Introduction: Public Banks and Public Purpose: From Pandemic Responses to Future Climate Prospects

Public bank responses to the Covid-19 global health and economic crisis hold vital insights for the future of public banking, especially as we face the global crisis of how to finance pressing climate and development needs. It is now clear that there is no pathway to financing global green and just transitions and transformations that will not pass through the world’s public banks (Marois 2021; UN FSDR 2024; TDR 2019, pp. 143–168; Griffith-Jones et al. 2023). But in whose benefit? And will sustainable development financing be at the pace, scale, and on the terms required? These remain open questions, despite the enormous progress that public banks, in particular public development banks, have made in the realm of climate and development finance. Still more needs to be done, quickly, and in new ways, given the extant failure of the World Bank’s 2015 ‘Billions to Trillions’ de-risking strategy of trying to use just a little public finance to mobilize mountains of private finance (Badré 2018; IMF/World Bank 2015). In practice, billions of public money is raising only millions of private investment and often at the expense of any semblance of advancing socially just green transitions (Cingolani 2024; Kenny 2022; Summers and Singh 2024). The pandemic responses of public banks can, and should, inform future prospects for socially just, climate-aligned, and long-term public bank development financing.