Category: News

Children’s Rights and Business: Governing Obligations and Responsibility, Gamze Erdem Türkelli (Cambridge University Press, 2020)

Children’s Rights and Business: Governing Obligations and Responsibility is a comprehensive legal inquiry into children’s rights and business. Relying on insights from various disciplines, the book illustrates the need for a children-focused inquiry on business and human rights. An analysis of the norm legalization process around the regulation of business and human rights, particularly of children’s rights follows the inquiry into existing hard and soft law regulatory frameworks on children’s rights and business. The book goes on to evaluate the promise of these frameworks in light of globalized business transactions through the lens of in-depth case illustrations on children’s rights in cotton and mineral supply chains and children’s rights in large-scale energy and transport investment projects. Finally, it concludes with a normative outlook on governing the children’s rights obligations of businesses and responsibility when violations occur, drawing on global governance approaches.

Dr. Gamze Erdem Türkelli, an LDRN member, is a Research Foundation-Flanders (FWO) appointed post-doctoral researcher at the University of Antwerp Law Faculty – Law and Development Research Group (an LDRN partner institution).

Concessionaires, Financiers and Communities: Implementing Indigenous Peoples’ Rights to Land in Transnational Development Projects, Kinnari Bhatt (Cambridge University Press, 2020)

Unrelenting demands for energy, infrastructure and natural resources, and the need for developing states to augment income and signal an ‘enterprise-ready’ attitude mean that transnational development projects remain a common tool for economic development. Yet little is known about the fragmented legal framework of private financial mechanisms, contractual clauses and discretionary behaviours that shape modern development projects. How do gaps and biases in formal laws cope with the might of concessionaires and financiers and their algorithmic contractual and policy technicalities negotiated in private offices? What impacts do private legal devices have for the visibility and implementation of Indigenous peoples’ rights to land? This original perspective on transnational development projects explains how the patterns of poor rights recognition and implementation, power(lessness), vulnerability and, ultimately, conflict routinely seen in development projects will only be fully appreciated by acknowledging and remedying the pivotal role and priority enjoyed by private mechanisms, documentation and expertise. This book:

State Governance of Mining, Development and Sustainability (Edward Elgar Publishers, 2019)

States in mineral-rich jurisdictions promote mining as a development industry, and at the same time attempt to protect people and the environment from the worst excesses of extractivism and neo-extractivism. Exploring how the State’s role in facilitating a developmental and sustainable mining industry has been defined, this book provides a world-first global, comparative analysis of the principal narratives framing mining, development and sustainability in developed and developing countries. The book illustrates how these themes are woven into technical governance areas of property, taxation, environmental assessment and mine closure. Ultimately, this book shows how the promotional and protective role of the State constituted by the advocacy, policies and laws of international financial institutions, industry associations, activists, and mineral-rich jurisdictions supports an unsustainable system of global mining production. 

Mining for Development: The Taxation Linkage (online course, edX.org)

Tax revenues are likely to be the core benefit of mineral extraction for host States. To promote mining for development, States must design mineral fiscal regimes that consider the interests of a wide range of stakeholders. Their choices have major implications for public finance, development and sustainability. This course will help policy makers, managers in private sector companies, and activists understand these choices and their implications.

This book and online course were authored by Prof. Tracy-Lynn Field of University of the Witwatersrand School of Law (an LDRN partner institution).