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The New Washington Consensus: Millennial Philanthropy and the Making of Global Market Subjects (with Matthew Sparke)

June 2016
Antipode Forthcoming(3)

DOI:10.1111/anti.12203

Authors:

Katharyne Mitchell

University of California, Santa Cruz

Matthew Sparke

University of California, Santa Cruz

This paper outlines the emergence of a New Washington Consensus associ- ated with leading philanthropies of the new millennium. This emergent development paradigm by no means represents a historic break with the market rationalities of neoliberalism, nor does it represent a radical departure from older models of early 20th century philanthropy. Rather, it is new in its global ambition to foster resilient market sub- jects for a globalized world; and new in its employment of micro-market transformations to compensate for macro-market failures. Focusing on reforms pioneered by the new philanthropic partnerships in education and global health, the paper indicates how the targets of intervention are identified as communities that have been failed by both governments and markets. The resulting interventions are commonly justified in terms of “return on investment”. But the problems they target keep returning because the underlying causes of failure are left unaddressed.

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The New Washington Consensus:

Millennial Philanthropy and the

Making of Global Market Subjects

Katharyne Mitchell and Matthew Sparke

Department of Geography, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA;

kmitch@uw.edu; sparke@uw.edu

Abstract: This paper outlines the emergence of a New Washington Consensus associ-

ated with leading philanthropies of the new millennium. This emergent development

paradigm by no means represents a historic break with the market rationalities of

neoliberalism, nor does it represent a radical departure from older models of early 20th

century philanthropy. Rather, it is new in its global ambition to foster resilient market sub-

jects for a globalized world; and new in its employment of micro-market transformations

to compensate for macro-market failures. Focusing on reforms pioneered by the new

philanthropic partnerships in education and global health, the paper indicates how the

targets of intervention are identiﬁed as communities that have been failed by both

governments and markets. The resulting interventions are commonly justiﬁed in terms

of “return on investment”. But the problems they target keep returning because the

underlying causes of failure are left unaddressed.

Keywords: neoliberalism, philanthropy, development, education, global health

We believe every person deserves the chance to live a healthy, productive life (Bill &

Melinda Gates Foundation).

“They desire the existing state of society minus its revolutionary and disintegrating

elements.”This is how Marx and Engels (2004:44) described the “socialistic

bourgeois”in The Communist Manifesto, including economists, philanthropists, and

humanitarians in a long list of 19th century liberal reformers. Today in the 21st century

does the description still stick? We live in an era when an extraordinarily diversiﬁed cast

of characters are involved in humanitarian reform efforts around the world. From

celebrities such as Bono and Angelina Jolie, to politicians, social enterprise leaders,

microﬁnance developers, corporate social responsibility planners, and a vast array of

NGOs, we hear many different voices echoing the egalitarian arguments for philan-

thropic humanitarianism made by the Gates Foundation. But can we describe the

contemporary global expansion of care as an effort to preserve the existing state of

global society, while eschewing its revolutionary and disintegrating elements?

Ouranswerhereisbroadlyafﬁrmative, and yet we argue that the historical and

political-economic shifts of the years since Marx and Engels penned their famous

polemic also make for important differences in how humanitarian reform is currently

envisioned and implemented. Much of contemporary philanthropy might still be

Antipode Vol. 48 No. 3 2016 ISSN 0066-4812, pp. 724–749 doi: 10.1111/anti.12203

summarily described as capitalists rescuing capitalism from capitalism. But there is

something new about the ways in which a vast variety of people today are being

philanthropically enlisted into entrepreneurial market-mediated partnerships, and

pulled away from making demands on the state for protection and relief from social

injustice. We suggest that to understand these developments it is necessary to

analyze how new millennium interventions by liberal philanthropists reﬂect the ways

in which liberal capitalism has itself mutated since the 19th century.

From the ﬁrst gilded age of late imperial liberalism, through Keynesianism, and

on to neoliberalism, the general trajectory of liberal capitalism has been well traced

in the scholarly literature (Amable 2011; Foucault 2008; Mirowski and Plehwe

2009; Peck 2010; Peck et al. 2012). But, as has also been highlighted by its scholars,

the contemporary term neoliberalism is a confusing neologism for the complex

assemblage of pro-market ideologies, rules, ties, and orientations associated with

globalization (Harvey 2005; Larner 2000). Moreover, even amongst its critics, the

tendency to associate neoliberalism with the policy orthodoxy of the Washington

Consensus leaves under-examined a signiﬁcant transition in hegemonic develop-

ment ideas, governmental practices, and forms of adaptation and resistance in

the so-called Post-Consensus period of the new millennium (Leitner et al. 2007).

Following critical development scholars such as Atia (2013), Essex (2013),

Roberts (2014) and Roy (2010), we think that the new formations of today’s transi-

tional moment are not adequately addressed as just a Post-Consensus or Dissensus

moment. Not only do such terms downplay the global disagreements with the

original tendentious claim on “Consensus”, they also obscure an important point

about how the rationalities and imperatives underpinning pro-market development

are articulated globally: namely, that neoliberal development norms and practices

continue to co-evolve in terms of hegemony and changing contextual conditions

of implementation. They are not ﬁxed ideas that were set once and for all, whether

on Mont Pèlerin, or in Chicago or in DC; these different locales themselves allow for

changing articulations of neoliberal ideals (Peck 2010). Moreover, even if members

and critics of the neoliberal thought collective often share a belief that it is the ideas

more than their reception and implementation that matter most, geographical

research indicates that we need to develop less deterministic accounts of the incom-

plete, uneven and context-contingent development processes through which

neoliberal ideas and actions continue to co-generate one another (Mitchell 2004;

Peck and Theodore 2012; Sparke 2006).

Millennial philanthropy makes clear how opportunistic as well as iterative the co-

generation process can be. We are calling the resulting norm-setting and targeted

intervention a New Washington Consensus, but in a way that is meant to highlight

rather than hide the hegemonic steering of a highly contingent process. Our point

is not to announce an epochal historical rupture with the neoliberalism of the inter-

national ﬁnancial institutions based in Washington DC. Even if today’s debates over

the new Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank do index DC’s decline as a develop-

ment hegemon, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund remain enor-

mously inﬂuential, and geopolitical references to a Beijing Consensus or Mumbai

Consensus are better understood as fearful Beltway bullet points rather than serious

assessments of developments and Development as they are actually articulated and

The New Washington Consensus 725

practiced. Our concern rather is with the new visions of development that are being

put into practice at once globally and, importantly for our argument, personally.

We are evoking “new”-ness in this sense in the theoretical spirit of The New Way

of the World (Dardot and Laval 2013). We do so to address the productive (if not

always deliberate) neoliberal formation of new market subjects and the ways in

which this cultivation and enlistment of individuals is increasingly being imagined

and implemented across national borders from local to global scales. Building on

the scholarship of others, we argue that millennial philanthropy is playing an espe-

cially signiﬁcant role in these processes (Fassin 2011; Hay and Muller 2014; Kapoor

2013; Kovacs 2011). In short, we argue it is advancing a New Washington Consen-

sus that opportunistically shores up global market practices and rationalities

through local social projects that at once acknowledge and cover for market failure

while simultaneously cultivating new market subjects. How exactly does this triple

movement work?

The Triple Movement: Making Market Subjects

In some signiﬁcant respects millennial philanthropy still resembles early 20th

century philanthropic practices, with similar ideas about the cost-effectiveness,

the scientiﬁc dispersal of funds, the top-down deployment of quick-ﬁx technical

solutions, as well as moral arguments about the rights of human beings to live

educated, healthy, and productive lives (Parmar 2012; Zunz 2011). Carnegie and

Rockefeller, much like contemporary philanthropists, sought to apply business

principles to their private foundations, leveraging their big business reputations

and networks as well as introducing strategies designed to maximize human poten-

tial in what they saw as rational and efﬁcient ways (Carnegie 1962; Lagemann

1989). Similarly, they addressed problems of social dysfunction with bold ambi-

tions to solve them by tying the socially marginalized to the opportunities offered

by the marketplace. For the same reasons, the projects they funded tended towards

experimentation and short-termism: two tendencies that are also notable continui-

ties with philanthropy today.

