Overall, the role of a new development bank or the existing multilateral banks would span measures at the national and international levels, ranging from financial and risk mitigating aspects, as well as the provision of technical advice.
• At the national level, the concerned bank would provide national authorities with technical assistance, helping them quantify their knowledge of the country-specific factors relevant for the selection, development, and management of projects with the highest social returns. In addition, it would enhance institutional credibility, synergies, and complementarities, thereby fostering commitments and risk mitigation both in the relationships between public and private sectors and in the relationships between different governmental tiers, as far as multilevel governance contexts are concerned.
• At the international level, it would provide financial assistance, pledging guarantees, and sharing the best international practices for project evaluation and risk assessment, the most suitable instruments for risk mitigation/insurance, and the most innovative finance techniques.
In Europe, these initiatives have already been undertaken, some at the country level, others at the EU level, with both technical and financial purposes. At the country level, the most important example is found, perhaps, in the UK, where the creation of IUK was announced in 2009. This agency is tasked with advising the government on strategic long-term infrastructure planning, prioritization, financing, and delivery across sectors, ranging from energy and waste to water, telecommunications, and transport. To pursue these objectives, IUK combines, under the Treasury umbrella, the program and project delivery capability of Partnerships UK (PUK), the lending capability of the Treasury Infrastructure Finance Unit (TIFU), and the policy development capability of the Treasury PPP policy team (see World Bank Institute 2012). This rich bulk of institutional and technical expertise reflects how complex it is to ensure that only valuable infrastructure projects are undertaken and that risks are properly assessed and efficiently shared between the public and private sectors so that each project is well structured and technically and financially viable.35
At the EU level, the European Investment Bank has launched the CEF programme to promote new forms of private financing, including the participation of pension/ mutual funds and insurance companies, as well as the issuance of project bonds. Arguably, involving institutional funds would be even more useful in emerging economies as their financial systems are essentially bank based and their financial markets are still small relative to the size of their economies (Schwartz, Ruiz-Nunez and Chelsky 2014). Over time, the development bank's support would stimulate those markets to grow and consolidate, leading to the use of more sophisticated financial instruments, such as project bonds.