6 - Democratisation

Summary

Chapter 6 on ‘democratisation’ continues to examine how public banks can function in the public interest, if not without contradictions. Looking at the cases of Germany’s KfW and Costa Rica’s Banco Popular, the chapter argues that their ways of democratisation support their institutional credibility, and hence persistence. In distinct but meaningful ways, the KfW and Banco Popular enable their societies to have a meaningful say over how these public banks function. In contrast to decarbonisation and definancialisation, however, democratisation has a more disproportionately self-evident public interest effect. Yet it is not a completed act wherein these public banks are democratised once and for all. Democratisation, too, is pulled between contending public and private interests in class-divided society within global financialised capitalism.