"We Need to Be Good Ancestors": Experts Weigh in on New Incentives to Invest in Global Solutions

Launched in February 2025, the World Bank's Framework for Financial Incentives offers countries a powerful package of benefits—more financing, longer repayment periods, and lower interest rates—when their projects deliver benefits that extend beyond their own borders. The FFI rewards middle-income countries for scaling up investments in pandemic preparedness, biodiversity conservation, and cross-border water management while pursuing their national development priorities.

Through the FFI’s Livable Planet Fund, middle-income countries—home to 75% of the world's population and holding most of the world's biodiversity hotspots—now have access strategic grants that make ambitious cross-border projects financially viable.

For decades, the question has lingered: who pays to protect our shared planet? 

"Global public goods is now such an interesting concept because it essentially starts to recognize that we are in a single world," explains Homi Kharas, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. "Development in any country also has implications for how other countries develop."

World Bank FFI Projects

_{A snapshot of projects approved under the World Bank’s FFI as of October 2025. (View full size.)}

What makes the World Bank's new Framework for Financial Incentives (FFI) revolutionary, according to Kharas, is how it eliminates this traditional trade-off between national development and global responsibility.

"The beauty of these kinds of programs is that it takes away this notion of a trade-off," Kharas explains. "For the finance minister the question is never going to be 'either do this or do that.' The question is: if you do this in this way, then you can actually do better for your own country and better for the world." 

Kevin Watkins, visiting professor at the Firoz Lalji Institute for Africa at the London School of Economics, puts the stakes in stark terms…referencing a classic Joni Mitchell song. The story of global public goods, he says, captures the importance of biodiversity, healthy ecosystems, and functioning natural systems that hold societies together—things we don't truly value until they're gone.

"It's great to see the World Bank today playing a leadership role in restoring global public goods to where they ought to be, which is right at the top of our international agenda,” Watkins says. 

Watkins frames the FFI as a moral imperative for this generation: "Our ultimate responsibility is to hand on to our children and to their grandchildren a planet that is sustainable, a planet that is livable. We need to behave like good ancestors who think about the well-being of people in the future, and I think what the World Bank has put in place with this initiative is a financial structure that creates the incentives that could enable us to do that."

Nick Vaughan of the International Finance Facility for Education (IFFEd) believes there is "a collective action problem" that requires creative solutions. The FFI, he says, represents exactly the kind of innovation needed.

"Countries should be offered incentives to make the necessary investment to address the externality," Vaughan explains. "I'm really pleased and excited to see the World Bank innovating at pace to offer incentives and adjust their frameworks."

"I would urge [countries] to approach the World Bank and other MDBs first because these institutions provide the best possible terms for countries to invest in national priorities."