New paper maps how the World Bank can align its economic foundations with bold 'missions'

London, 10th April 2026 — The World Bank’s ambitions to deliver electricity access to 300 million people across Africa and secure water for hundreds of millions more can only be fully realised if the economic thinking embedded in the Bank’s operations evolves to match the ambition of its mission commitments. That is the central finding of a new report launched today at the IMF/World Bank Spring Meetings in Washington DC, authored by Professor Mariana Mazzucato, Founding Director of the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP), and Lara Merling, Research Fellow at IIPP.

The paper — A Mission-Aligned World Bank: From ambition to delivery — was prepared for discussion at the 2026 Spring Meetings and examines whether the World Bank’s operational architecture is genuinely configured to deliver on its own mission commitments. It maps what a mission-oriented approach to development demands across five interconnected dimensions of the Bank’s institutional design: directionality, financing, public–private relationships, implementation capabilities, and country ownership.

The paper arrives at a critical juncture. Progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals has stalled, while underlying pressures intensify: climate risks are escalating, debt vulnerabilities are rising across low- and middle-income countries, and more than one billion young people are expected to enter the global workforce over the next decade without sufficient job creation to absorb them. The structural transformation required to address these challenges demands not only more finance, but a fundamental shift in how development finance is organised.

“The World Bank has taken important steps — adopting the language of missions and acknowledging, in its recent industrial policy report, that governments play a central role in directing investment and shaping structural transformation. These are welcome and significant shifts. But ambition alone is not enough. Mission 300 and Mission Water will only deliver if the Bank’s operational instruments are reconfigured around a different economic logic — one that moves from fixing market failures and mobilising private capital, to actively shaping markets, directing public investment, and building the institutional capabilities that real transformation demands.

The Spring Meetings are an opportunity to move the conversation from what missions promise to what delivering on them actually requires.”

— Professor Mariana Mazzucato, Professor in the Economics of Innovation and Public Value, UCL, and Founding Director, UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP) 

Key findings 

• Translating mission ambition into institutional design. Drawing on a structured assessment of 30 National Energy Compacts developed under Mission 300, the paper finds a consistent pattern: mission objectives are articulated at the level of framing, but delivery remains shaped by prevailing approaches centred on sectoral programming, private capital mobilisation, and market-enabling governance. Mission 300’s ambition is systemic; its institutional architecture remains sectoral.
• Fundamental reform is required across five dimensions. Shifting from ambition to delivery requires changes across five interconnected areas: how investment is directed (from sectoral silos to cross-sectoral portfolios); how finance is structured (from filling gaps to market-shaping public investments); how public–private relationships are governed (from de-risking to reciprocity); how institutional capabilities are built (dynamic capabilities for mission governance); and how country ownership is supported (nationally led mission design rather than standardised templates).
• The Bank’s financing model remains gap-filling, not market-shaping. The paper argues that the World Bank’s current approach to finance — centred on mobilising private capital through blended finance and de-risking instruments — reflects a model that treats investment as constrained by insufficient domestic savings. A mission-oriented approach requires public institutions to direct, not merely attract, finance: anchoring investment portfolios, creating the conditions that crowd in complementary private finance, and producing system-wide returns.
• Public–private relationships must embed reciprocity. Where public investment plays a foundational role in creating and shaping markets, the terms of private participation must reflect that public contribution. The paper calls for outcome-based conditionality embedded in IFC investments, MIGA guarantees, and blended finance structures — linking support to reinvestment, local capability development, and the sharing of upside returns.
• A mission-oriented water compact is possible — but requires structural redesign. Building on the work of the Global Commission on the Economics of Water, the paper develops a forward-looking framework for what a genuinely mission-oriented water compact could look like — one organised around cross-sectoral investment portfolios, reformed debt sustainability frameworks, and nationally led design processes.
• Reforming single instruments will not close the gap. The Bank’s country engagement instruments — Systematic Country Diagnostics, Country Partnership Frameworks, and compacts — apply standardised templates that limit the scope for context-specific strategy design. A mission-oriented reorientation would restructure these around nationally led processes of mission design, co-designed with government, firms, workers, and civil society.