Yet there are also some critically important differences between the earlier era

and the millennial moment. Whereas Carnegie and Rockefeller were interested in

the beneﬁts for capitalism that would follow health and education improvements,

many of the philanthropically funded interventions being developed today create

beneﬁts for business—for big pharma, for education management organizations,

and for a wide range of enterprising consultants and data managers. Moreover,

and more importantly, coming after the many disastrous pro-market policy exper-

iments of the 1980s and 1990s, early 21st century innovations in philanthropy

are characterized by a distinctive pattern of offsetting market failure using market

tools to develop market subjects. Although the normal economistic formulation

of the concept does not go so far, “market failure”in this sense also centrally in-

cludes the successful failure of the ﬁrst round Washington Consensus conventions

that succeeded in forcing states to cut back and reorganize public services through

the wholesale marketization of state practices. Millennial philanthropy has, in turn,

capitalized on the resulting forms of market-state failure, abandonment and

726 Antipode

dispossession, often by advancing a new round of market-mediated schemes,

metrics, and partnerships as supposed solutions for budget-bound governments.

It is this complex market-mediated combination of compensation, interpellation

and market-state reformation that we outline here.

Within the larger debates over neoliberal governance and governmentality we

see this millennial philanthropy as one among many micro neoliberal responses

to the inequalities and exclusions caused by the macro neoliberalism of the old

Washington Consensus policy regime. Epitomized, if not consciously led, by the

Seattle-based Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, this type of market foster care

can, for the same reason, be said to represent a New Washington State Consensus:

even if much of its emerging hegemony rests on reception and emulation else-

where, including by other states, as well as the federal United States government.

Its philanthropic interventions still put great trust in market-mediated delivery

mechanisms, cost-effectiveness metrics, competitive incentives, and intellectual

property protections; moreover, this distinctively neoliberal approach also inherits

the older suspicion of government corruption and state failure from the old

Washington Consensus. But at the same time, today’s market philanthropists

openly acknowledge some of the market failures of the preceding era, responding

and thereby compensating with short-term, grant-funded, spatially selective, vertically

targeted pilot projects which are, in turn, depicted as post-political investments in the

problem-solving of life itself.

These increasingly common compensatory practices are supported by shifting

and experimental public–private partnerships and other efforts to plug the gaps

in resource access and social protections; these were precisely the gaps often

caused or exacerbated by the destructive structural adjustments that were designed

to expand and entrench market liberalization in the ﬁrst place (Harvey 2005; Klein

2007; Navarro 2007). The result is a messy, micro-market management of human

life, in which non-conforming areas, communities and populations are routinely

explored and monitored vis-à-vis their readiness for market preparation or correction.

These targeted areas become sites of experimental studies and competitively funded

demonstration projects, serving as the testing grounds for novel innovations in

education and health that simultaneously constitute new norms of calculation and

entrepreneurialism (cf. Nadesan 2008; Popkewitz 2008). Moreover, as areas where

social identity and practices of citizenship are being remade they are also notably

non-national in geographic scale; they are reterritorialized as local nodes in an

emergent global network of individualized empowerment.

Market philanthropy, like microﬁnance before it (and with it), thus operates at a

personal as well as a structural level (cf. Roy 2010). Its competitive and calculative

practices foster a market orientation among philanthropic grantees, many of whom

are marginalized by race and gender as well as by poverty (Rankin 2001; Roy 2012;

Young 2010). Through the process of winning grants and the rationale behind them,

as well as through the funded projects themselves, recipients are encouraged to see

the difference-friendly freedoms and choices offered by the market as solutions to

the forms of oppression in which they are mired; moreover, through the management

of funds and “return on investment”mindset they are recruited to operate as agents

who can become responsible for their own care (cf. Foucault 1988; Rose 1999). In

The New Washington Consensus 727

direct and oblique ways, then, the funding and underlying humanitarian reasoning

integrates individuals and populations into the ethos of an entrepreneurial and indi-

vidually accountable global capitalist society (Reid-Henry 2014).

To make sense of this modern-day nurturing of market subjects in the midst of

market crisis it is helpful to explore the contemporary applicability of Karl Polanyi’s

(2001) classic account of the “double movement”: the organization of socio-

political struggle to protect societies from the vortex of marketization. In examining

this further, we are inspired by Nancy Fraser’s(2013)morerecentargumentabout

a“triple movement”that includes the diverse struggles for racial and sexual justice—

emancipation movements—that are active in tension with both marketization and

social protection. Fraser argues that the multiple transformational social struggles

that emerged in the decades after The Great Transformation was published have

produced a new set of actors and causes that are insufﬁciently captured with the

“society”v. “economy”poles of Polanyi’s earlier theorization. These social move-

ments include second-wave feminism, LGBT struggles, anti-racist and anti-war

movements.

Rather than freedom from the ravages of the market, many proponents of these

movements have experienced oppression as a result of social protections previously

organized by governments, with insufﬁcient interest or attention to the multiple

axes and practices of domination. Hence, Fraser argues, in order to analyze the

current structural crisis and the dearth of systematic, state-coordinated responses

to neoliberal marketization and ﬁnancialization, we must consider what is happen-

ing around this “third pole”of emancipatory struggles. Other tendencies towards

state capture by hegemonic market elites (including conservative philanthropists

like the Koch brothers in the US) remain critical, not to mention the ways in which

state sovereignty itself has been globally yoked to the work of authorizing,

expanding and enforcing market rule. But as Fraser underlines, the question of

how and where resistance to marketization is redirected is vital to investigate further.

Our point here is to highlight the role of the New Washington Consensus in

redirecting rights-claiming emancipatory or justice movements towards market

alliances and away from traditional government-led forms of social protection.

Demands for charter schools in predominantly minority areas in the US, for example,

are incentivized by philanthropy in ways that converge with the neoliberal privileging

of personal choice and competition in undermining public schools (Saltman 2010).

Likewise, humanitarian demands in primarily post-colonial societies to recognize

access to medicines as a human right are steered by market philanthropy away from

patent overrides, compulsory licensing, and free state provision of generics in the

direction of collaborating with the same pharmaceutical companies whose intellectual

property (IP) monopolies blocked and limited access in the ﬁrst place.

Problems of precarity created by racial and sexual violence (including the legacies of

imperialism and slavery) thus become important objects of our attention (cf. Butler

2006). Due to the intersecting imperatives associated with such extra-economic axes

of oppression, market philanthropy is often involved in projects that target ﬁgures of

racialized and gendered dispossession as modern market subjects (Roy 2012).

Moreover, at the same time that hope amongst these subjects is nurtured for

grant-funded initiatives and programs, demands for systematic, horizontally organized

728 Antipode

government action are often abridged. Additionally, governments themselves are

often pulled into diverse and uneven assemblages of public–private–philanthropy

partnerships (3P partnerships) that constitute the anti-state state effects of the new

post-national consensus.

In the images of perennially smiling recipients pictured in most donor-graphy

brochures we meet the dispossessed, or those who speak for the dispossessed. Here

the discourse of emergency, the personal ethics of a moral response to suffering,

and the persuasive expectations of immediate practical action rule the day. Thus we

are led to believe that the new 3P partnerships deliver and deliver now, today, and

practically, where both governments and macro-market forces have previously failed.

The subjects of this emergency action, and the non-governmental agencies that often

speak for them, must increasingly consent to the promise of project-based protection

and philanthropically mediated praxis. Most especially in areas hit hardest by the

preceding decades of neoliberal privatization and austerity, there is an increasing

embrace of the individualized approaches to risk management, resilience and survival

that the partnerships advance in the name of equality rights (see, for example, the

essays in Navarro 2002, 2007; Navarro and Muntaner 2004).

That these personalized approaches to protection and planning are largely expe-

rimental, short term and constructed like capitalist consumption practices may be

admitted, or even used to further legitimate more ties to for-proﬁt businesses. But

the promises and the projects remain compelling because they are also seen in

traditional liberal terms as expressive of the choice-maximizing will of individuals

themselves (Mitchell and Lizotte 2014). While grant recipients and targets of deve-

lopment have long been expected to become empowered agents and active citizens

and to “self-improve”through the NGO or foundation’s largesse (cf. Cruickshank

1999; Dufﬁeld 2010; Li 2007; O’Connor 2001), the contemporary moment exhibits

an even more intensely self-reﬂexive version of this. Not only are subjects the target

of human capital development,they are now also recruited into the very process itself,

enlisted as entrepreneurial 3P believers—rights-claiming activists for choice, who

demand the context of their own discipline and improvement.

In what follows we suggest that today’s liberal philanthropists are responding—

whetherknowinglyornot—to the destructive legacies of the older structural adjustment

consensus, including the social problems caused by austerity and public sector cut-

backs, as well as the diverse forms of social resistance that market fundamentalist policies

have engendered. Following this, and using illustrations from education in the United

States and global health worldwide, we explore the ways in which new innovations in

philanthropy facilitate the recruitment and fostering of new market subjects, pulling

individuals and communities away from claims for government-led social protection

within nation-states, and towards market preparedness both locally and globally.

