Philanthropic Foundations and Transnational Activist Networks: Ford and the Inter-American Institute of Human Rights (original) (raw)
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The Open Society Institute (OSI) is a private operating and grant-making foundation that serves as the hub of the Soros foundations network, a group of autonomous national foundations around the world. OSI and the network implement a range of initiatives that aim to promote open societies by shaping national and international policies with knowledge and expertise. The OSI provides an excellent case study of the strategies of transnational activism of private philanthropy. It is an institutional mechanism for the international diffusion of expertise and 'best practices' to post communist countries and other democratizing nations. This paper avoids assumptions that civil society is an entirely separate and distinguishable domain from states and emergent forms of transnational authority. Focusing on the 'soft' ideational and normative policy transfer undermines notions of clear cut boundaries between an independent philanthropic body in civil society and highlights the intermeshing and mutual engagement that comes with networks, coalitions, joint funding, partnerships and common policy dialogues.
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The Review of International Organizations, 2012
INGO advocacy can range from cooperative to confrontational, and these tactical choices can have important repercussions for the overall success of the organization's policy work, yet little attention has been paid to this variation. We contend that INGO advocacy strategies are shaped by the organization's national origin. Drawing on insights from sociology and political science, we argue that there is substantial variation among wealthy industrialized democracies in the availability and structure of material resources as well as the domestic institutional environment surrounding INGO work. Together, these national-level factors shape INGOs' choice of the level of confrontation or conciliation that they adopt in their advocacy. We first demonstrate the importance of INGO national origin using new data on the confrontational advocacy strategies of over 3000 non-governmental organizations from OECD countries that are international in focus. We then explore the relationship between national origin and INGO practice through comparative case studies of INGO umbrella organizations in the relief and development sector. Throughout, we focus on four countries in particular: the United States, Britain, France, and Japan. These countries differ significantly in terms of the material resources and institutional environments faced by INGOs and thus allow us to understand whether and how these factors influence INGO advocacy choices. These systematic differences in INGO strategies have important ramifications for understanding national and global advocacy by INGOs and demonstrate an enduring role of the state in shaping the behavior of non-state actors.
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Theories of US hegemony commonly ignore the role of American philanthropy in the contemporary transformations of world society and the globalization of capitalism. In this essay, I suggest that the philanthropic foundation, and with it the institution of philanthropy, is being invigorated by the expansion of its domestic role to foreign activities and to globally framed activities within the USA. I propose that US philanthropy exports American understandings of democracy and simultaneously organizes global reflexivity through citizenship education for the US populace. I offer a preliminary theoretical interpretation of the empirical patterns of international grant-making activities by US foundations, considering John W. Meyer's concept of 'instrumental culture' and some arguments made by Foucauldian 'governmentality' scholars. I emphasize the need to conceptualize the cultural-symbolic and organizational dimensions of hegemony and suggest further sociological analysis of philanthropic activities as integral to current politically and economically led transformations of societies around the globe.
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For comments and suggestions, we thank our entire research team, the anonymous reviewers, the editors Aseem Prakash and Mary Kay Gugerty, and the other contributors to this volume. 2 'Transnational' and 'NGOs' have become conventional terms widely used in the academic literature, although activists frequently reject those terms and prefer 'international' and 'civil society organization.' For the purpose of this chapter, we will use the term 'advocacy organization' to distinguish this subset of transnational activism from more service-oriented organizations (e.g., CARE and World Vision).
Sociology Compass, 2013
The article examines why many foreign-funded, resource-rich movements in developing countries have been unable to produce the massive mobilization found in other successful social movements with access to fewer resources. While foreign ties have brought substantial benefits to local movements, many such social movements have limited grassroots support. The issue of external aid is at the core of an emerging research agenda in the fields of international relations, social movements, and development studies that focuses on the relationship between participatory development, democratization, and the process of transnationalization. Drawing on research work from these different fields, the article argues that by making constituency support irrelevant, internationalization through financial assistance has transformed conflict movements into consensus movements that follow an institutional, resource-dependent, non-conflictual strategy with no deep roots in the community. The article specifies the mechanisms by which foreign funding affects grassroots mobilization. These arguments are examined with respect to evidence from around the world. In today's democratic South Africa, as throughout the continent, a disproportionate number of civil society NGOs supported by donors are trustee organizations, ''with virtually no social roots'' (Ottaway, 2000, 82). In Romania, the NGOs funded by donors ''have lost their tie to the people'' for they are too busy writing grant proposals, ''rather than organizing a protest rally at a polluting factory to raise people's awareness'' (Petrescu, 2000, 233-34). In India, ''(t)he extensive NGO-ization supported by international agencies has… replac(ed) the visible broad assertive struggles where women's groups formed federations and were once very active ….. (and) forg(ed) alliances with grass roots women'' (Krishanraj,2003, 4536). In Brazil, as SOS Corpo's, (a middle class women's organization) dependence on funding agencies grew, ''the relationship with grassroots women's movement was undergoing a fundamental shift''-seeking ''change by becoming an influential 'player' among powerful decision-makers, rather than by participating directly in mobilizing pressure from below'' (Thayer, 2010, 144). In Pakistan, while '''governance' and 'public participation' were central to the work of all the [foreign-funded] NGOs, none of them, not even the most established advocacy NGOs surveyed, were participating in the democracy vs. military debate in the country..…. 'Community mobilization' to the NGOs surveyed was a very non-political term'' (Bano, 2008, pp 2309, 2307).
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This paper is designed to understand the relationship between states and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), especially foreign aid policy and the field activities of NGOs. In this study, I argue that NGOs influence states’ foreign aid policy behaviors toward other states directly, functioning as information providers and lobbying groups. By applying theoretical arguments to the field of international development, the influence of NGOs on states’ decisions about foreign aid is analyzed with the case of the United States. A new time-series cross-sectional data set of the activities of US-based NGOs in developing countries is constructed. This study shows that as the number of US-based NGO field operations in developing countries increases, that country is significantly more likely to receive higher amounts of aid from the United States. NGOs that have longer operations in developing countries are also more effective at lobbying the United States to provide more foreign aid.