(Can you) do good things with bad money?
Global development faces both a budget crunch AND a boom in the number and diversity of potential funders. Is any money fair game? Does over-thinking this take the 'fun' out of fungibility?
So, can you do good things with bad money?
This question has been on my mind for ages, but has been brought into sharp focus as I get deeper into the world of ‘fund raising’ (more like fund chasing) and also hunting for work amongst the other free radicals, consultants, freelancers, lone rangers, gnus for hire.
My experience is that freelancers are a fairly collegiate bunch, sharing tips and advice. Sometimes we ask each other ‘would you ever work for…?’.
This has a sense of ‘how low would you go…?’.
Finding chunks of paid work can be tough. Being a civil servant and spending tax payers’ money was so much more straight forward…
Thinking about fund raising for an anti corruption organisation (U4), and now trying to find funders for new initiatives, throws up moments of soul searching, debate, kind advice, forceful direction, judgement, even anger…
Everyone seems to have an opinion, and these vary , and sometimes demonstrate inconsistencies even when operating within a single brain. Mine included.
Debates can describe a long continuum with shades of grey, but also some fundamentals: what is ‘bad’ and what is ‘doing good’? (I guess the whole of public policy, aid, and international development is one massive discussion of ‘what is doing good?’). And regardless of complexity and nuance, ultimately a decision about pursuing or accepting money is likely to be a binary switch. Yes / no?
When money is concerned, beauty is in the eye of the (cash strapped) beholder.
Brainy, Briny Thursday (the online ‘Talk Club’ that I organise ever fortnight) had this topic as a theme two weeks back - ‘(Can you) do good things with bad money?’.
To frame the discussion I sketched out a diagram (and got my in house artist to make it neat and legible) , and then discussed and refined it with my friend Liz David-Barrett (Director of the Centre for Study of Corruption at the University of Sussex though we also talk about dogs, bees, and politics).
Here is the diagram (work in progress). We kicked off discussion by talking through it from top left, and tried to give a real world example for each category - summarised in the notes below. I am sure you can add more types and sub types, and better examples under each.
Here are the notes :
SOURCES OF FUNDS: and examples or explanation
Legal but bad: Donations from big tobacco, gambling industry.
Illegal and bad: Donations from drug trafficking, organised crime.
“Good” money from bad actor: Government funding or private donations from an autocratic state, or alleged kleptocrat, which might look bad but for which there is no proof of illegality. Or from a state that is interested in funding a progressive activity, but is also actively against other ‘goods’ or rights, such as against gender equality.
Bad money from good actor: Aid funds closely connected to oil revenues.
Good money that over time looks bad: Things that in their time may have been accepted by elites in power, or by most of a wider society, but which over time look bad…. the list is pretty long. Slavery, tobacco, alcohol, synthetic opioids, big oil.
SPENDING BAD MONEY
Returning stolen assets, reparation: Obviously good in intent. May be hard to implement in practice.
Negative branded ‘bad money’ funds: Part of the settlement and punishment for proven wrong doing. Siemens is the obvious case. We struggled to think of another ‘negative branded’ example.
Anonymous funds (eg to an NGO or think tank) with no direct influence of bad actor: This seems simple but… if the recipient knows what the source is, might they self censure or avoid certain activities which in some way risk an influence from the source, or even prioritise causes that they know the donor supports?
Also, if we believe that transparency of funding sources is generally a good thing (and we criticise dark money think tanks for being opaque about funding) are we behaving unethically if we keep any source quiet? Can anonymity be justified? When? Who decides?
Positive branded with bad actor’s name: there are two obvious varieties of this:
The bad actor donor gets brand recognition, which is transparent but may be off putting, reputationally damaging, or damage the credibility of the recipient.
The recipient and bad actor may agree that the donor is named but has no influence over how the funds are spent, or can retain limited influence. However, even the former may risk a degree of self censorship – would the recipient ever instigate work that directly ‘goes after’ its donor or their industry or country?
Would you?
TO DISCUSS (explaining that box)
Reputation laundering vs rehabilitation, redemption: A lot depends on timescale. Today’s robber baron is tomorrow’s (or next century’s) wealthy philanthropist progressive legend. Our field includes a range of big foundations with founding benefactors that historians wrinkle their noses at. Reputation laundering is partly a matter of time. It is hard to do over weeks or months (though many try), but gets easier over years, decades, centuries.
But for deep stain removal, how long is long enough? And if we believe in rehabilitation, and maybe redemption, what are the rules?
