Foundations and Public Policy: The Mask of Pluralism (original) (raw)
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Foundations and the challenge of legitimacy in comparative perspective
"Foundations are dandy things, but the truth is few institutions are as complacent, and potentially unaccountable to the real world as private foundations. When I was a public official, my dealings with philanthropy often left me with the question -who do they think they are?" Douglas W. Nelson, President, the Annie E. Casey Foundation Who do foundations think they are? Why do they even exist? Why do societies accept the presence of private institutions that control large amounts of capital, in perpetuity, with few constraints on how their assets may be used? On what grounds are institutions that control vast wealth able to secure the consent of society and government? To whom are private foundations accountable? What, in other words, gives private foundations their legitimacy?
American Foundations: Their Roles and Contributions to Society
American Foundations Roles and Contributions, 2010
Among all industrial societies, the United States has long granted the most scope to philanthropy. While foundations exist in many countries—most prominently in Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy, the Netherlands, and Japan—the United States stands out: in no modern society are foundations more numerous, and nowhere have they become so prominent and visible. Compared with their counterparts in Europe and Asia, the philanthropic foundations of the United States look back to a longer and more continuous history. In this book, however, our concern is not to explain why so many foundations have appeared in the United States or why they are more numerous and more influential here than in other countries. Instead, we ask, What difference have they made over time, and what difference are they making today? What have they contributed to American society over time, and what are they contributing today? How did foundations achieve impact in the past, and how are they attempting to make a difference today? It would be wrong to conclude on a note that suggests that all foundations subscribe to any single set of approaches. Instead, we step back for a moment to emphasize the extraordinary diversity of foundation size, approach, and purpose and to suggest that acceptance of that diversity is increasing. Recent decades have seen a remarkable and still little-studied flowering of religious foundations devoted not only to the oldest-established mainline Protestant denominations but also to evangelical Protestantism in many of its varieties, to the many dimensions of Judaism, and even to Catholic causes that had long made minimal use of foundations.38 The liberal National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy critiques the field from a progressive standpoint; the Philanthropy Roundtable and the Capital Research Center comment from the right. In its efforts to provide an umbrella for the entire field, the Council on Foundations has set up a number of specialized committees. Foundation program officers have organized a large and increasing number of grant makers in particular fields ranging from aging and the arts to the environment and health to the U.S. International Grantmaking project . Hence it is no surprise that those who call for new foundation approaches do not speak with a single voice.
Foundation roles and visions in the USA
Politics of Foundations, 2007
Since the emergence of the "modern philanthropic foundation" in the wake of the Russell Sage, Carnegie and Rockefeller philanthropies in the early 20 th Century, the question of roles and functions (if not necessarily visions) of foundations has always been a firm part of the American foundation debate as well as its rhetoric and mythology . Since then, the guiding foundation paradigm in the United States (US) has been that of the well-endowed grantmaking foundation acting as social venture capital to foster social change. Early recourse to a role definition (e.g., the innovation or change agent role in particular) was a necessity to establish societal legitimacy for the "new" organizational form in a way that was perhaps less necessary in Europe-at least in those parts of Europe where the foundation survived the transition from pre-modern times to modernity. In fact, the very emergence of the modern philanthropic foundation was almost immediately contested in the progressive, anti-corporate climate of the early 1900s; and political challenges (albeit on very different grounds) reemerged in the 1950s and 1960s.
Private foundations in the United States (US) are powerful actors in contemporary society. Their influence stems in part from their lack of accountability – they operate free from market pressures or finding sources of funding, and they are not subject to formal democratic systems of checks and balances such as elections or mandatory community oversight. In recent decades, foundations have become increasingly influential in shaping public policy governing core social services. In US education policy, for example, the influence of private foundations has reached an unprecedented scope and scale. Although economic and electoral accountability mechanisms are absent, foundations are aware that their elite status is rooted in a wider acceptance of their image as promoters of the public good. They are incentivized to maintain their role as “white hat” actors and, in balancing their policy goals with the desire to avoid social sanctions, the ways in which they exert influence are shaped and limited by institutional processes. Drawing on rare elite interview data and archival analyses from five leading education funders, we observe that foundations seek to sustain their credibility by complying with legal regulations and by drawing on cultural norms of participation and science to legitimize their policy activities.