Geographies of philanthropy: The intricate,the critical,and the generative

Abstract

Fuentenebro et al.'s (2025) intervention on geographies of philanthropy provides a welcome prompt for geographers to engage more extensively with philanthropy's undeniable socio-political significance. My commentary focuses on the authors’ proposition and disaggregation of ‘the philanthropic complex’. Useful as the proposition is, I argue we will be well advised to resist the urge to allow ‘the complex’ to sediment as a macro-concept. Geographical engagements with philanthropy will benefit from engaging with more fully relational thinking and an insistent focus on practice to understand how philanthropy's powers and capacities are assembled and, more generatively, to identify the potential to disassemble and even to redirect philanthropy's impacts.

Philanthropy is emerging as an undeniable influence in governing society, politics, economy, and culture. Fuentenebro et al. (2025) provide a welcome prompt for geographers to engage more extensively with philanthropy's undeniable socio-political significance. Their timely and rich intervention has the capacity to shape the still-emergent field of geographies of philanthropy. As such, the analytical repertoire it suggests demands reflection. In this commentary, I engage with their critical disaggregation of the ‘philanthropic complex’ through Masseyian relational thinking. I suggest that, conceptually useful as ‘the complex’ is, at this still incipient stage of geographers’ engagements with philanthropy, we will be well advised to resist allowing ‘the complex’ to sediment as a macro-concept and to ‘refuse to know too much’ about its effects (Gibson-Graham, 2008). Our engagements with philanthropy will benefit from engaging with more fully relational thinking and an insistent focus on practice to understand how philanthropy's powers are assembled and, more generatively, to identify the potential to disassemble and even to redirect philanthropy's impacts.

On knowing less about the complex…

The authors ascribe philanthropy, especially super-philanthropy, as a configurational force, working across space and scale to reshape relations between capital and labour, state and society. Its operations inoculate and stabilise neoliberal capitalism and the power relations that sustain the super-rich. The authors lean into the concept of philanthrocapitalism, whereby ‘capitalists rescu(e) capitalism from capitalism’ and social problems are targeted market opportunities rather than political questions (Mitchell and Sparke, 2016: 725). Along with other critical scholars, they imbue philanthropy with capability and legitimacy to set policy frameworks around market-oriented solutionist approaches and contain calls for systemic change (see Gilmore, 2016; Rogers, 2011).

For the authors, philanthropy's configurational force arises from the ‘philanthropic complex’. This is conceptually attractive. It pushes beyond individuating narratives of High Net Worth Individuals and foundations as benevolent gifters and suggests more systemic workings of philanthropy. Rooted in Masseyian relational thinking, the authors disaggregate the complex across five sociospatial ‘axes for thinking’. This elaboration is a productive move in many senses. It provides instructive conceptual resources that highlight the infrastructural nature of the complex, drawing out the network of relations and intermediations that enable and maintain philanthropy's geographically uneven effects.

However even as the authors recognise that the systemic and structural, personal and place-based are intertwined in philanthropy's operations, in their disaggregation of the complex the systemic and structural win out. Its multiple intricate connections and intermediations have a known effect, pre-determined by philanthrocapitalism's unfolding logics, structures, and system-like character. Philanthropy is ‘hyperagentic’. Audiences are swayed to allegiance, recipients subjugated, and preferred solutions rendered mobile and uniquely neoliberalising in intent and effect. Philanthrocapitalism's mechanisms are sedimented, and the depolitisation and reproduction of super-philanthropy and neoliberalism itself are achieved. Limited space remains for the need to explore how philanthropic rationales and preferences are institutionalised to enable webs of power relations to be respun.

This effect is somewhat inevitable in a relatively concise theoretical intervention, yet it warrants reflection because it risks allowing the complex to solidify as a macro-level concept: a smooth-functioning, ideologically and politically unified force with limited vulnerability. Rather than magnify the capacity of relational thinking to bring into view the finer-grained practices (at multiple scales) that render the complex effective and reveal ‘how (it) operates in practice’, as a macro-level concept, the complex risks overpowering practice with pre-framed, presumptive systematicity, masking how philanthropy's admittedly powerful effects are rendered. The macro-orientation attributes such effective agency to the complex that it appears immune to intervention: little hint of its immanent dissolution (Webber et al., 2021: 358) or potential for reassembling remains visible. Deployed thus, the authors’ reminders that ‘thinking relationally goes both ways’ and of Hart's (2006: 982) orientation to the ‘slippages, openings, and contradictions [that] help us generate new understandings of the possibilities of social change’ slip from our analytical grasp.

