Development Seminar

From Laissez-Faire to Foster Care:

Market Philanthropy, Education and Global Health

Katharyne Mitchell & Matthew Sparke

University of Washington, Seattle, USA

Nov 8th, 1-3 PM,

Room SS 2125, Sidney Smith Building, 100, St. George Street

Toronto

Contemporary philanthropy shares many continuities with early 20^th century efforts by philanthropists to apply their market prowess and power in communities seen as disconnected from the opportunities of market capitalism.   However, coming after the pro-market policy experiments of the 1980’s and 90’s, early 21^st century innovations in philanthropy are characterized by a distinctive concern with what we call ‘market foster care’. We see this as a micro neoliberal response to the inequalities, exclusions, and suffering caused by the macro neoliberalism of the so-called Washington Consensus. Led by the Seattle-based Gates Foundation, market foster care can, for the same reason, also be said to represent a new Washington (State) Consensus. Its philanthropic interventions still put great trust in market-mediated delivery mechanisms, assessment metrics and intellectual property protections. And this neoliberal approach also inherits the old Washington Consensus suspicion of governmental corruption and failure. At the same time, however, today’s market philanthropy is often conceptualized in ways that openly acknowledge market failure as well. As a result market foster care is pursued in the hope that contemporary capitalist ‘best practices’ (including investment metrics, targeted pilots and public-private partnerships), represent the best hope of responding to problems produced by markets that are not structured to serve the poor. Using examples of interventions in US education and global health, we explore the problems with spatial selectivity and temporal sustainability created by this micro market foster care approach to macro market failure.

In terms of theory our project also problematizes Karl Polanyi’s classic 1944 account of the “double movement” (the organization of socio-political struggle to protect societies from the vortex of marketization). We draw thus on Nancy Fraser’s more recent argument about a “triple movement” that includes the diverse struggles for racial and sexual justice that are active in between and in tension with both marketization and social protection. Amidst this tensional triangle, we highlight the role market philanthropy plays in pulling rights-claiming justice movements into alliance with marketization and away from traditional government-led forms of social protection. Demands for charter schools in minority districts, for example, are incentivized by philanthropy in ways that converge with the neoliberal forces of competition to undermine public schools. Likewise humanitarian demands to recognize global health and access to medicines as human rights are steered by market philanthropy in the direction of supporting the same pharmaceutical companies whose IPR monopolies block access in the first place. As a result, market foster care is often involved in projects that target figures of racialized and gendered dispossession as nascent market subjects.

Contact: http://www.devsem.utoronto.ca/

Matthew Sparke is Professor of Geography, International Studies and Global Health at the University of Washington, where he also serves as the Director of Integrated Social Sciences. He is the author of Introducing Globalization: Ties, Tensions and Uneven Integration (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), as well as In the Space of Theory: Post-foundational Geographies of the Nation-State (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press) and over 75 other publications. Based on grants from the National Science Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, his research is focused on the uneven geographies of globalization, including most recently epidemiologies of inequality and enclaved risk management in global health and biological citizenship.

Katharyne Mitchell is a Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Washington, Seattle. She has authored or edited five books, including Crossing the Neoliberal Line: Pacific Rim Migration and the Metropolis, and Practising Public Scholarship: Experiences and Possibilities Beyond the Academy. Mitchell served as Simpson Professor of the Public Humanities at the University of Washington from 2004-2007, focusing on childhood and education in the United States. She is the recipient of fellowships from the National University of Singapore, and Stanford University, and grants from the Spencer Foundation, MacArthur Foundation and the National Science Foundation.