Frontex is now named). Special attention is paid to joint maritime operations carried out under the auspices of the agency, either by the Member States alone or in cooperation with third countries. These activities involve the detection and interdiction of persons at sea with important ramifications for their fundamental rights related to access to protection. The impact of these initiatives on refugee flows is specifically addressed in a separate section.

This chapter presents the principal-agent framework that will serve as the basis for the empirical research in the following chapters. Although a great deal of theoretical development has helped explain why international organizations do not always achieve the mandates given to them by states, less research deals with the mechanisms available to states to control international organizations after delegating authority and resources. This chapter puts forward the primary theoretical argument of the book, specifically that member states are able to manage discretion and promote selectivity when they (1) generate information about the outcomes of past decisions and (2) use that information to raise the costs of making decisions that have been unsuccessful or encourage decisions that have been successful. Both steps are difficult and are likely to arise only under certain circumstances, which form hypotheses for the following chapters.

Can the allocation of aid be made compatible with achieving good development and environmental outcomes? To this day, environmental and development aid remains largely stuck in a system that focuses on the approval of projects and the disbursement of funds. This book has shown that it is sometimes possible to channel or overcome these incentives and thereby give aid more effectively. There is not a uniform response to information about results across different types of projects and multilateral development banks. Information about performance must combine with incentives to be selective from donor countries, civil society groups, and recipient countries to change allocation decisions. This chapter discusses the implications of this result for the future of environmental and development assistance, including the creation of the Green Climate Fund and reforms to the allocation procedures at the multilateral development banks. Shifting focus from selectivity practiced at the level of countries to selectivity practiced within the portfolios of countries offers a way to give aid more effectively.