So the question becomes one of how to productively engage the complex as a meso-level concept that might guide critical investigation of the work needed to maintain its effects and, crucially, of the processes through which its constituent relations might be intervened in, disassembled, or redirected. At this stage in the development of geographical scholarship on philanthropy, as the authors note, more expanded empirically grounded geographies are urgently needed. Leaning heavily into the effectivity of the complex in advance of this empirical work on grounded practice risks short-circuiting theory development and pre-framing analyses such that we discount unanticipated outcomes – material, political, and social – and potential for interruption and reassembly.

There is surely potential for deepening relational thinking more attuned to the intricate, taking relational thinking ‘all the way up’ to capture the relational formation of the complex, the labours and governing technologies needed to construct and maintain philanthropy's shaping of the rules of the game and the labours through which philanthropy is indeterminately localised and contingently worked out on the ground. This will require careful exploration of the diversity of place-based, relational enactments of philanthropic engagements, with and beyond super-philanthropies.

A greater willingness to temper the evaluative with the empirical can prevent us from assuming the pathways through which the complex's constitutive relations stabilise and reproduce philanthropic trajectories, and from too easily dismissing the potential that these relations might be reworked and that local philanthropic engagements might have different trajectories. Admittedly, there are methodological challenges to this, to which I return. Nonetheless, the authors’ disaggregation of the complex suggests productive lines of analysis that can guide this work without its sedimentation as a macro-concept.

States and ‘the complex’

To explore this further, I turn to the way states, particularly urban states, figure in the author’s rendering of the complex and state–philanthropy relations. The authors confer two closely connected positions on states. First, philanthropy is co-constitutive, having progressively stepped into the ‘void’ left by the neoliberal rollback of Keynesian welfare states. States are reduced to ‘one among many actors’ in the networked operations of the complex while super-philanthropies become apex actors marshalling and containing other ‘shadow state’ constituents. Second, states sustain the complex via an essential infrastructure of wide-ranging state supports. For Fuentenebro et al., as for critical scholars of philanthrocapitalism more widely, the result is damning: ‘state restructuring, expanding philanthrocapitalism, ideological capture of political possibilities’.

My concerns are whether this stance writes off states’ public capacities too easily and, relatedly, assumes too readily that systemic capabilities assumed of the complex straightforwardly translate to the urban. Most work on philanthropy has been at the nation scale yet, as the authors note, philanthropy has had increasingly explicit urban dimensions (Fuentenebro and Acuto, 2022). The urban-oriented work thus far chiefly focuses on the constraining effects of city-based philanthropic initiatives and the gravitational pull of their preferred market-oriented, metricised styles (Montero, 2020; Pill, 2020; Rosenman, 2019; Webber et al., 2021). Yet, notwithstanding recognition of the multiscalar configuration of philanthropic power, there is much scope to explore whether different possibilities might emerge from urban state–philanthropy relations that escape the bounds of philanthrocapitalism and philanthro-policymaking.

For some time, urban scholars have been theorising emergent roles, performances, and aspirations of urban states as they enact agency and shape progressive agenda beyond the habitual styles and aspirations of neoliberalised urban governance. This has been triggered by a seeming revival of urban states’ capacities across a political spectrum from the regressive, to progressive variants of the urban entrepreneurial state (Phelps and Miao, 2020), to more intentionally progressive interpretations that locate urban states as drivers of transformative socio-political and economic change (e.g. Chatterton et al., 2018). When it comes to philanthropy, this suggests the necessity for unpacking instances where urban states are not overwhelmed by the inherent ‘power to’ of the complex or complicit with its systemic propensities but are actively engaged – relationally – in shaping other more expansive trajectories. Recent work on new municipalism (e.g. Russell et al., 2023 is instructive here, as is the wider wave of work on experimentation and urban governance (e.g. Bulkeley, 2023). Certainly, it suggests that how urban states position themselves to work with philanthropies – leveraging strategic opportunity or holding ground against conditionalities of philanthropic ‘gifting’, shaping relations – bears further investigation.

