Beyond ICSID? Non-ICSID Arbitration and the International Investment Disputes Governance Under the Belt and Road Initiative

Contemporary debates on Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) increasingly reflect concerns about the legitimacy crisis of investment arbitration and the fragmentation of international economic governance. Although significant progress has been made in modernizing the procedural rules of the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), capital-importing states remain hesitant about a single, centralized model of investment dispute governance. Therefore, the importance of non-ICSID arbitration in decentralized governance is increasing. However, the structural implications of this shift remain underexplored. This article argues that non-ICSID arbitration should be understood not merely as an alternative procedural mechanism but as part of a broader polycentric transformation of investment governance. Unlike the relatively self-contained ICSID framework, non-ICSID arbitration operates through interaction among arbitral institutions and domestic courts. The article further examines the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and China's evolving arbitration framework as important sites of decentralized institutional experimentation. It concludes that the future development of ISDS under the BRI is likely to depend less on convergence towards a single institutional model than on increasingly pluralized and distributed forms of transnational investment governance.