Can public development banks muster a 'movement'?

The second summit of the world’s public development banks kicks off Tuesday in Rome with a focus on agriculture, amid concerns from some NGOs that the voices of those affected by banks’ lending are yet to be heard.

Finance in Common began last year, the brainchild of Rémy Rioux, head of the French Development Agency, or AFD, and one of the negotiators of the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate.

The 2020 debut produced a non-binding joint declaration from some banks to shift “strategies, investment patterns, activities and operating modalities” to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris agreement. A more ambitious, additional text pushed by the European Commission was shelved in an effort to reach consensus on the main declaration, but that did not stop major players such as the World Bank and Asian Development Bank from refusing to sign on.

Similar drama is unlikely this year as Adama Mariko, secretary-general of the Finance in Common initiative, told Devex the focus will be on assessing the various work streams that grew out of last year’s declaration, with communiques on specific topics.

“It’s more about progress than something new,” said Mariko, who is also deputy executive director for strategy, partnerships, and communications at AFD.

Among the expected deliverables is the launch of a public development platform for green and inclusive food systems, spearheaded by the International Fund for Agricultural Development and first announced in July. This year’s two-day event, which will also be online, is hosted by Italian development bank, Cassa Depositi e Prestiti, in partnership with IFAD.

One criticism of Finance in Common from development insiders is that it is essentially an AFD-driven event, with limited buy-in from other players.

Mariko said that not all of the roughly 500 public development banks cited by the organizers may actually know that they are part of Finance in Common, but are nevertheless counted through their membership in regional networks.

And Mariko confirmed that the African Development Bank and European Investment Bank had asked to host next year’s summit. “So see here the transition, that’s where we cannot say it’s an AFD thing,” he said, highlighting the growing involvement of regional as well as national banks.

For civil society however, the Finance in Common “movement” — as French President Emmanuel Macron called it — still has a number of shortcomings.

Siddharth Akali, director of the Coalition for Human Rights in Development, wrote in an op-ed that this week’s summit provides “no spaces to confront or learn from [public development banks’] destructive legacy of exacerbating anthropogenic climate change, increasing food insecurity for women, and causing human rights violations.”

According to Akali, organizers have failed to include civil society-led events or the voices of indigenous people affected by these banks’ work.

"It is truly outrageous,” Mark Fodor, coordinator of the Defenders in Development campaign at the Coalition for Human Rights in Development, told Devex by email, ”that a forum claiming to be an assembly of public development banks would lock out those they claim benefit from their work, communities impacted by development finance.”

In response, Mariko told Devex by email that NGOs do feature on panels this week on the “agriculture-planet nexus” and sustainable finance. And he said CSOs had been offered the chance to run their own session — though Fodor responded by email, “It’s hard to call a session CSO-led if civil society is not allowed to set the topic or choose who speaks."

Mariko wrote that AFD is also considering funding to support NGOs involvement in the Finance in Common process, including between summits, in the long-term.

For Sarah Strack, director of Forus, an NGO network which sits on the Finance in Common executive committee, the clock is ticking.

“There is a window of opportunity for Finance in Common to demonstrate that [public development banks] can take a leading role in transforming financing for development to be truly people-centred and based on human rights, community-led development as well as climate and social justice principles,” Strack told Devex by email Monday. “But this window is closing fast and the success of Finance in Common, as an ongoing initiative, will depend on its ability to include civil society, from the local to the international level, in a meaningful way in its governance and decision-making.”