Blended Finance

The mitigation of climate change, biodiversity loss, poverty, and other grand societal challenges has historically been primarily financed through public funding and private philanthropic giving. Various funding instruments are used. Yet, despite the use of public funding and private philanthropic funding, a large financing gap remains, especially in the Global South, to effectively address the climate and biodiversity crises and other grand societal crises. With the aim of closing this financing gap, the practice of blended finance has emerged in recent years: private capital is “blended” with public or philanthropic capital, whose aim is to subsidize and de-risk private capital investments to mobilize more capital and finance innovative solutions that address these crises. This includes investable projects in renewable energy, climate technology, nature-based solutions, social inclusion, and others. 

While blended finance is not novel, it is still in its infancy and poorly understood. A better understanding of the current practices in blended finance is critical to growing the blended finance market. This includes understanding the challenges and opportunities that arise to identify and scale up investable projects, the characteristics of effective private-public partnerships (PPPs), the balancing and allocation of risks across investors, how to improve financing structures, and how to speed up the scaling up of the blended finance market, among others.

To make progress in developing the blended finance market and mobilize more private capital investments, it is important to provide a platform that brings together and fosters dialogue among the key players in the public and private sectors, policymakers, and academia. Moreover, critical to increasing the supply of investable projects and the creation of innovative solutions is the training and education of the current and future generations of (private, public, and philanthropic) investors, project managers, policymakers, ministers of finance, and other world leaders from around the globe. 

Columbia University’s Sustainable Investing Research Initiative (SIRI) is uniquely qualified and ideally positioned to serve as a leading international hub for dialogue, scholarship, and education on blended finance and thereby contribute to scaling up the global marketplace for blended finance. 

Blended Finance Roundtable Discussions and Annual Convenings

The SIRI Blended Finance Annual Conference and Roundtable Discussions (focused on specific countries) are SIRI’s signature events. These convenings bring together academics, industry experts from across the financial sector (including institutional investors, multilateral development banks and other development finance institutions, philanthropic organizations, and private investors), standard setters, finance ministers, policymakers and other world leaders from around the globe. 

The aim of these convenings is to serve as a platform that fosters conversations, collaborations, renewed commitments, and actions around expanding the global marketplace for blended finance, with the ultimate goal of crowding in more private capital (especially to the Global South) to scale development solutions and effectively address climate change, biodiversity loss, and other grand societal challenges. Besides fostering dialogue and actions, the convenings also provide an opportunity to share the insights of academic research and best practices in blended finance with leaders from business, investment, policy, and academia. The ability to bring together leaders from across the public and private sector, with a global perspective, is a defining strength of SIPA and Columbia University. 

These convenings bring together a carefully curated set of leaders from around the world. They are by invitation only and under Chatham House rules. SIRI develops high-level summaries of key insights from each of these events to help inform future plans and actions of each participating organization about the critical bottlenecks and opportunities in developing and scaling up the global marketplace for blended finance to help foster sustainable (economic, environmental, and social) development. Read the summaries from the concluded events below.

Past Events

• Inaugural SIRI Blended Finance Conference | September 25, 2024 [Summary]
• 2^nd SIRI Decisionmakers Blended Finance Roundtable Discussion - India | September 24, 2024 [Summary]
• Inaugural SIRI Decisionmakers Blended Finance Roundtable Discussion | April 22, 2024 [Summary]

Upcoming Events

• 3rd SIRI Decisionmakers Blended Finance Roundtable Discussion - Brazil | June 13, 2025
• 2nd SIRI Blended Finance Conference | September 24, 2025

Blended Finance Academic Research

Climate change and biodiversity loss pose existential threats to our way of life—indeed to all life on Earth—and are tightly intertwined with other systemic challenges such as poverty and social inequality. To ensure the long-term health and resilience of individuals, communities, the natural environment, and economies around the world, it is critical to understand how blended finance can effectively foster sustainable development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. 

The sheer scale, scope, and complexity of these challenges call for multi-disciplinary research and collaborations between academia and practice. Although blended finance is getting traction among investors, there is a near complete lack of academic research studying blended finance. To enhance our understanding of the challenges and best practices in blended finance and to make progress in effectively scaling up the global marketplace for blended finance, it is critical to foster rigorous multi-disciplinary academic research on blended finance investments and their contributions to systemic change. Also, it is important to create and strengthen linkages between academia and practice by engaging in research collaborations on blended finance.

Featured Publications on Blended Finance

• Flammer C, Giroux T, Heal GM. 2025. Blended Finance.
• Flammer C, Giroux T, Heal GM. 2025. The Economics of Blended Finance. American Economic Association Papers & Proceedings, forthcoming. 
• Flammer C, Giroux T, Heal, GM. 2025. Biodiversity Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, 164: 1-15.

Academic Expertise

SIPA has extensive global expertise in understanding the threat posed by climate change (and other systemic challenges) for society and the natural environment, and in developing solutions drawn from its expertise from across disciplines—such as economics, finance, social sciences, natural sciences, and engineering—in the areas of sustainable development, climate change, renewable energy and environmental sustainability, finance, innovation and technology, social inclusion, economic empowerment and poverty alleviation, economics and financial policy, urban and social policies, and many other areas. In short, SIPA brings deep experience and expertise in undertaking impactful inter-disciplinary research, developing solutions, and affecting real-world business practices and policies to foster a more sustainable world that balances tomorrow's needs with today’s needs. 

In addition to Columbia’s faculty, its PhD program in Sustainable Development is unique in the world as it provides a rigorous, solution-oriented, and multi-disciplinary education in social science combined with natural science and engineering to understand the world’s most pressing questions in sustainable development. Effective solutions to climate change and other systemic challenges require more than conventional economics, finance, or engineering, but a deep, structural combination of skills and understanding of the complex interactions between a modern, global economy and earth’s natural and physical environment, including climate change, biodiversity, and economic development. 

In sum, providing collaboration opportunities and fellowships to researchers helps support academic advances in blended finance and inform practice about its insights, with the ultimate goal of driving progress in developing the global marketplace for blended finance and crowding in more private capital investments to the Global South to scale development solutions and effectively address climate change, biodiversity loss, and other grand societal challenges. Through hosting development workshops and providing fellowships, SIRI especially aims to support the scholarship of junior scholars and scholars from the Global South to conduct research and drive forward progress in blended finance.

If your organization is interested in supporting academic research in blended finance and exploring potential avenues of collaboration, please contact SIRI Director Caroline Flammer at [email protected]. 

For further information on SIRI’s research activities, please visit its dedicated Research webpage.