A/HRC/30/44 IIAs and their implementation suggest that the time has come to revisit the IIA regime with a view to transforming it. Such challenges include the move towards megaregional agreements and the increasing number of investor–State dispute settlement (ISDS) cases. 5. Member States and IIA stakeholders at the 2014 IIA Conference, held in connection with the World Investment Forum in Geneva in October, called upon UNCTAD to develop a road map for the reform of the IIA regime and sketched the contours of such reform. 6. A number of developments characterize the current IIA regime and set the background against which such reform would be undertaken. 7. First, the balance is gradually shifting from bilateral treaty making to regional treaty making, including through megaregional agreements, such as the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. These agreements, also known as “megaregionals”, could have systemic implications for the IIA regime: they could either contribute to the consolidation of the existing treaty landscape or create further inconsistencies through overlap with existing IIAs, including those at the plurilateral level (World Investment Report 2014). 8. Second, the second-highest number of treaty-based ISDS cases were brought against host countries in 2014. Host countries — both developed and developing — have learned that ISDS claims can be used by foreign investors in unanticipated ways, as a number of recent cases have challenged measures adopted in the public interest (World Investment Report 2014). This has sparked growing interest in reform of the investment dispute settlement system. 9. Third, an increasing number of countries are concluding IIAs with novel provisions aimed at rebalancing the rights and obligations between States and investors, as well as ensuring coherence between IIAs and other public policy objectives, in response to the recognition that inclusive growth and sustainable development need to be placed at the core of international investment policymaking (2013 and 2014 editions of the World Investment Report). UNCTAD Trade and Development Report 2014 – excerpts (pp. 46-48) In an increasingly globalizing world, no less than at the domestic level, market activity also requires a framework of rules, restraints and norms. And, no different from the domestic level, the weakening and strengthening of that framework is a persistent feature. However, there are two important differences. The first is that the international institutions designed to support that framework depend principally on negotiations among States with regard to their operation. Essentially these States must decide on whether and how much of their own policy space they are willing to trade for the advantages of having international rules, disciplines and support. Inevitably, in a world of unequal States, the space required to pursue their own national economic and social development aspirations varies, as does the likely impact of an individual country’s policy decisions on others. Managing this trade-off is particularly difficult at the multilateral level, where the differences among States are the most pronounced. Second, the extent to which different international economic forces can intrude on a country’s policy space also varies. I n particular, cross-border financial activities, as Kindleberger (1986) noted in his seminal discussion of international public goods, appear to be a particularly intrusive factor. But in today’s world of diminished political and legal restraints on cross-border economic transactions, finance is not the only such source; as chapter V notes, there are also very large asymmetries in international 40