The Washington Consensus from Old to New

Named in 1990 by the American economist John Williamson, the Washington

Consensus originally referred to what he and his colleagues saw as a widely accepted

common sense about the merits of 10 speciﬁc pro-market policy reforms (Williamson

1990). These reforms were to: (1) make cuts to avoid ﬁscal deﬁcits; (2) redirect public

The New Washington Consensus 729

subsidies; (3) ﬂatten taxes; (4) set anti-inﬂationary interest rates; (5) adopt competitive

exchange rates; (6) liberalize trade; (7) liberalize foreign investment; (8) privatize state

enterprises; (9) deregulate business; and (10) enforce property rights. For Williamson,

the immediate target of these pro-market reforms was Latin America. However, as

they were globally expanded and enforced by DC-based agencies, the 10 reform

recommendations articulated a wider consensus on what ofﬁcial Washington viewed

as the best governmental approach to enabling global capitalist development. As

such, its simple mantra of “stabilize, privatize and liberalize”became widely associated

by critics with the instabilities and un-freedoms of market-led globalization more

generally (Klein 2007; Tabb 2004).

Due to both the internal failures and widespread resistance to market-led globalization

throughout the 1990s, the Washington Consensus itself became a tarnished title for

many policy-makers by the dawn of the new millennium (Naím 2000; Stiglitz 2002).

Anti-austerity and anti-privatization protests continued across much of the global South:

Asian countries hit hard by the ﬁnancial crises of 1997–1998 rebelled against the IMF;

and, from the AFL-CIO (America’s umbrella organization for unions) to TAC (South

Africa’s successful Treatment Access Campaign) to the Zapatistas (the anti-neoliberal

activists in Mexico’s Lacandon jungle), diverse parts of global civil society expressed

heart-felt dissensus with the so-called consensus. Indeed, Washington State itself

became associated with such dissent insofar as the massive anti-WTO protests in Seattle

in 1999 were widely interpreted as a public condemnation of “race to the bottom”

trade liberalization, over-expansive intellectual property rights assertion, and a neoliberal

approach to globalization more generally (Leitner et al. 2007; Sparke 2011, 2013).

As a result, the cant of consensus could no longer deliver on its depoliticizing promise

for policy-makers. In the context of the global backlash against neoliberal structural

adjustment and Wall Street proﬁteering, it was hardly surprising that Williamson

himself began to backtrack, disassociating his list of 10 reforms from neoliberalism as

well as from an explicitly American-led agenda for global market liberalization

(Williamson 2003). But despite the insistence that the old consensus was really more

caring, less doctrinaire and less violent about market rule, a closer look at the original

10 reforms reveals just one that departed from the free market fundamentalism

condemned by critics. This departure was recommendation 2, calling for the redirection

of public spending. Rather than cutting off all public spending as an inefﬁcient

distortion of market forces and an invitation to inﬂation, Williamson recommended

aredirection rather than an end to publicly oriented expenditures. Following the Adjustment

with a Human Face logic of a notably neoliberal 1987 UNICEF report (Cornia et al. 1987),

hisrecommendationsthuscalleddirectlyforinvestmentsinprimaryeducationand

primary healthcare as two of the main foci for such redirected public spending.

The emphasis on investing in education and health represents an important

continuity vis-à-vis the rise of the new consensus, as do the associated arguments

about the importance of cost-effectiveness, targeting and accountability (which

were also evident in Adjustment with a Human Face). Nevertheless, the calls for such

targeted investment have increased over time. Diverse authorities have come to

reverse the older market fundamentalist faith that good growth generates good

health and education to argue instead that good health and education are vital

prerequisites of good growth (O’Neill 2006; Sachs 2005).

730 Antipode

The World Health Organization’s (2003) Commission on Macroeconomics and Health,

the World Bank’s (2007) Healthy Development strategy, and the Lancet Commission’s

report, Global Health 2035 (Jamison et al. 2013), have all ampliﬁed this same investment

logic, noting that there is an enormous beneﬁt from investing in global health. Likewise,

defending domestic education spending asaninvestmentinAmericaneconomic

competitiveness has been a broadly bipartisan project. It is one that has grown from

The Work of Nations vision of Clinton’s liberal labor secretary Robert Reich to Bush’sNo

Child Left Behind policies initiated in 2001, as well as the corporate-inﬂected Race to the

Top incentivization schemes of Obama’s education secretary Arne Duncan (see Giroux

and Saltman 2009; Lipman 2015a; Parsons 2011). Thus in basic economic thinking little

has changed in these health and education initiatives, which continue to economistically

assume that such spending is an investment in the human capital of the poor.

Politically, however, there are signiﬁcant contrasts. Whereas the older consensus

discussed education and health as “quintessentially proper objects of government

expenditure”(Williamson 1990:47), today the new consensus assumption is of

public–private partnerships operating as the main agents of innovation and investment

in these areas. National governments might be included in such hybrid relationships

but they are included primarily as market-oriented partners; their role is no longer to

regulate or build national horizontal systems of public health and education but rather

just to provide resources and encourage reform.

It is now well understood that the old consensus cutbacks and privatization initia-

tives signiﬁcantly, albeit unevenly, undermined national health and education systems

in the name of economic growth (Fort et al. 2004; Rowden 2009). Furthermore,

notwithstanding the good intentions in Williamson’s recommendation 2, the “redirec-

tion”of public spending that actually happened in the 1980s and 1990s was towards

foreign banks and bond-holders rather than to systems of primary healthcare and

education. Within the US, some promoters of market fundamentalism even articulated

arguments for cuts instead. The Reagan Administration, for example, sought to eliminate

the Department of Education and defund programs such as Head Start and subsidized

school meals (Verstegen 1990). And internationally, IMF and World Bank ofﬁcials

argued, albeit with increasing hesitancy, for the introduction of user fees for health

services, while simultaneously urging countries to prioritize export-led development

over support for health systems (Fort et al. 2004; Keshavjee 2014; Kim et al. 2000;

Rowden 2009).

More generally, it was the wider economic instability and impoverished develop-

ment patterns generated by the old consensus that made funding and support for

social services, education, and health provisioning increasingly insufﬁcient and, in

many cases, impossible. Whether due to the problems of increasing ﬁnancial

volatility, the ﬁscal austerity forced by debt, the high costs of medicine created by

expanded intellectual property monopolies, or the emphasis on reducing taxes

and regulatory burdens on business, the many costs of the old consensus coalesced

to undermine social protections provided by national governments.

Our argument here is that the new consensus has arisen amidst the ruins created

by the older DC development diktats. It is thereby emerging as an increasingly

inﬂuential set of imagined antidotes to the problems and resistances caused by

structural adjustment and austerity on the ground. It is these contexts that have

The New Washington Consensus 731

helped shape the co-evolutionary relationships at the heart of millennial philanthropy,

social impact investment and development target-setting more generally. How then

can we analyze the initiation and ongoing development of this transformational

moment? It is to the rise of this new amalgamation of partners and philosophies that

we now turn.

Out of the Ruins: The Rise of Millennial Philanthropy

While there are many similarities with the earlier era of so-called scientiﬁc

philanthropy, the current logic of millennial philanthropy manifests some unique

features. These include a reliance on ﬁnancialized investment rationalities, elaborate

cost-effectiveness algorithms, and the integration of individuals into the subjective

logic of entrepreneurial capitalism. Together they create a novel combination of

care practices and market-mediated interventions. Despite some agonized dissent

from within the high net worth executive jet set (eg Buffett 2013), the discourse

of positively investing for health and educational improvements with contemporary

business logics and entrepreneurial recruitment efforts has become a dominant

motif in the media and popular culture (Kapoor 2013).

Contemporary philanthropists therefore understand and represent themselves as a

new breed of social entrepreneur (see, for example, Kiviat and Gates 2008; Omidyar

Network 2014). In their attitudes to giving they are believers in the market-based

practices of global ﬁnance, and this leads them to favor highly targeted investments,

market-mediated partnerships, rapid technological ﬁxes, constant assessment, quick

exits, and the use of competition, benchmarking and rankings to set funding priorities.

Perhaps most importantly, their abiding trust in competitive environments, especially a

deep-rooted belief in the beneﬁts of both empowering and incentivizing individual

choice and accountability through competition, is instilled through the competitive

grant process, and in the forms of accountability and assessment with which the

programs are measured and advanced (often subcontracting the monitoring and

planning itself to private sector consulting ﬁrms; see Mitchell and Lizotte 2016). Many

therefore ﬁt and even embrace the model of philanthrocapitalists—hyped for using

their global business expertise in pursuing rapid solutions for contemporary social

problems (for example Bishop and Green 2008).

