The European Investment Bank (EIB) and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) have deepened their long-standing partnership by signing a Mutual Reliance Agreement on environmental and social aspects. The agreement will make it easier to finance projects together and get them off the ground more quickly in common countries of operation. It will also reduce red tape for our our clients.
The agreement, signed in April in Washington on the sidelines of the Spring Meetings of the World Bank Group and the International Monetary Fund, represents a step change in the EIB-EBRD partnership and sends a strong signal on the determination to improve cooperation among Multilateral Development Banks - in order to increase their impact, as outlined in the Viewpoint Note jointly adopted in 2024: Multilateral Development Banks: Working as a System for Greater Impact and Scale.
The agreement also aligns with the recommendations of the G20 Roadmap for Better, Bigger, and More Effective Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs), which calls on MDBs to enhance country-level coordination and co-financing, including through mutual reliance agreements for greater development financing efficiency.
Mutual Reliance Agreements allow for institutions to count on each other in areas where their norms and way of doing things are similar. The Agreement signed today underlines the extent to which the EIB’s and EBRD’s Environmental and Social policies and standards are aligned. In practice, we will be able to fully rely on each other’s Environmental and Social policy frameworks and delegate such tasks along the entire project cycle, from due diligence to project monitoring. This will reduce transaction costs and administrative burdens, as clients will have one main interlocutor instead of two on environmental and social matters. In turn, this would speed up and simplify processes, all while allowing clients to avail themselves of the support of both institutions and ensuring the highest environmental and social standards are met by the projects.
The EIB was one of the pioneers of mutual reliance through agreements a decade ago with the Agence Française de Développement and KfW. The new agreement with the EBRD on environmental and social matters complements a number of previously agreed mutual reliance arrangements on procurement including with the EBRD itself and most recently, the Council of Europe Development Bank and the World Bank . the EBRD, as well as the Asian Development Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, the African Development Bank, the Caribbean Development Bank and the International Fund for Agricultural Development . The agreements of mutual reliance on procurement have allowed the EIB and its partners to successfully implement and monitor some 77 projects with an investment cost of around EUR 30 billion for the period 2015-2024.
Watch the video of Presidents Calviño and Renaud-Basso on why EIB-EBRD Mutual Reliance matters.
