Funding integrated territorial development: The role of the European Investment Bank in supporting European policies

The European Investment Bank (EIB) is the lending arm of the European Union (EU) and the world’s largest multi-lateral lending institution. Despite its increasing recognition and role in the European economic recovery, the EIB is one of the least-studied EU bodies/institutions. Against this backdrop, this paper focuses on the EIB’s approach to territorial development, one of the main intervention fields for the bank under the EU’s cohesion objective, and the role of EIB’s key intervention interlocutors (ie the sub-sovereign governments) following the 2008 crisis. The EIB’s approach to funding territorial development interventions is presented/explained along with the financial products it has developed to satisfy the needs of sub-sovereign governments, in a significantly diversified EU landscape. Based on 11 case studies (EIB-funded interventions), the study highlights the complex challenges faced by the urban sector on all spatial scales and their associated administrations. The authors conclude that the EIB’s added value is both financial and non-financial. Finally, they argue that the mantra should be ‘invest more but invest better’, in other words, the role of sub-sovereign governments needs to be better exploited due to the specific challenges they face.