In turn, grant-funded projects often operate to recruit individuals and popula-

tions who have been economically and socially marginalized, and to orient them

towards more market-based solutions to their problems. Ideally, from the vantage

point of funders, the subjects are able to access the proffered aid in ways that simul-

taneously liberates them from previous constraints and orthodoxies, including

those of patriarchy, nationalism, and racism. But instead of top-down structural

adjustment being seen as the route to liberation as in the older consensus, it is

now more bottom-up innovations in market making by new market subjects that

are celebrated as opening a frontier of freedom for personalized free enterprise.

The provision of micro-ﬁnance by foundations is a case in point. Women are

frequently targeted for the loans with the dual aim of economic and sexual libera-

tion. Female heads of household are, not incidentally, also a “good risk”, providing

the double beneﬁt to funders of return on investment and the potential integration

732 Antipode

of previously marginalized economic subjects. This process relies on a newly

delineated subject position Rankin (2001) has termed, “rational economic woman”

(see also Roy 2012; Young 2010); this rational woman must both learn from and

manifest entrepreneurial ambitions and understandings, and be able and willing

to take advantage of the opportunities offered to her.

The emphasis of most current foundations is clearly on the provision of opportunities

for people to “lift themselves”out of their own social and economic difﬁculties so that

they can bebetter integrated into all facets of global capitalist life. This goal is evident in

education and health opportunities as well as in the earlier and ongoing microﬁnance

initiatives. As stipulated on the Gates Foundation website:

Guided by the belief that every life has equal value, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

works to help all people lead healthy, productive lives. In developing countries, it

focuses on improving people’s health and giving them the chance to lift themselves

out of hunger and extreme poverty …(emphasis added).

These ideas are part of a broader ethos of individualized economic independence—

the most basic form of civil citizenship or “possessive individualism”as elucidated by

John Locke in the 17th century (Locke 1988; Macpherson 2011). Today, though, this

freedom and independence is integrated into the values of the globalized 21st century,

where the freed body now speciﬁcally includes those previously excluded by nationality,

race, gender, and other axes of power. Such freedom, moreover, notably includes

freedom from those forms of systemic discrimination associated with prior systems of

welfare-state social protections; these are systems that have often become even more

exclusionary as a consequence of the old Consensus cuts and other austerity measures.

The logic of aiding the systemically marginalized and globally disconnected, along with

remaking them individually as effective and responsible entrepreneurs and global

citizens, is thereby scaled up in ways that are meant to transcend the exclusions of

faltering welfare systems through forms of technical and reputedly post-political

integration (see also Rancière 2004; Wilson and Swyngedouw 2014; Žižek 2005).

Atthesametime,thislogicisjustasfrequently scaled down. This is because the reach

of millennial philanthropy is often delimited by the sub-national spatial targeting that

creates inclusion for a well-positioned few, while excluding others for whom the

vertically targeted intervention is not calculated to be cost effective. If people do not

have exactly the right problem in the right place at the right time, the patchiness of

today’s 3P partnerships can leave them abandoned. To better understand these parallel

patterns of globally networked inclusion and locally embodied exclusion we look at two

dynamics that work in tandem: leveraged partnerships, and cost-effectiveness calculations.

Partner and Leverage

In the Cold War era of Carnegie, Rockefeller and Ford the nation-state was understood

as the primary scale of allegiance and US foreign policy interests were underpinned

with foundation support (Berman 1984; Carnoy 1974; Parmar 2012). Now, however,

the upward global scaling of millennial philanthropy is attempted through multiple

networks and partnerships, many involving more than one set of actors. As well as

crossing international borders, 3P partnerships also transcend for-proﬁt/non-proﬁt

The New Washington Consensus 733

and government/non-government types of designations and involve actors at every

scale, from individual to local, state, and global levels. The state’s role is rhetorically

aggrandized as activist “stake-holder”, but it is practically diminished through becom-

ing just one of many partners in this patchwork quilt of complex alliances. It is further

diminished vis-à-vis its traditional roles of social protection through regulation as

regulation itself is privatized, outsourced and/or reduced to market-mediated

incentivization schemes. The 3P partnerships characterizing the new consensus thus

manifest a more ecumenical vision of “whatever works”or, in the practitioners’lingo,

“best practices”(Azzam 2007; Garrett 2007). The evolving consensus aspires, in this

sense, to be both post-political and post-patriotic, as it eschews any particular

allegiance to a speciﬁc political vision, government or nation-state.

Individuals are also recruited into more active partnering positions in the funding

process, yet this is less in the sense of preparation as productive workers and national

citizens, but rather as healthy and calculating global consumers and entrepreneurs.

As partners rather than grantees, recipients of current foundation support are

made responsible for their behavior and their choices as they are simultaneously

invited to share in the foundation’s entrepreneurial ideals. The largest contemporary

foundations thus exert a top-down, yet simultaneously all-encompassing type of

pressure on policy through individual recruitment and orientation as well as through

funding, networking and leveraging at all scales of governance. This is in sharp

contrast to the more nationally oriented policy articulations of the earlier period of

“scientiﬁc philanthropy”(Gallagher and Bailey 2000; Lagemann 1989).

Millennial philanthropy is still closely tied to the state and politicians, setting up

its own revolving doors for personnel that parallel those between contemporary

government and employment at big banks, corporations and lobbying ﬁrms. The

Clinton Foundation is an obvious institutional example of this, as is Sylvia Matthews

Burwell, who transitioned from leading the Global Development Program at the

Gates Foundation to becoming President Obama’s secretary of health and human

services. Another former Gates administrator, Rajiv Shah, now manages USAID in

Washington DC, and as such, also plays the role of a policy transfer agent spreading

new Washington Consensus norms back to the institutional centers of the old con-

sensus (see Carr et al. 2012; Essex 2013). But beyond the principal agents involved,

it is the post-national market-making principles that constitute the active working

logics of millennial philanthropy. The ﬁnancial logic of leverage is critical in this

respect, and many contemporary philanthropists have joined forces so that their

giving can have a greater impact. The most familiar example here is Warren Buffett,

who pledged approximately $31 billion to the Gates Foundation in 2006 and then

helped to widen the network by establishing the Giving Pledge in 2010.

More generally, one of the signature strategies of millennial philanthropy is to take

the logic of leverage into all partnerships, not least of all with governments and

governmental agencies, whether local, national or global. From remote school boards

and state education departments to ministries of health and agriculture in developing

countries to global agencies such as the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria, a

recurring pattern is one of incentivization schemes that use relatively short-term

investments in an attempt to leverage long-term changes in programming. Mean-

while, venues where investor impact logics are already hegemonic—such as the

734 Antipode

annual World Economic Forum in Davos—have become key sites of advocacy for new

targets of action (see, for example, Milligan and Schöning 2011).

Politicians are increasingly drawn to these celebrity philanthropists and foundation

CEOs, even as the foundations undermine or re-purpose the authority of governments

with partnerships. As foundations step in to provide, partner, and program, governments

frequently abandon more universal commitments to maintaining already underfunded

but supposedly inclusive health and education systems. The increasing power and

credibility granted to the foundations thus reﬂects a compensatory moment, one

wherein market mediation is allowed and indeed encouraged to provide the care

formerly delivered by the state, but so dependent on leveraged state consensus that

the idealized logics of both state coordination and market coordination are displaced

by a middle way of coordination by targets. In this volatile context it is not surprising

that an emergent ethos of everyday survival and program management has been

imported from the world of ﬁnance. This is the ethos of risk management.

Risk and Return

The new consensus evinces a new concern with building resilience for an era

shaped by risks that are now seen as inevitable: epidemic outbreaks, climate

change, ﬁnancial shocks, endemic poverty. This concern presages a change to

active, mobile and targeted risk management rather than with traditional

biopolitical governance ideals of risk reduction for a single, territorialized population.

Whereas in older forms of philanthropy the rhetorical commitment was to provide

funds for tackling the causes of risk—even that ideal is now gone. Risk is an ongoing

feature of the market and hence of life itself (Martin 2002). Moreover, risk is

“naturally”devolved to the grantees or to the other partners such as the government,

which is expected to share or absorb the risk, but not the potential ROI occasioned by

using risk to its best advantage (Roy 2012). While Carnegie’s vision of returning the

gift of money “to the masses”was a national and more material circuit of wealth

generation, the millennial logic is post-national and dematerialized through the

circuits of global ﬁnancialization.

