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20 January 2011: The Gates Effect: the anti-politics of new philanthropic movements

Essex Business and Human Rights Project Speaker Series presents:

Linsey McGoey, University of Essex

"The Gates Effect: the anti-politics of new philanthropic movements"

January 26th 2011, 1.00 - 3.00pm Venue: TC1.9

Over a short period, the Gates Foundation has become the largest private player in global health funding and governance, spending more annually on healthcare in developing regions than the WHO, and contributing a significant amount to the WHO’s operating budget. The Gates Foundation’s influence on policy setting is raising concerns about the Foundation’s transparency, accountability, grant disbursement decisions, and investment in private sector companies seen as exacerbating global health problems. First, tension over the Foundation’s growth and dominance in global health will be explored, examining whether private philanthropies might be themselves compounding economic inequalities and human rights abuses that they attempt to mitigate. Second, parallels will be drawn between the Gates Foundation and earlier forms of charitable investment practiced throughout the late 19th and 20th-century. Theorists such as Bourdieu, building on Mauss’ work, have long suggested there is no such thing as a free gift: all gifts are offered with either the assumption of eventual reciprocity, with an eye to generating greater social prestige, or to further tacit personal or institutional interests. It will be suggested that the growing influence of actors such as the Gates Foundation raises concerns which both legitimate and surpass questions posed by earlier scholars such as Mauss and Bourdieu of older forms of philanthropy.

Linsey McGoey is a lecturer in sociology at the University of Essex. She is co-editor of a forthcoming special issue on global health governance in BioSocieties, and has published in journals such as Economy and Society, the Lancet, and History of the Human Sciences.