At the edges of the global philanthropic complex

Abstract

In response to Fuentenebro and colleagues’ paper about the geographies of super-philanthropy, this commentary examines the edges and potential cracks of the global philanthropic complex. By briefly bringing the global philanthropic complex to everyday academic and activist life, I focus on its ambivalent and sometimes contradictory inclusions and relations. Using these illustrative cases, I suggest the need to consider when the philanthropic complex might form the basis for alternative – distinctively reparative, even decolonial – global futures.

Encountering the global philanthropic complex

To make sense of the rise of global philanthropy, Fuentenebro et al. propose the concept of a global philanthropic complex, which highlights relationality, uneven geographies, and political forms, processes, and outcomes. My own research about the marketisation and financialisation of adaptive and resilient climate responses has bumped up against the global philanthropic complex in a number of ways. Like several other researchers (e.g. Fitzgibbons and Mitchell, 2019; Nielsen and Papin, 2021; Roberts et al., 2020), I peeked into this world through the Rockefeller Foundation's 100 Resilient Cities programme (Webber et al., 2021), which sought to build the definitions and operable technologies of urban resilience for cities vulnerable to a wide variety of climatic and more than climatic ‘shocks and stresses’. Although the programme itself closed quickly and unceremoniously, its ‘tentacularising’ (7) web of influence for problematising urban climate and extra-climate phenomenon lives on.

Similarly, another titan of the global philanthropic complex, Michael Bloomberg, has taken on the increasingly important nexus of climate finance and sustainable finance, as Bloomberg Philanthropies continues its drive for data-driven, private-market-led decarbonisation transitions. The Bloomberg approach and its unrivalled ability to convene data and political power (Baker et al., Forthcoming) are imprinted across major climate initiatives, such as the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, ¹ or at the most recent New York Climate Week. ² The global philanthropic complex asserts influence at the intersection of climate response and financial infrastructural power well beyond these more high-profile cases (Bryant and Webber, 2024).

In a highly variegated landscape, like other elite higher education institutions (Harvey et al., 2024), my university seeks philanthropic contributions to support its lofty infrastructural ambitions and to fund its research and researchers beyond ever-dwindling public funding. Each year I am invited to ‘pitch’ research ideas to a development office that shop them around to potentially generous and deep-pocketed funders. Recently, a project which sought to understand the emerging and contested relationship between sustainability finance and other more state-based tools for de-risking renewable energy investment gained interest from a boutique asset manager. The ‘gift’ itself was mediated through a single-page, 500-word PowerPoint proposal and a relationship manager skilled in facilitating exchange.

Similarly, I attended a workshop on debt and climate transitions coinciding with the World Bank Spring Meetings and its affiliated Civil Society Policy Forum in Washington DC. Funded, again, by the big philanthropic foundations whose wealth was realised through the financial and technology sectors, the workshop, and several others like it, brought together a broad and diverse collective of activists affiliated with anti-debt and climate justice movements with other civil society organisations, academics, and advocates. The explicit goal was to develop a framework and set of strategies that move beyond the ‘false’ solutions of financialised and market-based tools for responding to climate change and environmental breakdown, which have further indebted vulnerable countries in the Global South while curbing their capacity to respond to immediate and anticipated climate catastrophes (Jacobs et al., 2024). The formal workshop worked to build a coalition for world-making reparative approaches that invert common debtor–lender relations in climate finance (Táíwò and Bigger, 2022).

A global complex financialising climate governance

In their paper, Fuentenebro et al. (2025) propose to make sense of these disparate and anecdotal encounters with philanthropy at the intersections of climate and finance through the concept of a relational global complex of contemporary super-philanthropy. This complex encompasses the super-rich themselves, their foundations and networks, emerging investment tools, and the rolled back and rolled out governance and regulatory apparatuses in which philanthropy does business. With a specific emphasis on geographical relationality, Fuentenebro et al. are keen to identify the ‘specific connectivities’ of actors, processes, and outcomes which are thick with ‘dependency, coercion and power’. The paper demonstrates the importance of charismatic philanthropic actors cultivating laudatory audiences, operating across sites reflecting specific spatial and temporal conjunctures, and working through and reshaping networks of elite knowledge and solutionism (e.g., Bok, 2021). Although often declaring ideological agnosticism (Baker et al., forthcoming), the philanthropic complex operationalises new impact-oriented investment technologies to secure vast influence over welfare and social services, climate change, and urban re/development through anti-political, anti-statist, and trans-localised market-based, problem-solving approaches. In short, the global philanthropic complex looks to replace ‘public goods with philanthropy and charity’ across the ‘hollowed-out welfare states … of many Western countries, as well as the broader neocolonial global development agenda’.

The idea of the global philanthropic complex is diagnostic and exploratory. It highlights the diffuse structuring power of philanthropy (as in the case of the 100 Resilient Cities project) alongside the talismanic convening power of individual, charismatic philanthropists (as in the case of Bloomberg Philanthropies at New York Climate Week). The complex magnifies the shadow-political networks underpinned by and orchestrating financial markets and technologies for climate governance in the shape of markets (as with 100RC and GFANZ). The relational complex also highlights the increasingly tight co-imbrication of philanthropy and public, private, and civil society (e.g., philanthropically funded climate activists). In its emphasis on relations, the complex shows connections between neoliberalised, rolled-back states, divestment from public goods and services, increasingly unequal distributions of wealth, the need for charitable ‘giving’, and the implications of these for democratisation and transparency (as in the case of university research funding).

