This symposium aims to provide a platform for African voices to engage with and critique these foundational proposals. Bringing together perspectives from undergraduate and postgraduate students and early career researchers, the symposium reflects the intellectual dynamism of African youth contributing to global financing debates. These contributions underscore the necessity of ensuring Africa’s priorities and perspectives are central to the FfD4 agenda.

The opacity of the ISDS regime is not a mere oversight but rather a structural feature that prioritizes the investor-centric nature of its proceedings while giving limited consideration to the broader social, environmental, and economic impacts of investment disputes. Local communities often bear the brunt of disruptions caused by these projects, only to face the added burden of compensating the very investors responsible. Such payouts often divert public funds away from essential services, prioritizing corporate interests over the welfare of ordinary citizens. Arbitral tribunals reinforce this exclusivity by systematically excluding the voices of those most affected. While treaties and rules formally acknowledge the role of amicus curiae to lend a veneer of legitimacy, they actively stifle such participation by withholding key information and imposing procedural demands that resource-strapped local communities, academics, and civil society organizations are often unable to meet.

The GNLU Centre for Sports and Entertainment Law is please to host the 1st International Conference on Sports Law in the Global South in collaboration with the renowned T.M.C. Asser Instituut International Sports Law Centre, Netherlands.

Ghana’s debt situation underscores the critical need for comprehensive domestic legal and policy measures to enhance debt sustainability, strengthen public financial management, and ensure inclusive growth. The new Mahama administration must prioritize systemic reforms that align fiscal policies with long-term economic stability and development goals. More importantly, it must push for the expediting of the debt restructuring efforts under the G20 Common Framework. Over and above, Ghana’s experience, together with those of Zambia and Ethiopia, continue to expose the inadequacies of the Common Framework, demonstrating the need for a new comprehensive, fair, and effective sovereign debt restructuring system based in the United Nations, and that is binding on all creditors, including commercial creditors.

Afronomicslaw invites experts, scholars, policymakers, and practitioners to contribute as paid consultants to a series of quarterly reports on critical issues shaping Africa’s economic and financial landscape. These reports will take the form of policy briefs that are well-researched, written in clear and accessible language, and including actionable recommendations. These policy briefs, of at least 8,000 words, will provide in-depth analysis, evidence-based policy recommendations, and thought leadership on key thematic areas including sovereign debt, economic justice, the green transition, and sustainable development across the continent.

Dzah’s analysis succeeds in meeting the objective stated at the beginning of the book. It does so by diagnosing deficiencies of sustainable development and pointing the reader to a conceptual toolbox from which to draw ethical principles for re-imagining sustainable development. One angle of analysis that could have been addressed in this book is whether there are any drawbacks inherent to African ecocosmologies as a rationality for sustainable development. The analysis leaves the reader with an altogether positive outlook on the legal value of African ecocosmologies.

International law applies to the interchanging relationships and rules between states, including the establishment of norms and standards which govern their activities. This changing landscape of international law is recognised in one of the introductory paragraphs of this book: ‘international law possess an inherent transformative power to renew and remake itself if we are committed to reimagining the discipline and its fundamental characteristics, including the concept of sustainable development’ (pg 2). Sustainable development (SD) has been an integral part of international law discourse before the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment (UNCHE) and the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED). Hence, this book focuses on the ahistoricism and influence of international law on the environment and sustainable development in African legal systems through a Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) lens.

This book is about reimagining sustainable development. At a time when many scholars have become disillusioned with the concept and calls for abandoning sustainable development in favour of new concepts abound, Dzah makes an impassioned call for us to retain the idea, whose ancient roots predate its co-optation by Western (legal) hegemony, while think about it in a radically different way. The way in which he suggests we do this, is by turning to African relational ontologies and environmental ethics that (re)conceptualise humans “as mere co-occupants of nature with other species”.

The Law and Development Institute and the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, William S. Richardson School of Law will co-host the 2025 Law and Development Conference.