Financing the European Green Deal: Unpacking the institutional definition of sustainability of the European Investment Bank

The paper examines how the European Investment Bank (EIB) has adapted its internal practices, particularly in lending, under the banner of ‘sustainable finance’ during its transformation from EU’s development to EU’s climate bank. The EIB is a key European Union institution in a unique position to support the European Green Deal (EGD) and to accelerate the green transition by its capacity to influence the financial markets and to redirect and re-organize financial streams. Therefore, understanding the bank’s vision/definition of sustainability is essential in assessing the politics of financing of the EGD and the chances for its effective implementation. While it was studied how the EIB has aligned its strategic goals with the climate action ambition of the Paris Agreement and of the EGD, and subsequently committed to allocating over 50% of its financing to climate and environmental sustainability by 2025 (Mertens and Thiemann, 2023), the research gap resides in assessing the qualitative transformation process with regard to actually financed projects and their purpose. The paper focuses on how the bank defines ‘sustainability’ in its lending portfolio by unpacking the thematic diversity within the financed projects and their alleged contribution to sustainable development. From the database of the EIB are selected all financed projects since the 1950s to November 2025 with the word “sustain” in their sections “Project Description” or “Objectives” (N=313). Applying to this new dataset content analysis (based on Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics) and coding according to the 17 SDGs (via Atlas.ti) allows for demonstration of the thematic spread in EIB’s definitional shifts. The overarching goal of the paper is to assess how broad and attentive to other aspects of sustainable development beyond “net-zero” the EIB’s lending policy actually is. By documenting the discursive changes in the EIB’s portfolio, this study contributes to understanding the EGD’s implementation and the evolving role of financial institutions in shaping sustainability governance in the EU.