About
Author, Blog, Methodology & Contact
The Author/Founder
Ms. Diana Kanyuithia
Investment Governance Reform Specialist | PhD Researcher in International Economic Law | Focused on Sustainability Integration in African Regional Contexts
Background
Diana Kanyuithia is a legal scholar and policy analyst specialising in international investment law, investment governance, and sustainable development. Her work examines how legal and institutional frameworks structure foreign investment, shape state regulatory space, and affect environmental protection and community interests, with particular attention to developing economies in the Global South.
Her work is informed by over eight years of public-sector legal practice within Kenyan government institutions, including roles under the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock Development and the Ministry of Investment, Trade and Industry. In these settings, she served as an in-house legal and regulatory officer, handling issues spanning investment oversight, commodity trade governance, regulatory compliance, and institutional policy design. This experience grounds her research and policy analysis in the administrative, legal, and political realities of how investment frameworks are designed, implemented, and contested within the state.
She is currently pursuing a PhD in Law at the University of Portsmouth, UK, where her doctoral research focuses on aligning investment governance frameworks with human rights and the Sustainable Development Goals in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania. Her scholarship interrogates the interaction between international investment agreements, domestic legal systems, and sustainability objectives, with particular emphasis on investor–state dispute settlement mechanisms, regulatory capacity, and state accountability. Drawing on sustained engagement with government ministries, regulatory authorities, and regional institutional settings, she brings an applied understanding of the dynamics shaping investment decision-making at the intersection of development priorities, environmental protection, and fiscal constraints.
Through Rules That Move the World, she bridges academic research and policy-relevant analysis, translating complex legal doctrines into clear, institutionally grounded insights for policymakers, public institutions, researchers, and practitioners engaged in contemporary investment governance debates. The platform serves as a space for research dissemination, academic exchange, and informed policy dialogue rather than the provision of legal advice.
Her work is grounded in peer-reviewed scholarship, case analysis, and publicly available sources, with a commitment to making complex legal frameworks intelligible without diluting their analytical or normative significance.
The Platform
Rules That Move the World approaches international investment law as a system of governance rather than a neutral body of rules. It is concerned with how legal frameworks structure power, participation, and responsibility, particularly in contexts where development or investor protection is invoked to justify exclusion, marginalisation, or harm.
Much of the work begins from scepticism toward procedural reforms that promise inclusion without redistributing authority. The central question is not whether law symbolically recognises communities, but what law authorises them to do, and on what terms.
The platform engages primarily with international investment regimes, governance practices, and policy frameworks such as the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), examining how they operate within concrete institutional and regulatory settings. States are not treated as case studies for detached abstraction, but as institutional sites where law, development, and power intersect with particular intensity.
This work is written with an awareness of the limits of voice and representation. It does not seek to speak for communities affected by investment governance, but to interrogate the legal architectures that speak about them while simultaneously constraining their authority and agency.
The aim is not prescription, but clarity: to make visible the legal structures through which authority is organised, justified, and contested within contemporary investment governance.
Approach and Motivation
I approach international investment law and sustainable development from the conviction that legal frameworks should serve people, communities, and the environment, not capital alone. In the Global South, particularly in Africa, this question is especially urgent. Too often, investment rules are designed around external priorities or abstract economic models, rather than the lived realities, institutions, and aspirations of local communities.
My work is driven by the belief that legal and policy design matters. Carefully constructed governance frameworks can prevent conflict, protect environmental and public interests, and support sustainable economic outcomes over the long term. In East Africa, where land, natural resources, and regulatory authority are under increasing pressure from investment activity, questions of balance, accountability, and institutional capacity are not theoretical but immediate and consequential.
Rather than offering prescriptive solutions, this platform focuses on interrogating how investment law allocates authority, constrains policy space, and shapes development choices in practice. The emphasis is on understanding how legal frameworks operate within real institutional settings, and how they might be reimagined to support fairness, resilience, and sustainability.
Ultimately, this work is motivated by the view that investment governance in Africa should empower public institutions, respect community interests, and safeguard ecological systems, while still enabling locally grounded, durable development.
Research Orientation
The work on this platform is grounded in legal analysis that takes institutions seriously. Rather than treating investment law as a closed system of rules, I examine how legal frameworks operate within administrative, political, and regulatory contexts, and how they shape decision-making in practice.
My approach combines close reading of investment treaties, arbitration decisions, and domestic legal instruments with attention to governance structures, institutional capacity, and regulatory design. Law is analysed not only for what it says, but for what it enables, constrains, or redistributes in terms of authority and responsibility.
Comparative analysis plays an important role, particularly across African contexts. This allows patterns, divergences, and structural pressures within investment governance to be identified without assuming uniform solutions or linear development trajectories.
Throughout, the emphasis is on clarity rather than prescription. The aim is to surface the assumptions embedded in investment frameworks, to interrogate how sustainability, development, and participation are operationalised in law, and to assess the consequences of these choices for states, communities, and regulatory institutions.
This work is guided by a commitment to analytical rigour, institutional awareness, and intellectual honesty. It does not seek to offer technical fixes or ready-made solutions, but to contribute grounded, critical insight into how investment governance functions, and how it might be approached more coherently and responsibly.
Target Audience
This platform is intended for readers working at the intersection of international investment law, governance, and sustainable development, including researchers, students, policymakers, and practitioners seeking analytically grounded perspectives on how investment frameworks operate in practice.
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Strategic legal architecture begins with informed dialogue.
For advisory services, research collaboration, policy review, or expert commentary in international investment law and sustainable development, please make contact using the form below.
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