Editors’ Note: Pamala Wiepking opens HistPhil‘s forum on promoting an inclusive study of global philanthropy. In the coming weeks, scholars from around the world will reflect on the study of voluntary giving in their countries of focus and on how those studies can be informed by, and inform, Western definitions and norms, without being tethered to or constrained by them.

In July 2019 I was invited to give a keynote lecture at the European Research Network of Philanthropy conference in Basel, Switzerland. My task was to discuss “The Bright Side of Philanthropy,” contrasting the other keynote speaker, Rob Reich, who would be talking about “The Dark Side,” based on his book Just Giving. I struggled with this task. I wanted to share the power of philanthropy and move the audience to create more generous societies. I wanted to inspire people to improve philanthropy to improve the world. I had just joined the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy the year prior, in the role of Stead Family Chair in International Philanthropy. I struggled, not because of the force of the many criticisms emerging on philanthropy during that time, but because, if I was going to speak about philanthropy in its global dimension, I realized how inadequate the analytic tools available were to do so. While I did end my talk with ideas for how philanthropy can help create more generous societies, where people care for each other and contribute to public goods accessible to all, I choose to start the lecture by focusing on the problems I saw limiting the global study of philanthropy. This part of the talk eventually resulted in an article in Voluntas, “The Global Study of Philanthropic Behavior.” In that article, I set out what I believe are the three main problems with the global study of philanthropy and offered some initial solutions.

The three main problems I see with the global study of philanthropy relate to geographical orientation, negative connotations and, most importantly, limited definitions. First, while research on philanthropy is conducted all around the globe, research on philanthropy published in our field’s key journals is overwhelmingly conducted by scholars from Western Europe and Northern America, studying philanthropy in these contexts. In 2017, over seventy percent of articles published in Voluntas and the Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly originated from North America or Western Europe. It is laudable that these journals are increasingly publishing more work by international scholars; as I wrote: “The lack of geographical representation of scholarly research on philanthropy is problematic, because this leads to a unidimensional North American or Western European view of what is ‘philanthropy’ and consequently which countries are ‘more philanthropic’. And as a result, research and policy interventions are mostly based on this view.”  

Second, many people across the world have a very specific, and often negative connotation with the word “philanthropy,” if they know the word at all. Many people associate philanthropy with “rich white men who give large sums of money.” This is not what philanthropy means to me, and I know it does not mean this to many others, including researchers interested in the global study of philanthropy. However, when using this word in research, it is difficult to escape its negative connotations in large parts of the world. This leads me to the third problem: the problem with definitions. Too often, and I’m including my own research here as well, philanthropy is seen as synonymous with the formal giving of money and time to charitable organizations.

I am certainly not alone in advocating for a new and more inclusive definition of philanthropy. My colleague at the Lilly Family School Tyrone Freeman has advanced this discussion with his questioning and critique of the White definition of philanthropy often used in the United States. Through his work, Freeman advocates for a definition of philanthropy inclusive of experiences of Black and other historically underrepresented populations in the US. He has asked the important questions: “who counts as a philanthropist and what counts as philanthropy”? The answer in the academic literature so far has been underwhelming. What counts as philanthropy stems from a definition developed based on WEIRD standards and perceptions. WEIRD is an acronym developed by evolutionary psychologist Joseph Henrich which stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic. Henrich and his colleagues make an excellent point by stating that “most people are not WEIRD”, and consequently, we need to study the whole of humanity to understand human conditions. This is certainly the case for the study of what we call “philanthropy.”

Already in the early 2000s, Susan Wilkinson-Maposa, Alan Fowler, Ceri Oliver-Evans and Chao Mulenga conducted the seminal research project The Poor Philanthropist. How and why people help each other, in which they studied local concepts of philanthropy in Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa and Zimbabwe. Their key conclusions include that “horizontal philanthropy is part and parcel of the social fabric”. Horizontal philanthropy relates to informal local community networks of support providing material and non-material support, reflecting principles of altruism, reciprocity and co-operation. Alan Fowler and Jacob Mwati Mati propose to use the concept of “gifting” for African Philanthropy, which more accurately captures the historically developed practices of embedded, formal and informal philanthropy across the African continent.

Across other parts of the world scholars have also been developing local conceptualizations of philanthropy, using local terminology for behavior intended to benefit others. Examples include Shariq Siddiqui and David Campbell’s recent edited volume Philanthropy in the Muslim World as well as GivingTuesday’s global work on mutual aid and formal and informal giving. GivingTuesday, for example, has shown that globally, people are twice more likely to engage in non-monetary than monetary giving behavior.

Since taking up the position of the Stead Family Chair in International Philanthropy in 2018, my students and I have been interviewing people across the world, asking them about their own ideas, language, definitions and meaning of “behaviors that benefit others.” The full interview protocol can be accessed here, and through this project we too hope to contribute to a more inclusive and holistic understanding of philanthropy.

As I write in the Voluntas article:

There are many […] ways people can display behavior that is beneficial to others: They can volunteer for organizations, donate organs, blood or other body fluids or in more informal ways help others, both kin and non-kin, care for others and share their resources, including expertise. In order to study global philanthropy, we need to understand the different concepts, meanings, definitions and motivations that people across the world have in relation to this phenomenon.

Philanthropy scholar Rhodri Davis puts it more elegantly when writing about the problems with measuring giving:

In my opinion it is far from true that “only what is measured matters”, so we need be willing to embrace the idea that there are aspects of the value of giving and the work of civil society that may never lend themselves to data points or figures on a spreadsheet. However, it does matter what we measure and how we measure it, because any such measurement plays an unavoidable role in shaping our view of the nature of civil society and our perception of what is of value. Getting this balance right by ensuring that we broaden our definitions of what should count as “giving” and measuring effectively (but without deifying measurement above all else) is, for my money, one of the key challenges for civil society in coming years.

I could not agree with him more. Three early career scholars put this imperative to practice when writing about understudied contexts in which philanthropy is enacted. In the edited volume Philanthropy in a Different Perspective: Voices from Ethiopia, Nigeria and Serbia, PhD students Anastesia Okaomee and Kidist Yasin and research fellow Bojana Radovanović conducted primary and secondary research and wrote about the various creative and meaningful ways people support their communities in their countries of expertise. One of their common findings is the large variation of primarily informal philanthropy evident across these countries, including, but not limited to, “mutual reciprocal help” (Ethiopia), “taking care of kin and community” (Nigeria) and “helping those in need” (Serbia).

If we want to overcome definitional, cultural and geographical boundaries and to come to an inclusive study of global philanthropy, we first and foremost should support (emerging) scholars working in non-WEIRD contexts to keep growing the understanding of philanthropy—or the local words used for this phenomenon. By providing these scholars with access to the same level of resources and training as scholars in WEIRD countries, they will be able to expand our understanding of philanthropy in a truly global sense. Following the recent call to decolonize philanthropy, we also need to decolonize philanthropy research.

-Pamala Wiepking

Pamala Wiepking is the Stead Family Chair in International Philanthropy at the IU Lilly Family School of Philanthropy and professor of Societal Significance of Charity Lotteries at the Vrije Universiteit (Amsterdam, the Netherlands), where she studies the role and relevance of unrestricted and trust-based funding.