The article below appeared in the guardian on saturday 9 january 2015; written by deborah doane
As 2015 closed out, philanthropy
entered a new zenith. First, Mark Zuckerberg, joined the ranks of
philanthrocapitalists, announcing that he will give away 99% of his Facebook shares.
His intentions, thus far, are a bit vague – curing disease, education,
connecting communities and “advancing human potential”. Perhaps he had McKinsey
& Company’s guide: “Designing philanthropy for impact” as his
bedside reading.
Meanwhile, on the
eve of COP21, Bill Gates also announced his latest venture,
to launch a multibillion dollar green tech revolution. It was hailed in alongside
heads of state including President Obama and Prime Minister Modi. The model for
his energy revolution follows a template from previous initiatives on vaccines
and agriculture: bring in some billionaires, the private sector, match fund by
governments, and solve the world’s biggest challenges.
It’s difficult to
argue with such largesse. No doubt these new riches will find their way into
the development funding landscape. Development finance is a hot topic, and
private sources of finance are something that all NGOs rely on to varying
degrees. I would be surprised to find any development organisation without a
major donor strategy at the ready.
But funding from
the Gates or the Zuckerbergs also come with some fairly complex strings, the
heart of which is that most of this funding may actually impede the real work
of development – aptly described by Amartya Sen as being about freedom and
wellbeing – not simply to increase income. The barriers to these aren’t
necessarily technology, or even lack of funds: they’re more often political
and, as the recently deceased development economist Douglas North
articulated, in the institutions that govern society.
Wealthy charitable
foundations and/or not-for-profit LLCs (limited liability companies), as
Zuckerberg’s venture will be, aren’t much different from the big foundations of
their 20th-century forefathers, the Rockefellers, the Fords, the MacArthurs.
All are founded on the backs of an unequal society, concentrating wealth into
the hands of unaccountable private voices to determine what the priorities for
society should be, and indeed who gets to benefit. And development actors all
beg for the privilege to be involved.
“I wake up every
morning and pray they [the large foundations] will disappear,” says Mike
Edwards, former head of civil society and governance at the Ford
Foundation. “They’re past their sell-by date, un-reformable, and too
focused on incremental change.”global
development professionals
Large-scale change
rarely comes from an NGO sitting in Oxford or Washington, drinking from the
foundation well, he argues. Edwards’ central issue is that larger foundations,
which ultimately dominate development discourse, are not concerned with real,
lasting change – change which needs a rich tapestry of grassroots civil society
organisations that hold power to account, and shift the political game
entirely. “They thrive on inequality between foundations and recipients, made
up of conservative liberals,” he argues. “No one is going to relinquish control
over money.”
Inderjeet Parmar, a City University professor
of international politics who has studied the influence of large foundations,
argues that the wealthy foundations, whose boards are drawn from the upper
classes, are among the most powerful institutions in the world today and that
they sustain a social order that won’t challenge the power of elites.
Zuckerberg, for
example, has been heavily criticised in India, for
promoting his version of offering limited internet access to everyone. He even
wrote a letter for the Times of India attacking
his critics. Rights groups have argued that his proposal is a power grab for
Facebook, and concentrates information into the hands of a few select
companies, ultimately reinforcing poverty and class structures.
There are modest differences between
philanthropists, of course. The Soros
Foundation aims to promote open societies and improve
democracies. But they still maintain power structures from within, by
predominantly funding only “pre-selected” organisations. Thus Soros gets
to determine how democracy should be improved, rather than leaving it up to
democracy itself – the antithesis, in some ways, of what they’re trying to
engender.
Occupy would never
have been funded by a large philanthropic organisation, but the spontaneous
global movement is almost wholly responsible for putting the issue of
inequality on the political map. Large private donors are prepared to fund
technocratic causes, and in more enlightened cases – “democracy”, but they’re
not prepared to relinquish power and control themselves. In fact, they only
serve to concentrate power further into an increasingly narrower set of ideas
about how change happens.
For example, the
Gates Foundation makes a decision about vaccines and requires governments to
match fund the donation to access it. Those governments then have to choose
between saying no to funding for vaccinating, or diverting funds from something
else, such as public health or education. Gates made the de facto decision for
that government. His new agricultural alliance was similarly
defined: bring together large agri-business and government to improve
agriculture in Africa on a technology-rich, large-land-holder led platform.
Green agro-ecology approaches, despite having been proving significant success
in the region where it has been applied, get sidelined.
Parmar sees this as
even more sinister. “There are other priorities other than those that are
publicly stated – increasing the level of power, through increasing their
networks in non-western countries,” he says.
The funding arena
has become increasingly narrow, focused on issues like health or education.
Very few focus on voice, power or challenging the mainstream. Anyone who has
filled out long funding application forms, struggling to come up with
short-term targets and outcomes, will have felt the limits of the donor
relationship. Indeed, most foundations are now more focused on “value for
money” than ever before, in spite of the fact that development is complex, and
attribution for success can’t usually be ascribed to any one intervention.
Coupled with the
trend towards governments limiting the ability of charities or grassroots
organisations to campaign in many parts of the world – from India to China, and
increasingly on western shores – development NGOs, enabled by the funding
community, are at risk of becoming little more than contract agencies who
deliver basic public services while further entrenching a system of inequality
and divisions. If governments are stripping citizens’ rights, if communities
are divided, if resources are extracted only to benefit the wealthy elite, then
we will be aiding and abetting the status quo, leading to a shrinking and less
vibrant civil society in the long run. And a less vibrant and agile civil
society signals a reduction in long-term development for the many. “Is there a
model of power and development which is more focused on local concerns through
local participation itself?” asks Parmar.
A powerful letter written by Jessie Spector, the
executive director of Resource Generation, urges Zuckerberg to let go of power
and to fund root causes. In an ideal world, Zuckerberg never would have been
allowed to accrue this much wealth and dictate how it would be spent. But in
the world of realpolitik, I would take Spector’s recommendations further, and
say to Zuckerberg: set up an independent entity; don’t sit on the board; set
some guidelines about tackling root causes like corporate power or tax justice;
ensure smaller organisations have access to the funds without jumping through
excessive hoops; make sure it’s governed openly by a broad group of
stakeholders, representing gender, race, class, none of whom can sit on the
board indefinitely and finally, agree to relinquish control. Only then can
Zuckerberg truly begin to make a positive difference with his wealth and dent
the power dynamics that dominate the funding community.
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