This book has considered what role moral considerations should play within markets. But that leaves to one side the question of whether morality prescribes what sorts of things should be on the market in the first place. In this final chapter we consider recent philosophical debates about what kinds of goods should and should not be available on the market as commodities. If there are to be limits, what principles might govern the determination of those limits? We argue that none of the available arguments establish a strict boundary between the commodifiable and the non-commodifiable. Instead, we suggest that the most important considerations concern the risk of harm both to individuals and to social values.

This chapter explores developments after standards for pre-project consultation were raised in 2013. The six cases examined in this chapter, funded by multilateral and national development banks operating in the Asia Pacific region after heightened community engagement policies, were introduced underscore a number of key insights. The post-2013 cases broadly demonstrate a number of key improvements including greater rigour in consultation and diligence mechanisms, heightened precision in identifying issues of community concern, higher pre-project diligence and screening standards, ongoing environmental and technical monitoring, the presence of locally trained mediators, skill development for consultation participants, and a longer-term view of community welfare and responsive grievance remedies. Shortcomings persisted in some cases, including instances of duress, lack of information disclosure, fraud, limited access to consultation mechanisms and environmental harm leading to project cessation in two cases when the adverse social impacts were seen to outweigh potential benefits. On the whole, corresponding with more rigorous community consultation and diligence standards, during this phase, the number of stalled/cancelled and litigated case declined by 33%, the percentages of cases brought to court declined by 16%, and the number of cases pursuing party agreement through mediation or negotiation increased by 50% compared with ad-hoc discretionary consultation practices prior to 2013.

The limited-liability corporation is a ubiquitous feature of modern life that many regard as morally neutral. Yet when we consult traditional ethical theories – such as deontology and virtue ethics – it seems that we cannot account for such leniency. The traditional theories namely imply that corporate bankruptcies are moral catastrophes in the sense that the owners and/or managers are allowed to escape responsibility and liability for their wrongdoings. In the present chapter, we seek to develop a theoretical explanation of people’s more lenient attitude. Our alternative view is that the ethical norms that are appropriate for attributing responsibility or liability in a market context are somewhat different from those that apply in other social contexts, such as the ordinary morality of civil life. This view is supported by our theory that the market is an ethically distinct part within an organic social whole, and conditional upon a social safety net that softens the excesses of market outcomes.

This chapter examines the question of when expanded channels of community consultation and redress are made available in infrastructure project-affected communities, are grievances aggregated or reduced? To provide context for the nature and functioning of redress mechanisms and requirements for community consultation alongside other safeguard policies including information disclosure, this chapter examines the increasingly stringent application of such principles in the practices of a select number of global multilateral development banks (MDBs) supported by the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment and Belt and Road Initiative. This includes the World Bank, Asian Development Bank and Asian infrastructure Investment Bank to explore how their Environmental and Social Frameworks are designed to mitigate negative social and environmental impacts of project investments beginning in the early 2000s. This is followed by a statistical comparison of the proportion of grievances per project raised prior to and after bank policy amendments between 2010 and 2020 expanding access to pre-project consultation, informed consent and formalised grievance mechanisms amongst 10 of the world’s MDBs in order to determine whether increasing channels of consultation and accountability lead to an increase or reduction in the number of project disputes. The findings indicate that the percentage of grievances per project peaks at 15.4% in 2019 then drops significantly in 2021 to 7.1%.

This chapter presents a series of six investor–community case studies in the Asia Pacific region during the pre-2013 period, during which pre-project community engagement and accountability on the part of infrastructure investment banks were relatively less stringent, in order to understand the impact of relatively relaxed community engagement standards on subsequent grievance claims. This set of six cases will be compared with a set of six cases presented in Chapter 6 after heightened diligence standards were introduced after 2013. The cases reviewed in this chapter were either sole financed projects by the World Bank/International Finance Corporation or collaborative projects with the Asian Development Bank and European Investment Bank in the Asia Pacific region. The sectors include investment in transport, the extractive industry and special economic zone development. The key finding of this chapter is that during this pre-2013 discretionary community consultation phase, most cases resulted in either full or partial project cancellation, delay, suspension, compensation for harms or transfer to local courts for resolution. A small portion were dismissed due to insufficient information. In total, of the six cases examined, four were cancelled or stalled, one proceeded to court litigation and one was closed. The cases highlight the risks of insufficient attention to community consultation.

This chapter provides an overview of the aims and structure of the book, which explores the emergent development and challenges in implementing community–investor consultation, dispute prevention and facilitation mechanisms amongst multilateral and national development banks operating in the Asia Pacific region. In the several decades since the development of the first multilateral community–investor dispute resolution and accountability mechanisms, much has been learned about public facilitation, community engagement and dispute prevention during the early stages of major infrastructure development programmes. Drawing on a qualitative triangulating approach that compares public facilitation policy design with case-based practice, the remaining chapters of the book will examine community–investor dispute resolution policy design, supplemented by case studies, surveys and interviews of select private non-state actors in the Asia Pacific region to address the question of whether, and if so how, multi-stakeholder community–investor public facilitation methods contribute to the prevention and early resolution of infrastructure disputes and advance sustainable development objectives.

It is a staple of traditional ethical theories that they contain an injunction against causing harm. Indeed, many people hold this to be the most basic principle of morality – “First do no harm”. However, what about harms caused by the market? In this book we are interested in developing the thought that the market is different in the sense that there is room for moral leeway because of the social benefits that markets bring in their wake. In this chapter, we explore the limits of that claim; exactly how different is the market? One important way of doing so is by thinking about the harm caused by markets and the moral significance of that harm. What should we make of market harms? Beyond the most egregious kinds of harms, and conditional upon the establishment and maintenance of various ameliorative practices to soften their negative effects, we argue that society ought to accommodate and accept a large range of harmful behaviours that we wouldn’t normally accept in many other spheres of society.