Europe has the public financial institutions needed to help finance its transition, centred on the European Investment Bank Group (EIB Group) and National Promotional Banks and Institutions (NPBIs).1 The bigger challenge is channelling investment to where it is needed. National Energy and Climate Plans (NECPs) provide a solid foundation, but often fail to translate national targets into clear, bankable project pipelines. Strengthening the quality of NECPs and making better use of the complementary strengths of the EIB Group and NPBIs can help close this gap. Building on each NPBI’s strengths, while reinforcing existing cooperation instruments such as portfolio guarantees, coordination platforms and transition-planning assessment tools, can help turn national plans into investable projects.
The EIB Group and NPBIs play a central role in financing Europe’s transition
The way these institutions collaborate with each other and engage with NECPs is a key factor in closing the bankability gap and turning public finance into investable projects.
Both the EIB Group and NPBIs have moved decisively towards supporting the transition. Nearly 60% of EIB Group financing supported green projects in 2025, exceeding the 50% target set for the first phase of its Climate Bank Roadmap. NPBIs have also become key channels for financing national climate and energy projects, though following different paths, reflecting their mandates and national contexts. Together, they form a powerful public finance network that can connect EU priorities and national plans with tangible investment.
Stronger cooperation between public financial institutions can help grow the pipeline of investable projects
Our research finds a persistent constraint: NECPs often set targets without providing the sectoral detail, timeframes and delivery pathways needed to build credible project pipelines. As a result, the binding constraint to financing is frequently not a shortage of capital, but a shortage of well-prepared, investable projects.
Strengthened cooperation between the EIB Group and NPBIs can help address this gap by combining the EIB Group’s low-cost funding, risk-bearing capacity and structuring expertise with NPBIs’ local market knowledge, relationship with governments and businesses, and ability to originate and deliver projects within national contexts.
Europe does not need to create a new public finance architecture to close its transition investment gap. It needs to build on, connect and make more deliberate and systematic use of the vast network of institutions, instruments and cooperation platforms it already has, while making NECPs more useful as a shared basis for investment planning and project development.
The next phase of Europe’s transition will depend on moving from targets to implementation. With implementation of the updated NECPs progressing and the second phase of the EIB Group’s Climate Bank Roadmap (2026–2030) under way, there is a timely opportunity to make that connection stronger.
Recommendations for action
National governments should produce shorter, more usable NECPs
These should include clear sectoral volumes, timeframes, technology pathways and cross-border consistency, to serve as more practical investment-planning tools for the EIB Group and NPBIs.
To support this, the European Commission should convene a dedicated dialogue forum bringing together national governments, the EIB Group and NPBIs, building on existing dialogue mechanisms.
This should be complemented by a formal bottom-up feedback channel through which the EIB Group and NPBIs could provide project-level evidence and implementation experience to inform future NECP updates.
Cooperation between the EIB Group and NPBIs works best when built on complementarity and on existing instruments and structures
The institutions’ respective roles should be based on complementarity and tailored to each NPB’s comparative advantage. Technical assistance and support for project preparation should be strengthened, while existing tools such as portfolio guarantees, counter-guarantees and blended finance should be expanded where bankability is hardest to establish. Existing coordination platforms should be used more systematically where they add value, while remaining selective and focused on concrete project pipelines.
Aggregated findings from the EIB Group’s PATH framework could be leveraged to provide a useful bottom-up check on the ambition and operability of NECPs
This would help to assess whether plans are sufficiently concrete and actionable to support investment planning. PATH components could also be made available to NPBIs on an opt-in, modular basis.
1 The EIB Group comprises the European Investment Bank (EIB) and the European Investment Fund (EIF). In our report, we use “EIB Group” when referring to the whole group and “EIB” when referring to the Bank specifically.
