“expands and consolidates monopoly capitalist rule and safeguards the conditions for further capitalist accumulation.”

their rhetorical power and growing boardroom presence has allowed them to shape women’s rights agendas

The Anti-Poverty Swindle Corporate-driven development partnerships benefit their sponsors more than those in the Global South. by Maria Hengeveld A Nike campaign targeting AIDs reduction. Think Retail 431 Share 0 Tweet 0 Mail The new issue of Jacobin, centering on development and the Global South, is out now. To celebrate its release, new subscriptions start at only $14.95. Over the summer, the secretary general of the United Nations, Ban Ki-Moon, spent a day in Silicon Valley trying to persuade tech leaders to play their part in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the UN’s new global framework that will guide development policies, priorities, and aid flows over the next fifteen years. “I need your support,” he reportedly pleaded. “You are the most brilliant innovators. What matters is that some creative and innovative people who have the entrepreneurial capacity help these visions be carried out.” “That,” he told them, “is what the United Nations needs.” It wasn’t the first time the UN chief expressed his faith in the intentions, creativity, and strategies of capital. For years he has touted big business as a “truly transformative force” whose goodwill and resources provide a “unique opportunity” to drive sustainable development. His optimism echoes that of Simon Zadek, a recent contributor to Ban Ki-Moon’s High-level Panel on Global Sustainability whose 2008 article “Global Collaborative Governance, There is No Alternative” argued, “It is through collaboration, often involving the oddest bedfellows, that we vest this generation’s hope for effectively addressing the challenges of poverty, inequality, and environmental insecurity.” For many development elites, corporations are partners not just for their financial largesse, but because they’re well suited to help in the design and implementation of poverty reduction programs. For example, Melanne Verveer, President Obama’s first ambassador for global women’s issues, hails corporations such as Walmart and Nike for their “game-changing” philanthropy, and Paloma Durán, who heads the UN’s Sustainable Development Fund, is working to involve businesses at every stage of development. Indeed, the creation of the SDG framework (to replace the Millennium Development Goals), and the negotiations and discussions surrounding the process, has brought even greater visibility to the international development elite’s faith in corporations. SDG-related documents and reports show the growing role of corporations in development, and the hope among development elites that they can reduce the rhetorical, ideological, and methodological distance between corporations and the development world. Corporations, these texts tell us, have come to recognize that promoting global equality isn’t a purely altruistic act — it is also in their own interest. “Companies realize that their ability to prosper and grow depends on the existence of a prosperous and sustainable society,” the United Nations Global Compact says, “and that deprivation and ecological destruction can have negative material impacts on supply chain, capital flows, and employee productivity.” The SDGs, other documents explain, present us with a unique opportunity to foster this growing corporate goodwill and philanthropic enthusiasm to turn “business into a truly transformative force in the post 2015 era.” According to the World Investment Report and a recent UN Youth document, for instance, businesses are exceptionally equipped to support the poor by fostering “financial inclusiveness” and by changing the global business mindset through entrepreneurship education and relevant private-sector skills such as “Global Impact MBAs.” For the NGOs and students who take their cues on development from the UN, the message seems clear: corporations are our partners, not our enemies. You reach out to them to ask for responsibility, not to demand accountability. You charm, not scold them. It’s not just top-down development bodies that pressure NGOs and other institutions to cozy up to capital and adopt pro-market strategies, all while overlooking the role corporations play in driving poverty. On June 24, FundsforNGOs, a global resource hub for NGOs, held a webinar called “Corporate Fundraising: Making an Effective Funding Case to Business.” Too often, the webinar’s website reads, “NGOs and corporations speak two different languages and look at the world with two conflicting perspectives.” With an eye toward creating a lingua franca, the webinar promises to “explore practical tips for NGO managers to engage, work with, and obtain funding from corporations — while keeping social policies, ethics, and reputations intact.” The Foundation Center, another global resource hub for NGOs, similarly offers “Top Tips for Corporate Fundraising During Tough Times” and advice on “Securing Corporate Partnership,” urging NGOs to adjust themselves to the corporate logic of short-term profit and instructing them how to align their nonprofit goals with capital’s search for short-term investment returns (“Be able to communicate that you are a good investment now“). High-Impact Investments To be sure, the notion that capital’s know-how will strengthen the efficiency and impact of NGOs, and that the aims of businesses and development overlap, is not new. Far from speaking different languages, managerial culture, investment language, and capitalist logic have come to the development sphere over the past two decades. And as partners, board members, and philanthropists, corporate executives have eagerly adopted and re-appropriated social justice vocabularies. Concurrently, corporations have long recognized that investing in NGOs and attaching their brands to trusted activist organizations — preferably those who represent “innocent victims,” such as children and women and, ideally, those who focus on the cultural and traditional practices that oppress them — is a lucrative way to protect their reputations and pacify opposition to corporate globalization. Increasingly, they rely on NGOs not just to legitimize their direct practices but also to normalize