The Clock on the Thirtieth of June
Development Banks in a post-climate world
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Every institution has a document that tells the world what it believes. For the World Bank, through the most consequential decade in the history of climate finance, that document was the Climate Change Action Plan. In the summer of 2026 it was set to expire, and the question of what, if anything, would replace it became a quiet trial of strength between the most powerful shareholder in the building and nearly a hundred of the countries the Bank exists to serve. The deadline was fixed: the thirtieth of June. The outcome was anything but. This is the story of a fight conducted almost entirely behind closed doors, over a piece of paper that will help decide where billions of dollars, and a great many careers, flow next.
The thing about a deadline is that it cannot be argued with. Negotiators can stall, shareholders can posture, civil servants can draft and redraft, but the calendar keeps its own counsel. And on the thirtieth of June 2026, the World Bank’s Climate Change Action Plan, the framework that had guided the institution’s climate work since 2021 and had already been granted one extra year of life, was due to lapse with no agreed successor in place.
To understand why that mattered, you need to understand what the plan represented. The Climate Change Action Plan, known inside the Bank simply as the CCAP, was the commitment that turned climate from a side project into a core mission. Under it, the World Bank’s concessional lending arm, the International Development Association, or IDA, which provides grants and ultra-cheap loans to the world’s poorest countries, had become the single largest provider of concessional climate finance on earth, channelling some 85 billion dollars, more than half of it into adaptation, the unglamorous work of helping countries survive the warming that is already locked in. To let the plan expire without a replacement was not a tidy administrative event. It was a signal, and everyone in the building knew it.
The man who would ultimately have to decide was Ajay Banga, the former Mastercard chief executive appointed to lead the Bank in 2023 by the Biden administration. That last detail, once a footnote, had become the central fact of his position. The president who would judge his climate record was no longer the one who had hired him. Donald Trump was back in the White House, and his Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, had made the administration’s view of the Bank’s climate work unambiguous.
Bessent did not couch it in diplomatic euphemism. The World Bank, he said, should abandon its “distortionary” climate finance target. He went further, arguing that the institution should “immediately shift its myopic focus on climate and financing volumes to one that emphasises high-quality, durable projects, rather than shaping and selecting projects to chase arbitrary financing targets that do little to lift people out of poverty.” Strip away the policy language and the message was a demand: stop counting climate dollars as a measure of success, and stop letting climate goals shape which projects you choose. For an institution that had spent five years building exactly that machinery, it was an instruction to dismantle a part of itself.
The United States is the World Bank’s largest shareholder, and in an institution where votes are weighted by financial contribution, the largest shareholder’s displeasure is not a matter of opinion. It is gravity. One observer captured the mood inside the Spring Meetings with a phrase that stuck: with Washington pushing hard for fossil fuels and against climate conditionality, the Bank and the IMF “can’t make a squeak.” The institutions that had spent years presenting themselves as climate leaders were now, on the defensive, choosing their words with the care of people who know they are being watched by a hostile auditor.
But Bessent did not hold the field alone, and this is what gave the standoff its genuine tension. The shareholders who wanted the climate plan preserved did not go quietly. European countries, joined by several Latin American nations and by the small island states for whom climate change is not an abstraction but an existential threat, held firm in pushing for a version of the plan to be extended. Arrayed on the other side, alongside the United States, were the countries whose economies run on hydrocarbons: Russia and the Gulf states, for whom a World Bank retreat from climate targets was a welcome development.
Then came the move that turned a shareholder dispute into something closer to a revolt. Late in the negotiations, a bloc of borrower-country executive directors known as the G11-plus, representing the interests of nearly a hundred developing nations, sent a letter directly to the Bank’s board. These were the client countries, the ones the Bank exists to serve, and their message cut against the easy assumption that climate conditionality was something wealthy donors imposed on a reluctant developing world. They asked management to extend the current Climate Change Action Plan while an independent review evaluated its performance, its targets, and its trade-offs. They were, in effect, asking the Bank not to abandon the climate mission on Washington’s timetable. More than ninety civil-society organisations piled in behind them with a joint open letter demanding the same one-year extension. The countries on the front line of climate change were fighting to keep the plan that the Bank’s most powerful member wanted gone.
Caught in the middle was Banga, and his predicament reveals something about how these institutions actually work. He is not a climate ideologue. His instinct, honed in the private sector, is to find the pragmatic centre and operate there. On energy he had already staked out a position he called “all of the above,” committing the Bank to finance whatever a poor country needed to deliver power, from solar and wind to geothermal, hydroelectric, natural gas and nuclear, going so far as to lift the Bank’s long-standing prohibition on financing nuclear projects. It was a stance that infuriated climate purists and pleased the new administration in roughly equal measure, which was, perhaps, the point. Banga’s bet was that energy access for the 700 million people still living without electricity was a banner broad enough to shelter under while the climate war raged overhead.
The think tanks that follow the Bank most closely framed the choice in stark terms. E3G, an influential climate finance outfit, titled its analysis of the moment “renewal or retreat,” and argued that the situation called for neither timid continuity nor wholesale reinvention but a strategic enhancement: fold the climate plan into a broader “Livable Planet Strategy,” extend it through 2030, and widen its scope to cover the energy transition, adaptation, nature and biodiversity, with stronger transparency built in. It was a sophisticated answer to a political problem. Whether anyone with the power to decide was listening was another question entirely, because the defining feature of this whole episode was its silence. The negotiations were happening behind closed doors, stalled, according to people familiar with them, with the clock running down.
For the men and women who build careers inside this world, the stakes of that closed-door stalemate are intensely concrete. The World Bank is one of the largest employers of climate and energy specialists on the planet, and the direction it sets ripples outward to every other multilateral development bank, each of which watches the leader for cues. If the Climate Change Action Plan is extended or enhanced into a Livable Planet Strategy, the climate, adaptation and energy-transition teams that have expanded over the past five years keep growing, and the pipeline of roles for the next generation of specialists stays open. If it lapses, or is quietly hollowed out to satisfy Washington, those same teams face a colder future, reorganised around an “all of the above” energy mandate that prizes gigawatts delivered over tonnes of carbon avoided. The job titles would change. So would the skills in demand. A young professional who joined the Bank to work on adaptation finance and a mid-career engineer hired to build gas plants are betting on very different versions of the institution, and the document expiring on the thirtieth of June will help decide which of them was right.
That is the drama of it. There will be no dramatic vote, no press conference with a winner and a loser. There will be a deadline, and either a piece of paper that survives it in some form or a silence where the plan used to be. Banga, the operator caught between the shareholder who hired him and the shareholder who now judges him, will make a call, advised by governments pulling in opposite directions and watched by a hundred countries that have made plain they do not want the Bank to walk away. Whatever he decides, the development world will read it as the answer to a question larger than any single plan: in an era when the most powerful voice in the room wants climate off the agenda, does the institution that did more than any other to put it there hold its ground, or does it let the clock run out.
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