Five years ago, a Colombian solar developer looking for European capital had to build a relationship with a French or Swiss investor almost entirely from scratch — usually through a generalist bank with no specific renewable energy mandate, and no standing relationship with Bogotá’s Ministerio de Minas y Energía.
That has changed quickly, and it has changed for structural reasons. Colombia’s renewable auction framework has matured into one of the more predictable permitting regimes in the region. At the same time, French and Swiss institutional funds have been actively searching for renewable assets outside of saturated European markets — and Latin America, with strong solar irradiance and increasingly stable regulatory footing, has become the obvious next stop.
What was missing was not appetite on either side — it was the connective layer: government relationships that could validate a project’s permitting status to a foreign investor, and investor relationships that could validate a fund’s seriousness to a Colombian ministry. This is precisely the gap that a small number of independent relations offices, Meridian among them, have moved to close.
Trade missions play a disproportionate role here. A single ministerial roundtable — the kind now being scheduled between Bogotá and Paris on a roughly quarterly basis — can compress eighteen months of relationship-building into a single afternoon, provided the right people are in the room and the agenda is genuinely substantive rather than ceremonial.
The more structural shift is the emergence of binational investment vehicles — funds capitalised jointly by Swiss or French institutions and Colombian or regional partners, purpose-built to co-invest in renewable infrastructure. These vehicles do more than move capital efficiently: they create a standing structure that outlives any single transaction, so the next project doesn’t require rebuilding trust from zero.
For developers across the wider Latin American region, the lesson is transferable. Capital is not the constraint. The constraint is whether a project can be seen, understood, and vouched for by the institutions on both ends of the relationship — which is exactly the work that happens before a term sheet is ever drafted.
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