The Omidyar Network is a recent example of this trend. The Network invests

actively in for-proﬁt as well as non-proﬁt ventures and expects to make money in

the process. The eBay founder’s main concern is that most investors are “too

risk-averse”and thus miss the potential—for proﬁt and for social betterment—of

working with the so-called bottom billion, the very poorest populations around

the world (Schumpeter 2013). Omidyar has hence backed numerous microﬁnance

initiatives such as Kiva and SKS, which are designed to help those who would

otherwise be left out of the presumed advantages of the risk-taking and potential

return of global credit in market-based systems. For newer foundations and

networks, ensuring that these individually oriented incentives toward risk manage-

ment and self-improvement are not compromised through corrupt intermediaries

is critical. Thus projects are constantly monitored and the subjects of accountability

themselves are expected to submit to the culture of measurement and the metrics

of return. The increasing use of metrics is frequently commissioned by research

advocacy organizations that are also funded by the foundations themselves

The New Washington Consensus 735

(McGuinn 2012). These advocacy organizations are then able to wield statistics

stemming from the latest data and analyzed with the most current methods and

technologies. The results are framed as “evidence-based”as opposed to the ideology-

inﬂected rants of those who disagree with the foundation’sdirection.

Evidence-based investment is imagined as distinctly post-political and post-national,

being strongly associated with ideas of moving beyond the inherent corruptions

limitations, and borders of territorial government (see, for example, Bono 2013).

Among the perceived limitations of the past was the welfarist orientation of Keynesian

liberalism in the post-World War II period, as well as the revanchist disciplining of the

IMF and World Bank. Rather than return to either of these more nationally mediated

regimes, the current period takes market discipline to new scales; it is a response that

orients locales and individuals to market-based solutions using a calculus of quantita-

tive evidence as well as a purported freedom from the oppression and subordination

of previous regimes. Moreover, to the extent that national governments are involved

as partners in this work, the project-based investment partnerships can, in turn, be

explained as a good way of rescuing government programs from the critique of

corruption and inefﬁciency. This is how Bill Gates (2014:9) put it in his “annual letter”:

…broadly speaking, aid is a fantastic investment, and we should be doing more. It saves

and improves lives very effectively, laying the groundwork for the kind of long-term eco-

nomic progress …which in turn helps countries stop depending on aid. It is ironic that

the Foundation has a reputation for a hard-nosed focus on results, and yet many people

are cynical about the government aid programs we partner with. The Foundation does a

lot to help these programs be more efﬁcient and measure their progress.

The emphasis on efﬁciency and measurement is illustrative of the post-political

aspirations of the new consensus. In addition to its institutional effects it is active

on a personal level as well; it operates as a form of cultivating practice that hails

the disconnected and marginalized, signifying that new market tools and metrics

offer practicable solutions to personal problems within the wider global context

of market rule. To provide a more detailed account of how these processes simulta-

neously shore up market relations and help to develop market subjects we provide

two illustrative empirical examples: one from the world of contemporary education,

and the second in the arena of global health.

Educational Reform in the United States: The Mantra of

Choice

Low literacy rates and other negative student outcomes evident in many American

public schools, especially in minority neighborhoods, have been highly publicized

in the past few decades (Kozol 1991, 2005). But despite a large body of scholarship

on the inequitable geographies of resource allocation, income, nutritional and

dental health, and other systemic forms of disparity, these negative outcomes are

rarely laid at the door of widespread impoverishment and racism (Giroux 2011;

Ladd 2012; Rothstein 2004). The reputed “failure”of public schools that is widely

trumpeted by education reformers and their well-funded allies in government

and private foundations is not located in structural issues of this type. Rather, they

736 Antipode

are more frequently represented as deriving from deﬁciencies such as poorly

trained or inadequate teachers, large and overly bureaucratic schools, school dis-

tricts, and unions, or the lack of modern technology and/or modern approaches

to contemporary global issues (Ravitch 2013).

The proposed market-oriented “solutions”to the constant refrain of public

school crisis do not therefore address concerns of racism or a more generalized neo-

liberal abandonment. They are pointed towards more superﬁcial and seemingly

“soluble”problems. These are broadly encapsulated in the word “reform”, and in-

volve several components, including more standardized curricula and testing for

students, greater teacher accountability (with “evidence-based”assessment tied

to tenure, promotion and termination), more ﬂexibility in the hiring and ﬁring of

teachers (with a corresponding decrease in union power), and the linkage of federal

and local funding for schools to the results of standardized tests (Brill 2011; Ravitch

2010, 2013; Saltman 2010). The single greatest feature of the educational reform

movement, however, revolves primarily around the possibility of greater school

choice. Over the course of the past decade the necessity for more school choice has

become the most pervasive, all-encompassing and inescapable mantra of private

foundations, government, advocacy organizations and many parents (Lipman

2011; Wells et al. 2002).

Meanwhile, many parents in low-income and/or segregated neighborhoods and

low-performing school districts witnessed a spate of closures of their “failing”local

neighborhood schools—often instigated by pro-reform mayors and school superin-

tendents.

This rhetorical and practical alignment of crisis, closure and “choice”is a

good example of the workings of the triple movement in education. The parents of

children in low-performing schools—schools often highly segregated by class and

race and frequently growing more so as a result of neoliberal cutbacks and the

forces of neighborhood gentriﬁcation—are invited to become savvy investors of

their children, choosing the best school environments for the strongest individual

returns. At the same time, their opportunity for committing to their local neighbor-

hood school is rescinded. They are thus directed primarily towards options such as

charter schools, a path that many have noted leads down the rosy market path of

educational privatization (Lipman 2015b; Lipman and Haines 2007; Ravitch 2013;

Saltman 2010; Scott 2009).

Charters are publicly funded but privately run schools. Each state has a different set of

rules and regulations governing charter schools, with some states more interested in

adopting and promoting charters than others.

While the acceptance and implementa-

tion of charters has varied by city and state, the overall national trend is strongly pro-

charter—with 42 out of 50 states allowing charter schools as of the end of 2014, and

with rapid annual growth in the overall number of schools.

These schools are often

managed by for-proﬁt charter management organizations(CMOs)oreducation

management organizations (EMOs); moreover they can negatively impact the normal

public school system, which loses both revenue and often the more academically

successful students and vigilant parents to them (Ni 2009). Yet despite a strong resistance

to the use of vouchers in education and the clear damage caused by educational

underfunding during the long reign of neoliberal policy-making, there has been relatively

little parental resistance to the rapid increase in charter schools over the past decade.

The New Washington Consensus 737

Millennial philanthropy is deeply involved in these processes and effects. Many of

the largest educational funders, including BMGF, The Walton Family Foundation,

and the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, are interested in the promotion of

systemic educational reform, and the foundation mission statements and large

amounts of grant aid given to charter schools indicate the market-oriented direction

of the desired changes (Barkan 2011; Ravitch 2010; Reckhow 2013). But in addition

to the direct provision of material resources to the schools there are also a number

of other ways that change and enlistment is encouraged. These include grant

funding to secondary organizations such as the NewSchools Venture Fund, which

promote choice and reform through the provision of venture capital; funding for

education reform advocacy organizations (ERAOs), which conduct “research”indi-

cating positive results for charter schools and in other ways advocate for reform;

and, less well known, funding for parent advocacy groups and for popular media

outlets that espouse greater school choice, including the choice of charter schools

(McGuinn and Kelly 2012; Mitchell and Lizotte 2014, 2016).

Most foundations interested in educational reform supply some form of seed

funding to parent groups advocating for choice. Many of these groups are repre-

sented in the popular media and on foundation websites as primarily minority

parents who have become infuriated with their wretched neighborhood schools

and who have spontaneously organized to demand greater school choice for their

children. A recent example of this type of representation in public culture is the

2012 Hollywood movie Won’t Back Down, in which two mothers take on apathetic

teachers and a sclerotic teacher’s union to try to turn around their children’s failing

school. According to the promotional blurb: “This powerful story of parenthood,

friendship and courage mirrors events that are making headlines daily”.

The

setting for the ﬁlm is a post-industrial blue-collar neighborhood of Pittsburgh,

and the main cast is a mix of working class whites and African-Americans who rise

to the seemingly insurmountable challenge of taking over and renewing the dreadful

school.

Won’t Back Down was produced by Walden Media, which was also one of the key

players in the ﬁnancing and distribution of the highly popular 2010 education

documentary, Waiting for Superman. In the documentary, the focus is similarly on

the failure of inner city public schools (in this case Harlem), with primarily poor

minority children and their parents as the main protagonists. Both the movie and

the documentary focus on the power and importance of parental activism in

demanding better schools and teachers for their children. Parents are shown as

initially frustrated and helpless in the face of intransigent bureaucracies and the

poor quality education their children are receiving. However, by the end of both

ﬁlms, the ﬁctitious mothers of Won’t Back Down and many of the real parents in

Waiting for Superman are depicted as energized, newly formed activists, or “Parent

Troopers”.