Report launch at the IMF/World Bank Spring Meetings, Washington DC

The paper will be launched and discussed at the IMF/World Bank Spring Meetings in Washington DC, 14–16 April 2026. The headline public event is:

Knowledge Café: “Missions in Practice: Turning Ambition into Delivery” — Wednesday 15 April, 13:15–14:00 ET, World Bank MC Atrium Room. Open and livestreamed. Professor Mazzucato will be joined by Arturo Franco, Director of World Bank Strategy Office, and Alexia Latortue, Head of Secretariat, Future of Development Cooperation Coalition.

Additional Spring Meetings engagements include a roundtable on industrial policy with the World Bank (14 April, closed door, with Marcos Chiliatto, Executive Director of EDS15, World Bank); a panel with the Development Strategy Leaders Network (14 April, closed door, with Michael Hugman, CIFF & World Bank Strategy Group); an interview at the Devex Impact House Capital Summit (15 April, open, livestreamed, with Raj Kumar, President, Devex); and a keynote on inequality and labour’s share of income at an L20 event (15 April, open, with Liz Schuler, President of AFL-CIO).

For media enquiries, please contact:

Sol Hallam, Director’s Head of Communications

Iipp-dir-comms@ucl.ac.uk | +44 7503 575 719

UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP)

Notes to the editors:

About Professor Mariana Mazzucato

Mariana Mazzucato (PhD, CBE, FREcon) is Professor in the Economics of Innovation and Public Value at University College London (UCL), where she is Founding Director of the UCL Institute for Innovation & Public Purpose. She is winner of international prizes including the Grande Ufficiale Ordine al Merito della Repubblica Italiana in 2021, Italy’s highest civilian honour, the 2020 John von Neumann Award, the 2019 All European Academies Madame de Staël Prize for Cultural Values, and 2018 Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought. She is a member of the UK Academy of Social Sciences (FAcSS) and the Italian Academy of Sciences Lincei. In 2025, she was appointed Commander of the British Empire (CBE) for services to economics in the King’s Birthday Honours List. Pope Francis appointed her to the Pontifical Academy for Life for bringing ‘more humanity’ to the world.

As well as The Entrepreneurial State: debunking public vs. private sector myths (2013), she is the author of The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy (2018), Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism (2021), The Big Con: How the Consulting Industry Weakens our Businesses, Infantilizes our Governments and W… (2023), and the forthcoming, The Common Good Economy: A New Compass (2026). She advises policymakers around the world on innovation-led inclusive and sustainable growth. Her roles have included for example Chair of the World Health Organization’s Council on the Economics of Health for All, Co-Chair of the Global Commission on the Economics of Water, a member of the South African President’s Economic Advisory Council, Co-Chair of the Group of Experts to the G20 Task Force for the Global Mobilization against Climate Change, and Special Representative of President Ramaphosa to the G20 Taskforce 1 on Inclusive Economic Growth, Industrialization, Employment, and Reduced Inequality.

About the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP)

The UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP) brings together cutting-edge academic theory with teaching and policy practice to rethink the role of the state in tackling some of the biggest challenges facing society. IIPP works with partners to develop a framework that challenges traditional economic thinking, with the goal of creating, nurturing, and evaluating public value in order to achieve growth that is more innovation-led, inclusive, and sustainable.

IIPP’s work feeds into innovation and industrial policy, macroeconomic and financial reform, institutional change, and sustainable development. A key pillar of IIPP’s research is its understanding of markets as outcomes of the interactions between different actors. In this context, public policy should not be seen as simply fixing market failures, but also as actively shaping and co-creating markets. Re-focusing and designing public organisations around mission-led, public purpose aims will help tackle the grand challenges facing the 21st century.

IIPP is a department within UCL and part of The Bartlett, which ranks number one in the world for architecture and the built environment. ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/public-purpose.