Highlights:

• Principal Findings:

The analysis highlights instances in which Public Ddevelopment Bank (PDB)  investments align with agroecological principles, particularly among institutions that have deliberately integrated agro-ecology into their broader investment portfolios.

Organizations such as the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and Agence Française de Développement (AFD) have explicitly engaged with agroecology as an orienting framework, helping to shape and deepen their strategic alignment with sustainable food systems. Several case studies, including those from Brazil, IFAD and the Global Agriculture and Food Security Program (GAFSP), showcase promising mechanisms and approaches that offer valuable lessons for how PDBs can more effectively support agroecology in practice. The case studies featured in this report showcase several PDB-funded projects that have resonance with agroecological principles. In addition, several communities of practice, including the Agroecology Coalitions Finance and Investment working group and the Agri-PBD platform, are actively supporting PDBs in engaging with agroecology.

However, the report also discusses persistent challenges that arise from the structural and institutional logics underpinning PDBs that present significant barriers to advancing agroecology.

The most fundamental of these are the “lock-ins” of the dominant economic development model and limited political will to move beyond productivism and growth-centred paradigms.

These challenges are compounded by weak accountability systems, ecological and social safe-guard frameworks, and enforcement mechanisms.

PDB financing remains heavily concentrated in global value chains, with investments favouring commodity sectors and export markets. This orientation reinforces systems that prioritize scale, speed, growth, and financial returns over diversified, resilient, and locally rooted agroecological systems. Once funds are disbursed, it is often difficult to determine whether they genuinely benefit smallholder farmers or instead exacerbate inequality and ecological degradation.

The prevailing approaches to PDB investment in food systems are grounded in a narrow economic logic that treats growth and job creation as the primary pathways to achieving the SDGs, meeting climate commitments, and reducing rural poverty. Food production is often considered in isolation from other dimensions of sustainability and justice. This reflects a entrenched “business-as-usual” mindset that needs to be directly confronted to enable a just transition at scale.

More fundamentally, rethinking PDBs’ role requires confronting their contribution to broader systemic and structural issues: rising sovereign indebtedness, the continued industrialization of agriculture, the promotion of extractive investments that degrade ecosystems and marginalize agroecological farmers, the violation of human rights, and the entrenchment of a narrow vision of modernization and progress. Together, these dynamics undermine efforts to realize the SDGs and the right to food in socially and ecologically just ways.

Despite these constraints, the analysis identifies meaningful opportunities, articulated through six overarching recommendations. Agroecological principles can inform a transformative pathway for investment, technical assistance, and policy engagement. In doing so, they could meaningfully reshape how PDBs finance infrastructure, rural development, and sustainable food systems. Though still largely untapped within PDB financing, these opportunities can help PDBs meet their public-good mandate by realigning their financial tools and commitments with broader efforts to tackle the poly-crisis and advance just food-system transitions.

• Recommendations:

The recommendations suggest pathways for reform and transformation that range from improving existing mechanisms to provide incremental improvements in support for agroecology, to recommendations that would require tackling more deeply rooted assumptions and lock-ins.

1. Shift the Paradigm: Adopt New Foundations for Financing Food System Transformation

   1. Foregrounding Human Rights, Agroecological Approaches, and Confronting Inequities

   2. From Scarcity to Abundance: Challenging the Myth of Limited Public Funds

2. Phase out Investments in Industrial Agriculture and Large-Scale Land Acquisitions

3. Use Agroecological Principles to Reform Institutional Mandates and Approaches

   1. Revisit and Transform Institutional Mandates and Policy Frameworks

   2. Develop Agroecology Focused Financial Instruments and Approaches

   3. Reexamine Assumptions around Risk and Return on Investment

4. Strengthen Safeguards, Accountability, and Governance

   1. Develop and Invest in Partnerships for Safeguarding PDB Investments

   2. Strengthen Environmental & Social Safeguards

   3. Enhance Monitoring & Evaluation (M&E), Reporting and Accountability Systems

5. Actively Support the Alignment of Trade and Agricultural Policy with Agroecology

6. Build Internal Capacity and Expertise on Agroecology at PDBs

   1. Join Communities of Practice Focusing on Agroecology and PDBs

   2. Invest in Internal Capacity Building & Expertise

   3. Leverage PDBs’ Technical Services

   4. Support Research on Agroecology-aligned Approaches to Financing and Development