Is a former klepto better than a current klepto…?
Fungibility: If all funds for ‘doing good’ are mixed together anyway in the recipient’s core budget, does each source matter so much? If not, what is the minimum dilution to turn bad to good? 20%? 50%?
Statue of limitations: see reputation laundering above. Yes, this should say statute.
Who defines “good” and “bad” anyway?: Don’t get angry, this is the whole point of the Blog!
Firewalls, legal separation of entities: Foundations with the same name as a global bad actor or big industry polluter can often demonstrate complete legal separation from that company, even if they share the same postal address and brand name.
Or an entity with the same name does bad things in other jurisdictions but is legally entirely separate…
A friendly debate
I won’t share the nuanced and unexpected discussions we had - suffice to say that it made the diagram more complex - in a good way. Some examples shared were close to home, or reflected personal dilemmas that were ongoing. Few were as simple as ‘Dr Evil wants to fund your research. Yes or no?’.
Q: is there good research on this theme? We did not know of any but did not look exhaustively.
Q: Is this blog worth turning into a proper paper?
An alternative: A reassuringly dead hand
Brainy Briny Thursday is ‘Chatham house chatty’ but I have permission to share this point from Peter Hurst, tax expert, tax philosopher, tax poet.
Peter said that the diagram underlines the value of tax: ‘the alternative to the uncertainty [in the diagram] is the ‘dead hand of the state’ - collecting tax and spending it’. He followed up with ‘Tax is the moral cleanser and neutraliser of societal money. The dead hand contrasts with the live, purposeful hand of philanthropy’.
Who decides if money is good or bad?
Discussion focused a lot on this question, and some of the examples were unexpected and demonstrated how subjective this often is - one person’s ‘good money’ is another person's ‘never!’.
This includes governments, oil revenues, philanthropies, specific industries and interests…. I won’t spill the beans here and am sure that you have some examples yourself. But it is a minefield.
A bit marmite…
Marmite: (informal) something or someone that some people like very much and other people dislike very strongly: He is something of a Marmite presenter - you either love him or you can't bear him.
To illustrate this subjectivity, here are a couple of examples that my career has bumped against.
In the 1990s I had a friend and colleague who was an avowed socialist. We worked together on a government funded (DFID’s predecessor ODA) project. After three years the project nearly but not quite got extended by ODA, and then ODA’s interest fizzled out. I held on in hope, and ended up unemployed for 6 months. This was miserable. I then applied to join the newly created DFID. I was excited (and needed a job!). My friend was dismayed by my betrayal (‘how can you work for that government!’). We hardly ever spoke again1.
I joined DFID and it was an exhilarating ride. Our kids grew up in DFID postings and proudly said ‘we’ to mean DFID (yes, cue for a gratuitous fancy dress pic).
I spent two decades in government, and DFID was a good fit for me. I ended up leaving when my personal mission and my employer’s mission got too far out of sync. Aid cuts, merger, and all that. I can now feel things moving in the right direction again.
However, in DFID I would occasionally be a thorn in the side of colleagues involved in partnerships with private sector entities and their foundation arms. Not funding DFID but co-funding or partnering with us.
It bugged me that we would embrace the ‘do gooding’ part of a global enterprise and perhaps achieve positive things with them, all while their wider business network operated in ways that that I thought were bad and counter to our mission.
One example was working with Unilever on public health while their wider ‘family’ of companies (legally separate) promoted fairness creams such as Fair and Lovely and other products that I (and many others) think perpetuated regressive notions of ‘beauty’, colourism, and stereotypical gender roles. I could not help but call this out, even when we invited Unilever in as a special guest (yes, I am that kind of colleague. Keep the mic away from me). The response was, of course, ‘separate legal entities in each country’. Ultimately Unilever took action and retired the brand name Fair and Lovely after renewed pressure during the rise of Black Lives Matter. Finally!
“The consumer goods giant also said that it had removed before-and-after impressions and "shade guides" on Fair & Lovely packaging in 2019. The skin care range is sold across countries such as India, Indonesia, Thailand and Pakistan.
Unilever's move comes as cosmetics firms around the world reassess their product lines and marketing strategies in light of the Black Lives Matters movement, sparked by George Floyd's death”. BBC News 25 June 2020
I am a hypocrite though - I ate Unilever’s marmite throughout.
friends that I have not fallen out with may say that this is just another example of me not being very good at sustaining long distant friendships.