Hidden in Plain Sight: Private Philanthropy’s Support for Research
By Giorgia Dalla Libera Marchiori
Where am I coming from?
In 2020 I was an infectious diseases researcher in London. When the Covid-19 virus started to spread and UK went into lockdown, my lab work halted. Suddenly, I had a lot of time on my hands. That became an opportunity to explore the many questions that have been piling up in my brain for more than a year at that point. Questions about economic, environmental and social justice in relation to people’s health. So, I started to read. A lot. And more questions emerged. What power dynamics are at play in health? What is the impact of wealth inequities on health? What knowledge and evidence we need to address the polycrisis? The more I dug, the more my understanding of ‘health’ expanded. I went from a biomedical limited understanding to a social preventable approach. It is when I realized I could be more useful to people’s health if I would hang my lab coat and take the path of system thinking.
After a few years of additional training and work outside academia, I landed to do my PhD exactly on the intersection between extreme wealth, power and knowledge generation, with the purpose of contributing to build a new global system that prioritizes health for all on a healthy Earth, rather than profit for a few on a dead planet. Specifically, my PhD looks at what type of research private philanthropic organizations are supporting and why. There are few reasons why philanthropy’s support for research is an angle worth exploring.
Critical literature on philanthropy has long discussed how private philanthropic organizations, such as the Gates Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Ford Foundation, have become powerful actors in global governance, influencing priorities in fields like health and agriculture. For instance, in health, philanthropic organizations are described as holding authority that can make them sit at the decision-making table and influence the global health agenda. More recently the role of philanthropy in knowledge generation specifically has been explored, with authors, such as Littoz-Monnet and Garate, bringing up an old concept: generating knowledge as a form of power (Foucault would be glad). However, there are limited empirical evidence on the type of research that is actually supported by private philanthropic organizations. In fact, the evidence available are quite old[1], or limited to specific topics[2], specific geographical context, where the funders or the recipients are based, or a hand full of funders [3].
Even thou private philanthropy’s contribution to research is much smaller than what governments provide, what philanthropic funders decide to support or not support can have important repercussions. In fact, philanthropic organizations are able, again due to their powerful position within the system, to incentivize governments to support specific priorities, either by providing seed funding for pilot projects that can show a government the potential of a specific area or by advocating with governments to co-fund projects together. What research is funded or not funded determine what knowledge is generated; knowledge that then can be used by policy makers, as ‘evidence-based policy’ is the mantra for 21st century governments and international organizations. However, little is known about how private philanthropic organizations decide on what to fund in research, and most that is known is around the usual suspects (e.g. Gates Foundation). Therefore, there is a lack of understanding of the broader ecosystem of private philanthropy supporting research.
Where am I going?
Through this research I aim to provide a better overview of the private philanthropy ecosystem, or more specifically to a portion of this ecosystem. I investigate private philanthropic organizations based in the Global North looking at what type of research they support and why they do so. In particular, I am interested in understanding what they consider valuable knowledge. Having a better understanding of this ecosystem may provide the variety of ways knowledge generation is approached and understood by private philanthropic actors, which has very important implications for the achievement of health for all on a healthy Earth, what in my research group we refer to as planetary health equity.
To answer my questions, I am being collecting data on private philanthropic giving from different databases to understand what data are available when it comes to research funding coming from private philanthropy, and what those data are (or not) telling us. In addition, I am conducting interviews with people working in private philanthropic organizations in Europe, North America and Australia and with experts who are consulted by those organizations, such as academics, philanthropy advisors and the like. What has emerged quite quickly is the lack of comprehensive and up-to-date data on funding for research coming from private philanthropy, as well as the narrow focus on US and Global North funders. These limitations have brought me to focus on Global North-based private philanthropic organizations when setting up interviews, which makes me reflect on how research reinforces the Global North view of philanthropy and how much more we need to do to get the Majority World perspectives into this field. Furthermore, finding external experts has been challenging, both because those experts are rarely acknowledged on funders’ websites and public documents, and because my interviewees rarely suggest people I could speak with. Nevertheless, those challenges have become part of the endeavour of this research, showing that it’s the full PhD process that constitutes an important contribution to knowledge.
Why does it matter?
My research does not spark from simple interest and curiosity; it has a normative embeddedness in the reality of the current World we live in. Private philanthropic organizations live in tension. On one side, their existence, and so the maintenance of their wealth, rely on the current consumptogenic system – the web of institutions, policy, commercial activities and norms that incentives and rewards the excessive production and consumption of fossil fuels-reliant goods and services. A system that is driving the interconnected health, inequities and environmental crises. On the other side, their work aims to improve people’s health and wellbeing, fight for social justice and preserve the natural environment, which are all under threat by the same system that creates and supports these organizations. This tension between existence and purpose creates a window of opportunity. In fact, differently from other private actors, by having an interest that goes beyond profit private philanthropic organizations could be powerful ally in system change and the achievement of planetary health equity.
Therefore, my work wants to shine a light on current practices and what can be learn from them if private philanthropic organizations really want to support healthy people on a healthy planet, which requires knowledge that feeds into the system transformation we desperately need to achieve planetary health equity. This work speaks to both private philanthropy and those supported by it to generate evidence, such as university researchers and practitioners on the ground. By questioning our understanding in the Global North of what constitute valuable knowledge in light of the polycrisis, I hope to spark conversations that challenge business as usual and reimagine the role of private philanthropy for planetary health equity.
[1] OECD Centre on Philanthropy most recent data is from 2019; Viergever et al. 2016’s paper ‘The 10 largest public and philanthropic funders of health research in the world: what they fund and how they distribute their funds’ shows data that is more than 10 years old.
[2] Viergever et al. 2016’s paper, for example, focus only on medical health related research.
[3] OECD Data Explorer reports data in relation to aid and development so the recipients are just ‘developing countries’ (country in the Majority World) and the funder list is short.
Giorgia Dalla Libera Marchiori holds a master degree in Biomedicine from Karolinska Institutet (Sweden) and a second master in Sustainable Management from Uppsala University (Sweden). She previously worked in infection diseases research and with NGOs on global health neglected issues and the transformation of our food system. She has experience with the European Union policy environment, and she has been engaging for a number of years in activism (in and out academia) on issues that are at the intersection of health, equity and planet.
In July 2023, she joined Professor Sharon Friel’s Planetary Health Equity Hothouse as one of the Laureate (Hothouse) PhD candidates. Her PhD project focuses on investigating the role of private philanthropy in knowledge generation and its implications for the achievement of planetary health equity – the equitable enjoyment of good health in a stable Earth system.