Research into many of these so-called parent organizations indicates that they

were either initially established or are currently managed by individuals who may

indeed be parents, but who are also, not incidentally, employed at charter schools

or CMOs, or otherwise connected to the broader world of privately funded educa-

tion reform. This was the case for “Parent Revolution”, which promotes the spread

738 Antipode

of parent trigger laws across the United States; these are laws that allow parents to

transform a “failing”public school, including by converting it into a charter school.

Parent Revolution was established by Ben Austin, a policy consultant for Green Dot

Public Schools; Green Dot is a manager of charter schools in Los Angeles. Both

Green Dot and Parent Revolution were heavily funded by the Gates Foundation,

the Broad Foundation the Walton Foundation, and numerous other “reform”-

minded philanthropies (see Ravitch 2013:198–205). Several other ostensibly

parent-run organizations have similar histories of charter involvement or other

philanthro-corporate connections.

A recent example of these multi-layered processes can be seen in the funding of

charter schools in Harlem. In the documentary Waiting for Superman there are

several interviews, including of Bill Gates and Michelle Rhee, who at the time of

the ﬁlm was a strong pro-reform superintendent of the Washington DC public

school system. After many pro school choice statements are made in these inter-

views, the parents are shown at the end, waiting breathlessly for the results of the

charter school lottery. The message is clear: this lottery will determine whether or

not these otherwise marginalized and disconnected parents and children will be

able to obtain a decent education and be brought back into the world of connection

and possibility.

What is not shown in the documentary is a campaign called “Flooding the Zone”,

which was initiated and promoted by the Success Charter Network and the Democrats

for Education Reform (DFER) with the explicit purpose of creating greater parental

support in Harlem for opening more charter schools and having more charter lotteries.

The Success Charter Network spent $1.3 million on leaﬂets,mailings,ads,posters,and

paid canvassing of the Harlem neighborhood between 2007 and 2009, just prior to

and during the same period in which the documentary was being made. DFER coordi-

nated the political rally. These two organizations share wealthy board members and

receive funding from several of the same individuals and foundations, including the

Gates, Walton and Broad Foundations. What also is not shown in the documentary

is the connection of many of the pro-charter school organizations and individuals

working in Harlem to the world of hedge funds. Of seven members of the Board of

Directors of DFER, for example, ﬁve are hedge fund managers; similarly, the Board of

Trustees for the Harlem Children’s Zone and for the Success Charter Network reads like

awho’s who of the hedge fund and banking sector (Miner 2011). Further, Walden

Media, which helped fund both the movie and the documentary is owned by the

Anschutz Family Foundation, which donates large sums to conservative think tanks

such as the Manhattan Institute, the Cato Institute, and the Heritage Foundation, as

well as to organizations promoting greater school choice.

The steering and enlistment of parents and parent groups illustrated here parallels a

simultaneous promotional and funding pushto inﬂuence politicians and other policy-

makers on educational reform. When pro-reform mayors such as Emanuel or

Bloomberg are in positions of power then philanthropic funding for educational

reform in that city ﬂows in copious amounts. A recent study conﬁrmed that the

networking, leveraging and shared goals between foundations advocating for educa-

tional reform leads them to target speciﬁc schools and school districts with their

grants and funding based on this logic. By concentrating their funding on a few sites,

The New Washington Consensus 739

they attempt “to achieve greater inﬂuence in these places”(Reckhow 2013:10). These

targeted sites are located in districts with mayoral or state control (rather than school

board control), thus providing a greater chance for leveraging educational reform

through long-term policy change.

Millennial philanthropy links these types of local, targeted reform projects with

personal parental and student cultivation based on ideas of individual freedom

and choice. It provides micro-market solutions to previous educational “failures”,

recruiting new market subjects through the language of choice, and providing both

“scientiﬁc”data and popular media and cultural persuasion to back up this

rhetoric. Parents and students marginalized by race as well as by poverty remain

particular targets of this philanthropic project of educational reform—as they have

in the US for more than a century (see, for example, Watkins 2001).

Global Health: The World of Bonds and Vaccines

When it comes to programs aimed at improving global health, the investments of

the Gates Foundation are more varied and extensive than its efforts to expand

parental choice in the US. They are global in scope and they stretch from develop-

ment initiatives focused on the micro-engineering of seeds, sanitation and disaster

management tools, to programs focused on child and maternal health, nutrition

and tobacco control. They also include efforts to treat, prevent and eradicate infectious

diseases, and to support global health agencies and research institutes such as the

Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria, and the Institute of Health Metrics and

Evaluation.

Across this remarkable range of work an enduring preoccupation of the Foundation

has been the development and distribution of vaccines. Gates’investment in this area

includes challenge grants aimed at incentivizing microbiological research into new

vaccines, and efforts to eradicate polio with targeted oral vaccination campaigns. It

also helped establish GAVI, the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunizations. The

manner in which these investments are evaluated and managed in terms of ROI, serve

as an emblematic illustration of wider millennial philanthropy tendencies in global

health. At least four interrelated characteristics of the vaccination efforts are notable

in this regard: ﬁrst, their conceptualization as a form of micro-market making that re-

sponds to macro-market failure; second, their attraction as an especially cost-effective

and potentially game-changing biotech investment in global health; third, their im-

plementation in ways that use market intermediaries to marginalize state agencies;

and fourth, their promise as tools for nurturing new market partners amongst the

ranks of the post-colonial poor.

Providing vaccines for poor communities represents a response to the wide-

spread problems of non-access created by global market rules and dynamics.

Although the foundation does not share the direct action protest tactics of civil

society activists such as South Africa’sTreatment Action Campaign there is little

doubt that a critique of macro-market failure still underpins the programs to

develop and distribute vaccines. Disgusted by the unnecessary deaths due to

limited vaccination programs, the philanthropists often echo the same sense of

moral outrage articulated by those speaking from and for poor communities

740 Antipode

themselves. “I remember reading the 1993 World Development Report”, explained

Bill Gates in a speech at the UN in 2002. “Every page screamed out that human life

was not being as valued in the world at large as it should be. My wife Melinda and I

were stunned tolearn that 11 million children dieevery year from preventable causes.

That is when we decided to make improving health the focus of our philanthropy”

(quoted in Jamison et al. 2013:1903).

Program ofﬁcers in the Gates Foundation interpret the problems of devaluation

and limited access as forms of macro-market failure, which are nevertheless

amenable to market-based responses and strategies. Speaking as Director of Global

Health Policy for the Foundation, Joe Cerrell (2007) put it like this:

Every year, millions of people in developing countries die from diseases, including

malaria and tuberculosis, that have been all but forgotten in rich countries. For these

diseases, the economics of the marketplace are not sufﬁcient to commercially justify

the large-scale investment needed to develop and deliver vaccines and drugs. Through

global advocacy, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is working to address this market

failure by promoting innovative health ﬁnancing mechanisms that provide better incen-

tives to the private sector to create global public goods. The guiding principle is to bring

together public agencies and private industry to deal with grossly inadequate health

care for the poor resulting from failures of the marketplace.

Market failure in this conceptualization is therefore seen as something that is

economically correctable through market incentivized 3P partnerships. Limited access

to life-saving medicine is not condemned as a deep structural failure of market capitalism;

nor is the role of IP protections for pharmaceutical monopolies acknowledged as a

primary cause (and thus another successful failure) explaining limited access in the ﬁrst

place. Economic outcomes of such IP monopolies might be noted in passing, including

the perverse incentives they create for drugcompaniestofocusonthediseasesand

lifestyle needs of the wealthy. But the millennial philanthropy approach quickly moves

on to conceptualizing how the vast wealth created by another suite of IP monopolies

(those held by Microsoft) can be repurposed into a market-making response to the lack

of effective demand presented by the poor. And, unsurprisingly, never is the acknow-

ledgement made that investments in vaccine development, however big they may be,

will never create a vaccine against poverty, inequality and all the suffering caused

globally by structural violence.

Once the problem of impoverished access to vaccines and drugs is reconceptualized

as a correctable market failure, the brokers of the new 3P partnerships can inaugurate

the more technical problem-solving work of funding the most cost-effective develop-

ment and delivery mechanisms—thereby working towards making real the so-called

“tiered pricing”that pharmaceutical companies themselves only otherwise tend to talk

about in the abstract ideals of corporate social responsibility statements (Christophers

2014). Here we witness the very direct ways in which the New Washington Consensus

is informed by the market logics of investment. The justiﬁcations may remain a far cry

from the “wealthier is healthier”conceits (see Pritchett and Summers 1996) through

which older Washington Consensus believers once defended their market fundamen-

talist faith, but they nevertheless rely centrally on the importance of making good

investments (Laurie 2015). Advertisingthe cost-effective beneﬁts of health investments

The New Washington Consensus 741

is a key characteristic of the emergent consensus in this respect, and as such it repeats

but reverses the causal arrow going from wealth to health in order to argue that

investing in health is vital to expand opportunities for wealth. “The bottom line”,Bill

Gates (2014:15) wrote in bold in an annual public letter, is that “[h]ealth aid is a

phenomenal investment”.

