Meeting the Paris Agreement goals will require massive public and private sector investments across all emissions sectors. Using public finance to mobilise additional private sector investment in clean energy investments will be vital. This dissertation investigates the roles of public financial institutions, particularly Green Banks in mobilising additional private finance for the net zero transition. It addresses important gaps in the literature. Empirical data on Green Banks is rare because they are a nascent form of institution, and existing datasets do not capture the technological and financial innovation which underpins their organisational mission. This dissertation begins to fill this gap adopting a mixed method approach underpinned by sixty-five expert interviews, a systematic literature review and development of a novel dataset exploring the role of the Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC) in accelerating technological and financial innovation in Australia’s large-scale solar sector. It examines the history and development of public green banks, their potential application in developing markets, and how they could operate at the multilateral level. In doing so, it sheds light on the roles of green banks, barriers to investment in scaling up climate finance in different kinds of developing markets, and the capacity of the existing international financial architecture to scale up climate change investment in the Indo-Pacific to achieve Paris Agreement goals. It finds Green Banks play an important role in mobilising additional private sector investment for climate change, that they are perceived to create public value through their investments, and their knowledge-sharing and transparency functions have valuable lessons for other public financial institutions.
Bio:

Chell Lyons is a Sir Roland Wilson scholar in the READ department of the Crawford School of Public Policy and a member of the Institute for Climate, Energy and Disaster Solutions (ICEDS). She is on leave from the Department of Climate Change, Energy, Environment, and Water. She is a part-time Climate Change Research Fellow in the Lowy Institute’s Indo Pacific Development Centre. Prior to commencing her Sir Roland Wilson scholarship, she was seconded to the ANU as the inaugural JW Land Research Fellow on the Grand Challenge on Zero Carbon Energy in the Asia Pacific.

To attend online:

Zoom link: https://anu.zoom.us/j/87813094408?pwd=9zHGAOiXcaYGg548EjKejQbiOjW7kQ.1

Meeting ID: 878 1309 4408; Password: 896895

To attend in-person:

Venue: Acton Theatre, JG Crawford Building, 132 Lennox Crossing, Acton ACT (ANU Crawford School of Public Policy)