Emergency and crystallization of the philanthropic world in Brazil: from the solidary approach to the reformist approach (1995-2022)

International audiencePhilanthropic world, as a plurality of private foundations with cooperative and competitive relationships with each other, is not a new domain of practices. In this regard, the role of American foundations in political and scientific disputes has been documented around the globe stemming from the first half of 20th century onward (cf. Lefèvre, 2015). It is the case of Brazil, which relied on a decisive American philanthropic participation in order to institutionalize multiple academic disciplines and institutions in its territory. However, what arguably can be deemed as relatively new is the constitution of a philanthropic world in Brazil, notably composed by national foundations. The aim of this paper is to trace the history of its emergency and crystallization. To address that, we propose two different moments, each of one characterized by a technical-scientific elite constellation (i), a shared interpretation of the State (ii), and an institutional configuration between national and international spaces (iii). Inspired by Tompkins-Stange (2016) and by Topalov (1999), we shall analyze the formation of the philanthropic world in Brazil as a shift from the solidarity approach (1995-2007) to the reformist approach (2008-2022). The methods of research mobilized for this end is thus interviews with actors occupying high and intermediate positions in foundations and their affiliated academic institutions (n=40) and textual analysis, as well as we will suggest a preliminary version of the Multiple Correspondence Analysis with a broad population of this world (around 300). Among the limitations in the philanthropic studies, we can highlight their excessive focus on organization as being an autonomous subject. Thus, these studies have underexplored the social space that is constituted due to the circulation of actors among a plurality of foundations and institutions, as well as how this space changes over time. Particularly in Brazil, there are factors that contribute to it: boards and advisory committees that are often interlocking; technical consulting provided either by the same expert or research center to different foundations; joint actions among many organizations for a common objective; research centers funded by several donations; and, finally, actors’ trajectories in several instances (either as a way to take a more prestigious and directive position or because of organizational restructuring that regularly eliminate and create positions). Instead of insisting on the question of influence, notably how this or that foundation influences public policies, as most of those studies already did, it seems more productive, for us, to analyze the strategies of capital reconversion, as proposed by Guilhot (cf. 2006). For him, philanthropy legitimacy depends on its capacity to distance itself from the world of profit. Elites become philanthropies through the reconversion of economic capital into cultural capital, thus one of the space par excellences defining the non-profit sector as such. Also following Bourdieu (2014), the act of reconversion is equally an act of delegation, since economic elites authorize other individuals to act in their place and in their name. The social space mentioned above is precisely the technical-scientific circuit constituted by successive philanthropic actions, in which some actors, including academic and political elites, can somewhat see as valuable to participate in it. In short, what is socially and historically variable here is the path through which foundations will traverse to deny their economic origin, as well as what expertise will be favored or not during this movement.With this framework in sight, we propose the unfolding of the philanthropic world in two moments. First, the solidarity moment consisted in a heterogenous elite constellation. Between the 1990s and 2000s, the first organizations and actors were rather close to the international agenda around the “civil society” – also named “third sector” –, supported by foundations such as Kellogg and Ford and global promoters like Lester Salamon and Peggy Dulany. Philanthropic donations thus favored scholars and knowledge from humanities and public health, while at the same time serving as points of normative support for critiques of the “centralizing” and “technocratic” character of the authoritarian regime (1964-1985), which ignored, for them, “local” experiences, and its “social” aspects. Also, an ascendant and liberal economic elite saw in this philanthropy, and its “participatory” and “autonomist” promises, a way to criticize the “interventionism” that characterized the Developmental State. As a result, the first spokespersons of philanthropy in Brazil exercised a negative attitude towards the State, which was further strengthened by mobilizing a certain academic interpretation that insisted on its “crisis”.The second and reformist moment implies in deeper transformations. Since around 2008, the community level is disqualified as “small projects”, even by the same foundations that supported it before, with the goal now being to support the expertise that supposedly can be more capable of transforming the State, instead of just reducing it. This, say, positive attitude will lead to a radical techno-scientific change, inasmuch as experts of the applied microeconomics and of the public management will be those most mobilized by the philanthropy. Considering the prosopographic data from 2022, the MCA shall clarify a new national-international intersection, in which Brazilian academic institutions occupied by high revenues students (namely FGV and Insper) and where philanthropy recruits its researchers as well as employees, are articulated with, on the one hand, a pole of executive specialization for those at the head of the foundations in Brazil (based in Harvard) and, on the other hand, a scientific pole of circulation of ideas for those inside and outside philanthropy (based in Stanford). If the first moment had the anthropologist and first-lady Ruth Cardoso and her association called Solidarity Community as the central meeting point in the Brazilian philanthropic world, the economist Ricardo Paes de Barros and his various collaborations within the Insper have gained an increasing centrality in the second