Investment in developing, purchasing and distributing vaccines speciﬁcally has

always been seen by the Foundation as one of the most effective investments of

all. Vaccines tend to be a one, two or, at most, a three-shot deal. This makes them

less attractive investments for corporations, which prefer the long-term patient

demand that comes with drugs for chronic illnesses. But when the return on invest-

ment is measured in terms of the value of disability adjusted life years saved—and

this is precisely how foundations measure cost-effectiveness vis-à-vis health aid—

vaccines look like some of the best investments available. Moreover, rather like

investments in hi-tech businesses themselves, they have special appeal as disruptive

technologies that hold the promise of becoming “game-changers”, which can

operate independently of both government and business as usual.

Another associated appeal of vaccination programs is their post-political promise

as targeted vertical interventions that can enlist market actors. This enlistment

occurs even as the programs tend to eschew systematic coordination and collabo-

ration with national governments and the maintenance of inclusive national

healthcare systems. A good example of this is the work of GAVI, which was origi-

nally established with a $750 million grant from the Gates Foundation in 1999.

Its International Finance Facility for Immunisation (IFFIm) develops so-called

“vaccine bonds”, which are issued in global ﬁnancial markets.

The future funding

stream that will pay back the private bond investors comes from money pledged as

long-term support for heavily indebted poor countries by a collection of nine donor

governments. The money raised by selling the bonds is used to buy vaccines at

market rates from pharmaceutical companies. These are then distributed to

targeted communities via GAVI’s system of 3P partnerships.

As a result of this vaccine bond chain, by the end of 2013 GAVI had disbursed

over $2.3 billion to support vaccine purchase and delivery in 70 developing coun-

tries. At the same time, however, the decision-making and administration of funds

committed by donor countries was completely removed from the control of the

impacted countries. These decisions were pre-empted by the bond issuance and

vaccine purchase program itself. The money from donor countries is now sent

directly to the pharmaceutical companies that produce the vaccines, along with

large-scale NGO managers, partners, and enterprising for-proﬁt start-ups (such as

vaccine cold chain innovator Intellectual Ventures based in Washington State). While

giving these market actors access to new markets, the market mediations effectively

pre-empt any moves that might be made by recipient governments to issue

compulsory licenses and manufacture or import cheap generics.

The way vaccine bonds bypass national governmental control in recipient countries

while simultaneously providing an ethical cover for business as usual by pharmaceu-

tical companies is a good example of the broader post-national 3P implications of the

new consensus. But more than this, GAVI’s overall approach to scaling up vaccine

access and immunizations in poor countries (which involves government

742 Antipode

partnerships as well) also underlines how the work of millennial philanthropy

operationalizes a new politics of personalized political-economic enrollment. “Why

Invest in Vaccines?”asks the front page of GAVI’s website, with the ensuing explana-

tion quickly provided: “Vaccines do far more than protect health; they also protect

people’s incomes and savings, and promote economic growth.”

To make this claim

appear evidence based the front page provides an interactive graphic that superim-

poses photos of individual people of color across a Google map of Africa, the Middle

East and South Asia. When the photos are clicked, the essays and big data tell stories of

individuals struggling heroically with the help of GAVI to make up for the failings of

weak and uneven national vaccination programs.

Thus the post-colonial promise of “Health for All”once articulated at Alma Ata in

1978 and doomed by the debt crises of the 1980s returns anew as a post-national

and individualized promise of market remediation for new market subjects.

“Children who get sick less often do better at school”, explains GAVI in a way that

links health to the philanthropic interest in education for a competitive global

economy. “Higher achievement at school leads to better employment prospects

and the chance to earn more in adult life.”

Conclusion

Common concerns raised by contemporary critics of millennial philanthropy

emphasize the manner in which a business logic of return on investment often

emphasizes high-tech solutions, lacks democratic accountability, and skews deve-

lopment towards the market—all the while distracting attention from the capitalist

determinants of failing health and education (Laurie 2015; McCoy et al. 2009; Wiist

2011). Here we have sought to further historicize such concerns by addressing how

the philanthropically subsidized supplements to governmental involvement in

health and education simultaneously aids in the compensation and enrollment of

new market subjects recovering from market failure.

One way of summing up this process of compensatory care is to conceptualize it

as a new kind of anti-politics machine along the lines that James Ferguson (1990)

once described in his critique of the development industry in Africa. But whereas

the anti-politics of development that Ferguson highlighted tended to de-politicize

questions of resource allocation while assuming a nationally territorialized target

of bureaucratic management, the New Washington Consensus replaces the foci

of national governance and territory with localized targets of investment. More-

over, it is an anti-politics that remains profoundly political vis-à-vis cultivating

new forms of personalized responsibility and entrepreneurialism in the process of

recognizing human value. This process of political enrollment involves new articu-

latory practices as different market subjects continue to be nurtured and connected

in the hegemonic but shifting patchworks of 3P partnerships (cf. Morvaridi 2012).

Our point about the depoliticizing machinery of the new consensus resonates

with the philosophical arguments made by Rancière (2004), vis-à-vis how appeals

for consensus close down the possibilities for dissensus in human rights discourse.

Responding to Rancière’s concerns, Žižek (2005) has suggested that counter-

demands for preserving arenas for dissensus should make us continually rethink the

The New Washington Consensus 743

“precise space of politicization”.Herewehavesoughttodosobypointingtothe

targeted recruitment of post-national market subjects—individuals and populations

often enlisted by virtue of their historical and geographical positioning on the margins

of economy and society. Investigating how these subjects are targeted via the exper-

tise, cost-effectiveness metrics, and partnership planning of millennial philanthropy

we have also sought to repoliticize what has been depoliticized by reframing it in

terms of Fraser’s“triple movement”. The precise space of politicization becomes leg-

ible vis-à-vis the recruitment of post-colonial and racialized bodies left unsupported af-

ter preceding struggles between state and society over the progression and terms of

the original consensus on marketization.

Ultimately our attempt at repoliticizing philanthropy returns to the homily of all hu-

man lives having equal value. Making this idea real was what Marx and Engels de-

scribed in terms of socialist struggle; it is what Žižek argues must be maintained as

the “communist hypothesis”, despite all the devastating contradictions of 20th cen-

tury communist government.When efforts to honor this sentiment are made by some

of the world’s wealthiest, it seems particularly germane toask about its contradictions

and limitations in the contemporary era. In today’s transitional period these limits and

contradictions are those of time, space, and market competition. The sites and pro-

grams developed by millennial philanthropy are only sustainable as long as there is

grant money to fund them. And notwithstanding the mega-wealth of today’sphilan-

thropists and all the Fortune-style fascination with the billionaires involved, the grant

money is actually quite limited in relation to the government budgets it presumes

to supplant and/or steer. As a result, all the targeted investments in health and educa-

tion tend to lead to sporadic and spatially selective interventions that remaindistinctly

exclusionary. Despite the egalitarian appeals, then, the underlying neoliberal premise

of enticing locally targeted subjects into new rounds of global competition under-

mines the prospects of equitable long-term protections.

In short, the New Washington Consensus is creating spaces of short-term protec-

tion for some amidst widening systemic crisis and suffering. It is producing an archi-

pelago of targeted local interventions in a rising sea of global challenges. Of course,

wherever compensatory care occurs we are assured that it is precisely its practical

market ties that make the projects sustainable amidst the wider context of

market-led globalization; it is also their very market readiness that is supposed to

ensure a brighter future for the subjects of millennial philanthropy. Yet, by persistently

postponing engagement with the long-term structural violence produced by the old

consensus and global capitalism more generally, we believe that the New Washington

Consensus is destined to endlessly revisit the ruination out of which it has emerged.

Endnotes

See http://www.gatesfoundation.org/Who-We-Are/General-Information/Foundation-Factsheet

(last accessed 2 October 2015).

The most highly publicized of these cases are the recent Chicago school closures under the

direction of Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

For example, nearly 10% of all K-12 children in Michigan now attend a charter school and

80% of these schools are run on a for-proﬁt basis (see Kain 2011). In some cities these

ﬁgures are far higher: over 75% of students in New Orleans are now in charter schools,

most with little government oversight (see Gabor 2013).