If we take these possibilities seriously, we must remain open to what might emerge from the contextual, conjunctural relationalities of new urban state/philanthropic engagements enacted in place. This demands the focus on finer-grained dynamics of practice mentioned above. Can we resist folding every relation that emerges back into the trajectories of the complex outlined here? Must philanthropy's involvement in restructuring urban states always lead to deepening marketised approaches and a limited solutionist zeigest? Alternatively, by maintaining a more open stance, might we reveal cracks in how the complex realises its imputed capacity to constrain, channel, and co-opt urban policy agenda?

Where might we turn for pointers on unpacking urban state/philanthropic engagements, cognisant of the potential power of the complex without allowing its analytical weight to overwhelm other unpredictable outcomes and trajectories? Pill's critical analysis of philanthropy-driven neoliberalist reworking of Baltimore's urban governance retains space to reveal alternative non-market, community-based paradigms for local development emerging with philanthropic backing. Baker et al. (2025) draw out how urban states exercise strategic opportunism, harnessing the organisational capacities and financial resources of philanthropy to pursue long-harboured agendas. Speaking directly to experiments involving philanthropy, Thompson (2023: 607) explores novel municipal partnerships that harness philanthropy to urban state aspirations to actively reshape local economies. Here philanthropy exercises significant power in urban governance, yet in a direction not limited to the extractive or entrepreneurial but aligned with generative, progressive policy logics associated with the commons and foundational economy.

None of this denies that states, as relational formations imbued with contest and contradiction, may lean towards regressive trajectories (M^c̲Guirk and O’Neill, 2012). It is to suggest, though, that the systemic possibilities of the complex may not hold as predictably as inferred. They might (see Pill, 2020), and revealing the practices through which this is achieved would be valuable. Alternatively, they might be interrupted, fail, be routed in unexpected directions, or trigger new relations that build new capacities, or spark a different politics that exceeds market-oriented urban solutionism. A more intricate relational sensibility will be needed to unpack all this, and what scope it may hold for channelling and configuring urban philanthropy. These are not, as things stand, closed questions. They require us to push past any assumption that the complex necessarily unfolds across urban states unobstructed to reshape economy, society, politics, and culture.

Towards critical, generative methodologies

Accomplishing research that gets under the hood of the fine-grained practices of the complex is challenging. As the authors note, philanthropy often belies accountability. Philanthropies, super-philanthropists in particular, and the support mechanisms of the complex can be evasive, elusive, and opaque (see Baker et al., 2025). Fuentenebro et al.'s disaggregation of the complex provides welcome grist for the mill for demanding transparency and accountability. Indeed, greater transparency will be key to enacting the fine-grained, multiscalar research, relational theoretical sensibilities, and methodological approaches that travel with ‘refusing to extend explanation too widely or deeply, refus(ing) to predict too much’ (Gibson-Graham, 2008: 621). This demands that we follow the labours that render effective the powers attributed to the complex, ensuring they remain available for analysis rather than pre-emptively attributing them structural or systemic force (see Baker and M^c̲Guirk, 2017). Peck and Theodore's (2015) distended case approach is apposite, accounting for ‘dominant patterns and trajectories of transformation, as well as for unscripted deviations and alternative mutations’ via methods that stay close to the ground of philanthropic and policy actors’ practice and contingent outcomes.

In the context of urban philanthropy, such methods would investigate the questions Fuenteneboro et al. nudge us towards around the actions, operations, and conditionalities philanthropies use to set ‘the rules of the game’ and circumvent urban political processes, and the techniques and technologies they use to discipline the horizons of city governance and policy-making. But they would also explore the following: how the personal whims of super-philanthropies intersect with local political priorities; instances where philanthropy-led policy agendas are embroidered with locally derived agendas or have unintended effects; the other connections, policy alternatives, and material benefits that funded initiatives leverage or spark; and where, how and with what effect are philanthropic agendas challenged. Such knowledge can further de-mystify philanthropy and fuel the capacity to interrupt moments wherein the complex works to narrow policy prisms, constrain potential, re-enact, and reproduce its power. Deployed as a meso-level concept in a relational approach attuned to this array of questions, Fuenteneboro et al.'s treatment of the complex can help geographies of philanthropy extend beyond the critical to the generative.