Philanthrocapitalism as a Neoliberal (Development Agenda) artefact: philanthropic discourse and hegemony in (financing for) international development^*

* A very preliminary version of this paper was released as a Documento de Trabajo 2018/01, Departamento de Economia, Universidad de Leon.

ABSTRACT

Based on a critical analysis of the structurally neoliberal financing for development (FfD) system established by the Addis Ababa Action Agenda, this article contributes to the literature that views the 2030 Agenda as a new phase of the Neoliberal Development Agenda (NDA), which has been consolidated as hegemonic within the international development (ID) field in recent decades. Additionally, considering philanthrocapitalism as an ideological framework that proposes its own diagnoses and prognoses, we analyse various discourses of relevant Philanthrocapitalist Institutions and International Organizations to point how they legitimate themselves. This article shows how philanthrocapitalism has been constituted not only as a key element within the current model of FfD but also as a genuine neoliberal artefact designed to encapsulate the NDA apparatus, and fostered by the discourse of international agencies to contribute to the meta-objective of consolidating the neoliberal model as hegemonic in the ID arena.

KEYWORDS:

• 2030 Agenda
• hegemony
• international financialization
• discourse analysis
• philanthrocapitalist institutions
• development finance

Acknowledgements

Jorge Garcia-Arias gratefully acknowledges support from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness Research Project ECO2017-85110-R, and from the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities “Salvador de Madariaga” Program PRX18/00296.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Juanjo Mediavilla http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5638-4347

Notes

* A very preliminary version of this paper was released as a Documento de Trabajo 2018/01, Departamento de Economia, Universidad de Leon.

1 See Garcia-Arias (2015) for further details and a more comprehensive explanation.

2 In this work, we understand an artefact to be an epistemological object and an instrument of mediation of human activity (Miettinen & Virkkunen, 2005) that is not neutral but plays a political and ideological role by transforming certain discourses into hegemonic ones and introducing changes in the patterns of behaviour, in the ways of thinking and in the belief systems of both individuals and institutions.

3 See Mediavilla and Garcia-Arias (2018) for a more detailed discussion of that Section and additional references.

4 These three texts have set the pattern and evolution of ID financing in the last decade, moving it to an increasingly privatising and marketized sense (Carroll, 2015; Garcia-Arias, 2008; Soederberg, 2013; van Waeyenberge & Bargawi, 2016).

5 Each are selected because they have the greatest ability to affect the ID agenda (Martens & Seitz, 2015), and define the discourse (Pizzigati, 2011), in addition to exhibiting enormous financial and political power.

6 See rockefellerfoundation.org, gatesfoundation.org, walkfreefoundation.org, waltonfamilyfoundation.org, broadfoundation.org and philanthropicintelligence.com. All of them were last accessed in August 2018.

7 Fragments of the text have been selected in which no contradiction is observed within the discourse, and these are contrasted with the rest and taken as representative of the discourse as a whole. In accordance with Gamson (1992), we assign centrality to the texts developed by PIs, employing a methodology that structures the key elements around a central organizing idea.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Juanjo Mediavilla

Juanjo Mediavilla is a Lecturer at the Department of Sociology at the University of Valladolid. He holds a MA in International Cooperation and Development and a PhD in Sociology from the University of Salamanca, with a dissertation on philanthrocapitalism as a social action model. His research interests focus on critical sociology, the theory of discourse and development finance.

Jorge Garcia-Arias

Jorge Garcia-Arias is an Associate Professor at the Department of Economics, University of Leon and a Visiting Scholar at the Department of Development Studies at SOAS, University of London. His research focuses on critical development studies, global political economy, and heterodox economics. His articles have been published in Global Policy, European Journal of Development Research, American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Journal of Post Keynesian Economics or Cepal Review, amongst many others.