What's beyond the complex?

The concept of the global philanthropic complex helps explain the relational, geographically embedded, and inherently politicised elements of my anecdotal encounters with global philanthropy. But, I introduced these cases to push and question the idea of a complex around its edges and ambivalences. Where does the complex start and end, what actors, institutions, processes, and practices are in or out, and when can philanthropy do otherwise or produce alternative complexes?

Consider 100 Resilient Cities, itself formative of a global urban resilience complex full of performative market tools, financialised metrics for vulnerable cities, and productive but uncanny public–private entanglements. Although the relational notion of a complex highlights the uneven power relations across donor/investor and recipient actors and sites, there are also mutual co-dependencies between cities and the 100RC project and the Rockefeller Foundation (Webber et al., 2021). Our own interviews with project proponents in Jakarta, for instance, often described how 100RC relied on, or ‘needed’, the vulnerable megacity's participation to secure the legitimacy of any global project focused on urban resilience. Similarly, canny senior government advisors and urban social justice and public art activists used the funding and legitimacy provided by the programme and its expansive networks to pursue their own longstanding urban environmental objectives. This is not to say that city governments and pro-poor urban activists, or other ‘recipients’, have power to direct the terms of engagement or outcomes when they enter the orbit of global philanthropy. However, global philanthropy is dependent on sites, actors, and institutions for their experimental interventions, as well as their complex and contingent experiences of crisis in order to deploy its fixes (Baker et al., forthcoming).

A view to these sites of engagement and implementation for global philanthropy is necessary to understand how the complex works, and its effects as its tentacles reach out into the world. And yet, if globalising crises, sites of intervention, and their governing agents, are, for instance, all part of the philanthropic complex, then what might we say is definitively outside? Similarly, and in turn, if everything is in the complex, then what exactly does this idea help us explain? Certainly, the concept of a complex emphasises the loose boundaries and dense interdependencies of global philanthropy; but it also risks sidelining the sociospatial contexts – the geographies – in which philanthropic action is embedded.

Expanding the ins/outs of the global philanthropic complex also asks us to consider the ‘interstices’, ‘cracks’ (Routledge et al., 2018), ‘raggedy edges’ (Sheppard, 2019), or even alternative ‘possibilities’ (Gibson-Graham, 2008) in the fractures at its edges. Although not central to their argument, Fuentenebero et al. highlight that relational thinking ‘goes both ways’: following Hart, they acknowledge the ‘slippages, openings and contradictions’ (2006: 982) within the complex. But when and under what conditions might these slippages form the basis for ‘radical change’, despite emerging from the ‘relations and alliances of capitalist accumulation and exploitation’?

Our own, modest, research proposal process, described above, reproduced the worst tendencies of global philanthropy: undermining public funding for public research, increasing inequalities between universities, a lack of democratic accountability in the ‘marketplace of ideas’, and a vast and growing bureaucracy which administers this largesse. As Fuentenebro et al. anticipate, this case also highlights the extraordinary concentration of wealth in and through the financial and financial technology sectors, opaque and undisclosed decision-making rubrics and processes, and a relational and uneven landscape of public service provision (universities) in the context of state austerity. And yet, it remains the case that finance itself proposed to support critical geographical research examining the potential to democratise the forms and outcomes of sustainable finance within the climate economy towards reparative decarbonisation trajectories (see also Webber et al., 2022).

More substantively, the activists and civil society groups which comprised climate and debt workshops mobilised against a private-finance and market-led climate transition that increasingly emphasises private investment for renewable energy and resilience initiatives. Proposals such as the Glasgow Financial Allianz for Net Zero (GFANZ) or the Just Energy Transitions Partnerships (JETP), supported by Bloomberg and other coalitions of the philanthropic complex, were the foils against which activists, strategic advisors, and civil society organisations railed. While some participants mobilised liberal human rights perspectives, others advocated their militantly radical positions on transition, transformation, and revolution. The event was a window onto a dependent, yet distinct, global complex, largely organised between Washington DC, New York City, London, and Berlin, populated by millennial and Gen Z socialists and anarchists (cf millennial development Roy, 2010). Largely funded by politically progressive philanthropists, such as George Soros's Open Society Foundation, this differently oriented complex works towards decolonial and democratic climate futures.

There are worlds – complexes? – of these progressive alliances which simultaneously depend on, but contradict the basis, forms, and outcomes of the global philanthropic complex. This includes schemes for individual Australian settlers to ‘Pay The Rent’ ³ on stolen land to First Nations peoples as a basis for Treaty, or financial investment which targets racialised economic inequality towards redistribution and reparations (Rosenman, 2024) and many more in between and beyond. These cases cannot be dismissed as mere dupes of the philanthropic complex or as simply reinforcing the exploitation and accumulation dynamics that form its basis. Across them, alternative coalitions from within the philanthropic complex use their ‘gifts’ to produce ‘world making’ visions and theories of change that centre decolonial climate justice, inversed global debtor–creditor relations, and repair and reparations.

The idea of a global philanthropic complex highlights and politicises the relational production of super-wealth and landscapes of inequality which necessitate philanthropic giving, and the dependencies of austere states on philanthropists for a wide variety of public goods and services. The complex conceives these relations as structurally coherent if geographically variegated and inherently uneven across actors, institutions, and sites. But, while expansively networked, encompassing, and consuming, there must also be edges to the complex and possibilities for the relational connectivities between philanthropic giving and its recipients to constitute radical alternatives.