About the Public Banking Project
Getting the financing needed at the right time, place, scale, and pace for achieving the UN 2030 Sustainable Development Goals is a global challenge. What role can public banks serve in financing these commitments appropriately and justly?
The Public Banking Project has three core objectives: One, to co-create theoretically informed and empirically rich understandings of the capacities of public banks; Two, to strengthen the interface between public banking scholars, policymakers, practitioners, and communities, and; Three, to train a new generation of public banking scholars.
Message from the Director
The Public Banking Project is a first-of-its-kind initiative, created with the intention of excavating the exciting world of public banks. Why? Because there is no pathway to global green and just transitions that will not pass through public banks. But for whose benefit? We are a collective of researchers from around the world committed to advancing pro-public alternatives. Public banks can have a catalytic effect on sustainable and inclusive futures, but only if society holds these powerful public financial institutions accountable.
The Public Banking Project (PBP) is housed at McMaster University, which sits on the traditional territories of the Mississauga and Haudenosaunee nations. The PBP aims to co-create cutting-edge scholarly knowledge and evidence-informed policy advice to improve how public banks finance sustainable, inclusive, and prosperous communities. Contributors include scholars working within and across the fields of political economy, development studies, politics, economics, finance, geography, business, sociology, and sustainability. Together we seek to train a new generation of public banking researchers with the capacity for conceptually innovative and policy relevant research, collaboration, and stakeholder engagement.
The origins of the Public Banking Project reach back more than a decade to the Municipal Services Project (MSP), Queen’s University, Canada. The MSP had been exploring public alternatives to privatization since 2000. In 2012 the MSP invited Thomas Marois (then working in Development Studies, SOAS University of London) to contribute to its research programme by linking essential public services to supportive public banking alternatives. Their research partnerships since flourished, particularly around public bank-public water collaborations. Thomas Marois now serves as an Associate Director at the MSP.
Building on MSP work, in 2022 Thomas Marois launched the Public Banking Project at SOAS. The PBP has emerged as a forum for the dedicated study of public banks. Its aim was, and is, to be the world leading hub of research on public banks. In the summer of 2023, Thomas Marois joined McMaster University as a Professor of Political Economy. The Public Banking Project was brought into the Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition (IGHC), contributing to the IGHC’s 25 years research legacy at McMaster University.
The future is public banking! Welcome to the world’s first hub of research dedicated to the advancement of public banks for green, just, and inclusive society.
Director, Public Banking Project
Information Box Group
Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Indigeneity
The Public Banking Project is committed to Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Indigeneity in all aspects of its research, teaching, recruitment, knowledge mobilization, scholarship, and community service.
Land Acknowledgement
We recognize and acknowledge that students of McMaster University meet and learn on the traditional territories of the Mississauga and Haudenosaunee nations, and within the lands protected by the “Dish With One Spoon” wampum, an agreement to peaceably share and care for the resources around the Great Lakes.