The BRICS’ New Development Bank at the Crossroads: Challenges for Building Development Cooperation in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

Back in 2014, the BRICS created their New Development Bank (NDB), a new multilateral development bank geared to fund sustainable infrastructure in emerging and developing economies. This chapter maps out the key institutional, governance, and lending innovations pragmatically brought by the NDB, while critically locating those innovations in the longue-duree of development finance landscape and the re-emergence of South–South Cooperation. It argues that the Bank has yet to take on the knowledge and political challenges of institutional engineering and experimentation to develop ambitious thinking and robust institutional mechanisms to deal with the economic, social, and environmental development imperatives of financing sustainable infrastructure in the Global South.