Capital, Credit and Commerce: Global Development Finance and India’s Role in the New Economic Order

Developing countries face a widening mismatch between the scale of investment required for the Sustainable Development Goals and the capital that reaches projects, firms and public systems on affordable and development-consistent terms. This critical narrative review examines four increasingly interconnected domains: environmental, social and governance capital allocation, blended finance, climate-related financial risk, and the Sustainable Development Goal financing gap. Literature published from 2006 to 2 June 2026 was identified through searches of scholarly metadata and full-text indexes, institutional repositories, citation networks and official multilateral sources; references and digital object identifiers were verified against authoritative records. The evidence indicates that sustainable-investment labels have expanded faster than measurement consistency or demonstrated development impact. Environmental, social and governance integration can improve risk identification and may lower financing costs for credible issuers, yet rating disagreement, firm-size bias, weak disclosure and limited emerging-market coverage constrain comparability. Blended finance can address specific, identifiable market failures through guarantees, concessional capital, technical assistance and risk-sharing, but mobilisation ratios are an inadequate proxy for additionality, equity or lasting market creation. Climate vulnerability already raises sovereign and corporate financing costs, creating a feedback loop in which countries requiring the largest resilience investments often face the least affordable capital. The Sustainable Development Goal financing gap therefore cannot be closed by relabelling existing portfolios or by transaction-level de-risking alone. A coherent strategy must combine domestic public investment, stronger local financial systems, debt and international financial architecture reform, transparent project preparation, disciplined use of concessionality, and outcome-based safeguards. The review concludes that sustainable investment is most credible when capital mobilisation is treated as an intermediate means rather than the final objective, and when financial additionality, development additionality, distributional effects and climate resilience are assessed together.