neoliberal, market-led development. Conversely, NGOs have discovered that focusing on emerging markets, youth potential, education (particularly for girls), skill building, entrepreneurship, and behavioral changes makes companies perk up, allowing them to strengthen their brands and avoid costly regulation and oversight. Transnational NGOs such as Save the Children, BRAC, the International Rescue Committee, CARE, Women Deliver, Vital Voices, Plan International, and the Population Council are among the growing group of NGOs that receive funding from corporations such as General Electric, Walmart, Adidas, Chevron, Unilever, Wells Fargo, Coca-Cola, Goldman Sachs, Nike, Johnson & Johnson, HRA Pharma, Bank of America, and JPMorgan to socialize and educate youth in the Global South along these pro-market lines. When choosing their NGO and philanthropic partnerships, most of these companies are looking for “high-impact investments” that unleash the potential of the poor and unemployed to become self-reliant, market-oriented, private-sector workers and entrepreneurs, able to drive (and take responsibility for) economic growth. Take Coca-Cola. Its donations stem from a desire to “help [them] understand the importance of self-reliance and the impact they all have on the future of the economy by addressing the issue of unemployment in Africa and helping to create a culture of entrepreneurship.” Big banks such as JPMorgan, Wells Fargo, Citi, and Bank of America are among the multinationals that, in partnership with NGOs, invest in programs that purport to teach poor people resiliency, fiscal responsibility, and relevant skills. Citi, for example, supports programs that help “adults and youth adopt positive financial behaviors” with microfinance and entrepreneurship. In 2014 alone, they paid more than $4 million to Junior Achievement, a global nonprofit youth organization that focuses on enterprise and financial literacy, to implement this vision in fifty-two countries. General Electric similarly empowers “people by helping them build the skills they need to succeed in a global economy.” For corporations like Nike, Citibank, and Goldman Sachs — who locate the primary cause of global inequality in the exclusion of women and girls from the labor and credit market — breaking down barriers that prevent girls and women from entering the marketplace has become a major priority. Though long promoted by international institutions like the World Bank, the Nike Foundation was one of the first major corporations to adopt and popularize this logic, declaring “adolescent girls as the world’s greatest untapped resource.” Since 2008, it has funded dozens of transnational NGOs and development institutions to promote the idea that poverty will be solved once girls view themselves differently, are valued as economic actors by their societies, and enjoy equal access to finance and business opportunities. This view of girls as good investments — this idea that integrating girls in the market will produce the best economic outcomes — has, rhetorically at least, become dominant in the gender and development field, reshaping the ways in which development budgets are spent. Unequal Partners The growing dependency of NGOs on corporate funding and the attendant expansion of pro-market interventions are central aspects of what political scientists Peter Dauvergne and Genevieve LeBaron, authors of the book Protest Inc., call “the corporatization of activism.” A key dimension of corporatization is a process in which “business charity has essentially replaced government funding in providing resources for social welfare and has become the so-called answer to social problems.” To the authors, corporatization “involves the politics of social activists internalizing a belief in the value of corporate responsibility, deregulation, and privatization.” As a result, Dauvergne and LeBaron argue, “activist organizations have increasingly come to look, think and act like corporations” — even (though to a lesser degree) in the Global South, where corporatization is changing “the context within which such groups organize and serve their communities.” Today, very few international NGOs call for a transformation of the global economic system, greater corporate accountability, or the enforcement of labor rights and workplace standards in corporate sweatshops. Instead, women’s leadership development, entrepreneurship (particularly in social enterprises), access to financial services, and sports programs for youth are the favored poverty-reduction strategies. The corporatization of NGOs, however, is not a straightforward process. Partnerships take many forms, and the actors involved aren’t monolithic. Oxfam is a good example. On the one hand, it’s proud of standing “at the forefront of partnerships between the business community and the NGO community.” But it’s also one of the few global groups that’s repeatedly called for structural economic reforms. Oxfam’s Dutch branch, Oxfam Novib, even funds the Brooklyn-based Center for Economic and Social Rights — a nonprofit that was one of the loudest voices for corporate accountability and private sector regulation during the SDG negotiations. In April 2009, Oxfam’s Australian branch called out the company for empowering girls with money generated through the economic exploitation of other women

Instead, women’s leadership development, entrepreneurship (particularly in social enterprises), access to financial services, and sports programs for youth are the favored poverty-reduction strategies.

“adolescent girls as the world’s greatest untapped resource.”

Increasingly, they rely on NGOs not just to legitimize their direct practices but also to normalize neoliberal, market-led development.

“Securing Corporate Partnership,” urging NGOs to adjust themselves to the corporate logic of short-term profit and instructing them how to align their nonprofit goals with capital’s search for short-term investment returns

“NGOs and corporations speak two different languages and look at the world with two conflicting perspectives.”

s working to involve businesses at every stage of development.

It wasn’t the first time the UN chief expressed his faith in the intentions, creativity, and strategies of capital.

A Nike campaign targeting AIDs reduction. Think Retail