744 Antipode

From 1999–2000 to 2010–2011 students enrolled in charter schools jumped from 0.3 mil-

lion to 1.8 million, and the overall percentage of public charter schools increased from 2%

to 5% (see National Center for Education Statistics 2015).

See http://www.bbfc.co.uk/releases/wont-back-down-2012 (last accessed 2 October 2015).

In addition to Parent Revolution these include the League of Education Voters, StudentsFirst,

Stand for Children, Democrats for Education Reform, Better Education for Kids, and many more.

See http://www.ifﬁm.org/about/overview/ (last accessed 2 October 2015).

See http://www.gavi.org/about/why-invest-in-vaccines/ (last accessed 2 October 2015).

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The New Washington Consensus 749

Philanthropy During COVID-19 Emergency: Towards a Postcolonial Perspective?

Chapter

Full-text available

May 2023

Civic actors started facing an increasingly challenging context with demobilization in recent years in Brazil. In 2019, a conservative government came to power, and the beginning of the pandemic led to deepening inequalities. That was when philanthropy emerged at its strongest: over US $1 billion in private donations were mapped in only three months. This paper presents data on donations during the pandemic and contrasts selected cases with different perspectives of philanthropy. It seeks to answer whether these donations may have had an outlier content for both donors and communities. It was observed that some initiatives started to break with hegemonic models of philanthropy, however, we argue that there is still a high level of resource-dependency from elites and a coloniality of power mindset, which leaves us to the question: “To what extent is a decolonial turn in philanthropy really achievable if its origin is based on colonial thoughts?”.

Knowledge politics in global governance: philanthropists’ knowledge-making practices in global health

Article

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Aug 2023

Existing research points to the presence of philanthropists in global governance as funders of programmes and partners. Through an in-depth exploration of global health governance, we highlight that philanthropic organizations now shape governance by acting as producers of knowledge. Practicing ‘knowledge philanthropism’, they collect, produce and assemble the data, calculations and research which is used by International Organizations (IOs) to govern problems. In addition, philanthropies craft tools of interpretation, whether concepts, vocabularies, or concrete technological devices that embed these, which are being used for the treatment of the knowledge they themselves produce. While performing such activities, they reify their own role and enable their deeper entanglement in the knowledge machinery of global governance, fashioning data-centric activities as the solution to global health problems, and themselves as the necessary partners in this resource-intensive data collection effort. The epistemic power of philanthropists produces political effects, on health interventions and modes of governing, which deeply participate to the transformation of all matters into objects of investments for financial returns. We explore these processes in relation to global health governance, with a specific focus on medical hypertension, fashioned as a top global health priority and a necessary ‘investment’ by the World Health Organization (WHO) and other sites of global governance.

Missing the Impact in Impact Investing Research -A Systematic Review and Critical Reflection of the Literature

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Aug 2023

Impact investing (II) aims to achieve intentional social impact in addition to financial return. Our systematic literature review of 104 articles finds that the growing academic literature on II is scattered across a variety of disciplines and topics, with inconsistencies in terminology and concepts and a paucity of theoretical explanations and frameworks. To provide an overview of common research areas and findings, we integrate the articles on II in nine emerging topics and shed light on inconsistencies in the literature. The analysis reveals one major shortcoming in II research: Despite the fact that II aims to create a measurable societal impact, this impact of II, its raison d'être, is not scrutinized in the literature. We argue that investigating the impact of II requires a holistic lens, for which we propose systems theory. We suggest prospective future research avenues which combine socioeconomic research approaches (esp. longitudinal qualitative studies and experimental methods) with socio-technical methods (esp. life cycle analysis) to enable a holistic systems perspective of II.

Public and Private in an Era of Entrepreneurial Philanthropy: Exploring John Dewey’s The Public and Its Problems (1927/2016) to (Re)conceptualize Philanthropy as a Public

Article

Nov 2023

Siobhan Daly

In debates about the role(s) and scale of entrepreneurial philanthropy in democracies, scholars discuss the erosion of distinctive public and private spheres and interests, and the replacement of the public sphere. This has occurred at the expense of public deliberation and participation, in favor of the reification of individuals and the role of experts/expertise. Drawing upon John Dewey’s The Public and Its Problems (1927/2016), I argue that there is an eclipse of the publicity of the public. This informs my case for the (re)conceptualization of philanthropy as a public, characterized by (a) the philanthropist as a social rather than an atomistic being, (b) the philanthropy-state dynamic and the publics’ claims, and (c) part of the radical vision of philanthropy. To ensure that private and public have analytical and practical resonance, it is imperative to (re)frame and (re)conceptualize what these concepts mean to entrepreneurial philanthropy and for its role in democracies.

Geographies of Philanthropy

Chapter

Sep 2023

Matthew Sparke

Geographies of philanthropy matter because of the uneven economic distributions of wealth and poverty dictating where philanthropic funds flow from and to, and how these flows of funding across space are tied to diverse historical, developmental, legal, political, cultural, and digital geographies of philanthropy. Philanthropy ostensibly involves an inclusive impulse to care for others in general, manifesting in distinctly localized practices of gift‐giving, territorial outreach, and targeted intervention. Problems with philanthropy have always been geographical, related to who gets to envision the appropriate arenas of beneficence, what people and places merit concern, and where else is excluded. Economic geographies of philanthropy outline the macro‐economic spatial patterns of these divided philanthropic spaces. Microscale analyses reveal complex component “philanthroscapes” that further fragment the geographies of philanthropy in ways that both deterritorialize and reterritorialize contemporary arenas of philanthropic care.

The win-win discourse of impact investing: legitimising accumulation for a new generation of Brazilian wealth elites

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Jessica Sklair

Access and Threats in the Study of Central American Elites

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Francisco Robles-Rivera

Despite this critical influence in politics and the economy, the elites in Central America have yet to be studied. This chapter explores the reasons why. First, access. In the region, the aftermath of years of violence has restricted contact with those at the top who keep their distance from society due to security concerns. Second, the criminalization, violence, and murder of thinkers and scholars interested in studying inequality and power during the social unrest since the 1960s has put a chill on research. In this regard, in this article, I discuss some personal and broader learnings about access, threats, and strategies to circumvent these limitations to studying elites

Remittances and Financial Inclusion: Contested Geographies of Marketisation in Senegal and Ghana

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Vincent Guermond

Charitable assets: social outcomes, financial values, and the new, nonprofit funding regime

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James Williams

Amidst growing signs of inequality, poverty, and marginalization, there have been calls for a new approach to funding the social sector organizations tasked with addressing these challenges. Rather than paying for services, governments and philanthropists are being encouraged to fund programs based on their ‘outcomes.’ This paper explores this growing movement around ‘outcomes-based funding’ (OBF) suggesting that outcomes in this context embody a distinctly financial logic and reflect an effort to turn the work of charities and nonprofits into a type of pseudo asset. The paper teases out these dynamics and their implications based on one particular form of OBF, the social impact bond, a financial instrument which uses private capital to fund social programs and calculates returns based on program outcomes. While SIBs have struggled as a market, the operations underlying these projects and informing the production of outcomes as investable assets have been carried forward into non-SIB work informing flows of public and philanthropic capital and embodying the practices of the larger OBF ecosystem. As a window into the new, outcomes-based nonprofit funding regime, the paper offers a unique lens and set of critical tools for exploring the relationship between capital, the social sector, and poverty governance.

Foundations-Government Relations

Chapter

Apr 2023

Stefan Toepler

The Post-Political and Its Discontents: Spaces of Depoliticization, Spectres of Radical Politics

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Our age is celebrated as the triumph of liberal democracy. Old ideological battles have been decisively resolved in favour of freedom and the market. We are told that we have moved ‘beyond left and right’; that we are ‘all in this together’. Any remaining differences are to be addressed through expert knowledge, consensual deliberation and participatory governance. Yet the ‘end of history’ has also been marked by widespread disillusion with mainstream politics and a rise in nationalist and religious fundamentalisms. And now an explosion of popular protests is challenging technocratic regulation and the power of markets in the name of democracy itself. This collection seeks to make sense of this complex and paradoxical situation by critically engaging with the influential theory of ‘the post-political’ developed by Chantal Mouffe, Jacques Rancière, Slavoj Žižek and others. Through a multi-dimensional and fiercely contested assessment of contemporary depoliticisation, The Post-Political and Its Discontents urges us to confront the closure of our political horizons and re-imagine the possibility of emancipatory change.

Development, Security, and Aid: Geopolitics and Geoeconomics at the U.S. Agency for International Development

Book