The COVID-19 global pandemic and the climate crisis already upon us are tangible manifestations of threats that until recently seemed theoretical. They have instilled a fresh sense of collective urgency around the importance of protecting and investing in global public goods (GPGs). But delivering on a GPG agenda is complicated by fissures and rivalries among major global players, tensions between the short-term “national interest” and the long-term “global interest,” and the general public’s growing skepticism about multilateralism itself.

Despite these challenges, this is not the time to invent a whole raft of new institutions. There simply isn’t enough time or the political will to dismantle the current system and start from scratch with new institutions. Instead, we need to repurpose, renew, and better deploy the international development machinery that we already have, and which has served us well over the past few decades. Multilateral development banks (MDBs) — by virtue of their size, reach and scope — are the anchor of this framework. They played a major role in helping countries reduce poverty, increase living standards, and improve health and education. Those tasks are still vitally important but to remain relevant, MDBs must have new missions and mandates, modernized governance, and reformed business and financial models to tackle the challenges of our new age.

The last century’s MDB was squarely focused on a country model that allocated resources based on national priorities. The MDB for our new age will need to be truly global. Its focus must be on helping countries work collectively on solutions to existential cross-border challenges that will determine not only the prosperity of future generations, but the habitability of the planet. This does not mean jettisoning poverty reduction or equitable growth; these issues must now be dealt with alongside global public goods and with a truly global lens. And the balance between programs targeted at global challenges and the traditional business of supporting broad based country development will need to vary between those that rely mainly on official concessional finance and those for whom official finance is one element in a broader package of international financial engagement.

Some of the GPG agenda can be accommodated within the MDB’s existing operating model, with tweaks around the margin.  For instance, supporting high-emitting coal-reliant emerging markets plan and finance their energy transitions (along the lines of the recently announced South Africa coal deal) can work in the existing MDB business model, but even this will require better MDB coordination, more effective mobilization of private sector resources, bigger volumes of financing, and, in some cases more concessional finance. It will also mean developing a series of incentives that encourage countries to use MDB resources for GPG programs.

A more far-reaching GPG agenda will demand some overhauls of the MDB model itself. For example, preserving major forest basins will require a big increase in global grants and an embrace of regional programming. So will meaningful action around oceans and biodiversity. Better pandemic preparedness will mean investing in a globally-networked health surveillance system that will require working directly with non-sovereign entities. Investing in major scientific breakthroughs means that the MDBs need direct funding relationships with research organizations.

To modernize the MDBs and to fulfill a global public goods agenda also requires a modernized MDB business model that can efficiently mobilize financing at scale and deploy a full suite of instruments from grants to guarantees across the entire range of countries it works with.

Here are some of the questions we will explore over the next year: