Friday, April 19, 2024
Sam Cassanos
Recently, however, the trends in giving are being reversed, largely thanks to an emerging group of super-wealthy philanthropists galvanised by the dangers of global warming.
“Lots of the new generation of philanthropists are very concerned about climate change, in particular, and there is a lot going on at the moment,” said Matthew Bishop, a writer for The Economist and the author, along with Michael Green, of the forthcoming book “Philanthrocapitalism: How the Rich Can Save the World”.
“There’s been these two strands in foundations,” Bishop told IPS. “There are the more traditional concerns and then there is the climate change issue, which has come on much more strongly in the last three to five years, especially amongst tech billionaires.”
And while veteran donors and foundations are also increasingly committed to ameliorating climate change, these new philanthropists are seeking innovative ways to address the problem.
Investing in the research and development of environmentally friendly technologies, redesigning office buildings to make them “greener”, and contributing to activist groups that share in the market-based approaches to social change are examples of how a new generation of philanthropists has begun to address environmental issues.
Representative of some of these new trends is the contribution that Google.org, the popular search engine’s billion-dollar philanthropic foundation, has made to the research and development of a car that can run on fuel that is 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline.
Additionally, philanthropists concerned with sustainability and global warming have lobbied governments to join international treaties regulating carbon emissions, while informing the contracting parties of how to make those agreements business friendly.
The money going into environmental causes is not confined to technological research and development and government lobbying. The more traditional approach of giving money to environmental groups such as the Natural Resources Defence Council or Greenpeace through a foundation or a grant-making association is still popular. According to a 2007 article in Grist magazine, these donations add up to as much as 2 billion dollars in a given year.
But how effective will philanthropists’ efforts ultimately be in bringing about large-scale social and ecological changes? According to Daniel Faber, the money being provided by philanthropists is still not being used in the most effective way to protect the environment – building a broad social movement.
“In order to achieve a transformative environmentalism, that is going to require a tremendous grassroots,” he said. “Absent that mobilisation, funders are going to go for the easier fixes. Policy approaches within the status quo can’t envision the way in which environmentalism could have the capacity to mobilise people in a participatory manner.”
Faber, a professor at Boston’s Northeastern University, who researches and writes about the relationship between philanthropic foundations and the environmental justice movement, is critical of what he calls the “entrepreneurial approach” to environmental causes embodied by “philanthrocapitalism”, which he says continues to ignore grassroots movements in its quest for environmental change.
Of the efforts to develop new ecologically friendly technologies, he says, “The problem is that you are mandating short-term returns on investment. The problem is if you are engaged in long-term movement building, it takes a while – sometimes five, six, seven years down the road – and [that is] very difficult to measure.”
While Matthew Bishop is more positive about the choices that philanthropists have made in supporting sustainability, he shares Faber’s understanding of the scale of the problem being addressed.
“Getting governments to agree will be very hard given the massive interests in preserving the status quo and politicians are short-term oriented,” he told IPS. “Going down the government route is very hard. It will require public information building and public pressure.”
One way in which donors and groups are working to pressure governments and companies to make pro-environmental decisions is through the internet. An advantage of the popularity of environmental causes it that the recipients of philanthropy’s largesse have the ability to invest in cutting-edge web-based techniques to advance their cause.
Advocacy “goes nowhere without a viable communication platform”, says Ethan Orginel, the founder of Aequus Green Communications, a consulting firm that works with environmental groups, and the editor of the website Greenbrooklyn.com.
In Orginel’s view, in the past five years or so there has been a merging, not just of issues within the environmental movement, but also of environmentalism’s goals with the interests of philanthropists, and an unprecedented ability for organisations to use viral internet campaigns to raise awareness and agitate for change. Sustainability and climate change are the cornerstones of this new agenda.
As evidence that these campaigns can have an impact, Orginel points to the Apollo Alliance, a largely web-based campaign to create federal funding for a project reminiscent in scale of the Apollo space programme that would end the United States’s dependency on oil and replace it with cleaner fuels. Orginel credits the group with making a concrete impact on how citizens understand energy issues.
“On both sides of the aisle the running theme is that we need to get off of oil and go on a new Apollo mission. In that regard it has been a resounding success in getting Americans to talk about a project to get America moving forward towards energy independence,” he said.
While acknowledging the revolutionary impact the internet has had on the environmental movement, Prof. Faber noted that funding for groups that focus on specific causes often hinges on political criteria. He cited the example of the Jesse Smith Noyse Foundation, which has had difficulty getting the funding to fully join the communications revolution.
Jesse Smith Noyse is an example of a group that favours the type of grassroots and communal responses to environmental issues and to issues of environmental justice that larger foundations often avoid. For example, Faber explained, in its effort to make the computer giant Intel more environmentally friendly, it initiated a “strategy which gave stock to community organisations to go to shareholder meetings. They brokered an agreement with Intel to clean up its act.”
“Foundations can partner with the environmental movement in very creative ways to use their financial clout to create pressure,” Faber said.
The much larger Ford Foundation opted not to support that effort. In professor Faber’s opinion, this was an example of “a major way in which the foundation world is missing the boat.”