This chapter presents four widely debated challenges to the current forms of liberal democracy in order to envision how co-creation may provide an adequate response to underlying democratic problems and thus help to reinvigorate and expand democratic governance. The chapter also revisits the accountability problem that arises in relation to public governance based on co-creation and reflects on how new forms of democracy advanced by co-creation practices can be integrated with representative democracy to form a new hybrid democracy. Finally, it discusses how co-creation can secure and perhaps even democratize the future development of democracy.

Chapter 6 on ‘democratisation’ continues to examine how public banks can function in the public interest, if not without contradictions. Looking at the cases of Germany’s KfW and Costa Rica’s Banco Popular, the chapter argues that their ways of democratisation support their institutional credibility, and hence persistence. In distinct but meaningful ways, the KfW and Banco Popular enable their societies to have a meaningful say over how these public banks function. In contrast to decarbonisation and definancialisation, however, democratisation has a more disproportionately self-evident public interest effect. Yet it is not a completed act wherein these public banks are democratised once and for all. Democratisation, too, is pulled between contending public and private interests in class-divided society within global financialised capitalism.

Chapter 4 on ‘decarbonisation’ argues that the ways that the China Development Bank and the Nordic Investment Bank function to tackle the crisis of climate finance bolsters their credibility and persistence within class-divided society. These public banks are scaling up financial capacity, directing it towards decarbonisation and environmental sustainability, and developing accountable floors for green funding decisions in ways that can inform needed debate on what pro-public green & just public banks should be like. However, neither are without contradictions. Despite committing substantial resources to combatting climate change, the China Development Bank and the Nordic Investment Bank also fuel it by disproportionately funding otherwise carbonising economic activities, exposing the green and growth contradictions of global financialised capitalism.

Chapter 5 argues that the definancialisation functions of the Indian National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD) and the American Bank of North Dakota (BND) help these institutions persist as credible public banks in their class-divided societies. As with decarbonisation so too with definancialisation. Contradictions arise and struggles endure over who benefits from what public banks do. Public banks can shield workers, the poor and marginalised, micro-, small-, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs), the public sector, and spatial regions (rural/urban) from the discipline of financialised market imperatives. Public banks can similarly shield finance capital, the wealthy and privileged, large financial and non-financial corporations, and even the financial world market from these same financial imperatives, entrenching their unequal power over social reproduction.

Chapter 1 argues that total global public banking capacity is exponentially greater than what tends to be reported by international institutions. Two premises support the argument. First, the financing for development literature provides an inconsistent and inaccurate empirical account of public banks around the world. The forcefulness of this premise depends on the second premise, namely that national and subnational public banks persist in significant institutional numbers and size. The chapter shows there are more than 900 public banks with nearly $49 trillion in combined assets. Understanding the actual capacity of (sub)national public banks is a precondition for having an informed debate on the future of public banks and for whom they might catalyse a global green & just transition. The chapter opens this discussion by first locating public banks within the wider credit system and in relation to other types of public financial institutions.

This chapter examines the outcomes and limitations of co-creation. Promotors of co-creation are sometimes satisfied with having stimulated civic voluntarism and created processes that are gratifying for the participants, but it is also paramount to consider the collective impact of co-creation on societal problems and challenges. A systematic literature review reveals that while the drivers and dynamics of co-creation have been the subject of numerous studies, the outcomes of co-creation have received scant attention. To compensate for this neglect, this chapter aims to explain what kinds of outcomes co-creation may produce. Since co-creation is intrinsically linked to value production, we discuss the outcomes of co-creation in terms of public value outcomes. This discussion is balanced against a consideration of some of the obvious problems and limitations associated with collaborative processes of co-creation.