Not knowing, not working, not right: three ongoing troubles with philanthropy
by Tobias Jung, Centre for the Study of Philanthropy & Public Good, University of St Andrews Business School
Philanthropy: loved, lauded, lamented, and lampooned in equal measures. Called upon where states and markets fail; celebrated for supporting unpopular causes and providing voice; criticised for being undemocratic, anchoring privilege, and laundering reputations; caricatured as benevolent busybody and meddlesome miser. The world of philanthropy is a paradoxical one: greed and generosity, virtue and vanity, care and control sit side-by-side.
None of this is new. In ancient Greece and Rome, wealthy elites made gifts and benefactions to their cities in exchange for honour, prestige, and political capital. Islamic waqfs and English charitable trusts mixed rewards for donors with benefits for their communities. Industrial-era philanthropists such as Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Ford promoted social progress while consolidating their influence. Today’s global foundations, big donors, and corporate philanthropies continue these patterns in alternative forms and formats. So what?
Well, while philanthropies’ own demeanour often seems to imply otherwise, philanthropy is dependent on the goodwill of society: it is society that sanctions and subsidises it. As societies are increasingly strained and suffer, it is natural to ask whether philanthropy lives up to its promises, whether it is fit for purpose. Here, three challenges present themselves:
- not knowing – asking what philanthropy is and on what knowledge it rests;
- not working – examining how it acts and whether its practices serve its purpose;
- not right – questioning where its boundaries lie, and when its claims begin to overreach.
Each of these shapes the field in its own way; together, they currently limit philanthropy’s potential as a force for public good.
Not knowing: questioning understanding
What does philanthropy actually mean? Some cast it as a feeling (generosity, benevolence), others as an action (giving, volunteering, serving); some consider it to be a resource (money, time, talent, networks), others frame it as an aspiration (making the world a better place) or an institution (foundations, endowed charities, membership organisations). These castings often overlap, contradict, and blur into neighbouring concepts such as charity, alms, and benevolence. The absence of a clear understanding of philanthropy’s meaning undermines its development and progress.
To address this conceptual disarray, some authors have sought to consolidate philanthropy’s defining characteristics into a singular, overarching, definition (Sulek, 2010); others, questioning both the feasibility and desirability of such an approach, have argued that we simply need to accept it as an essentially contested concept (Daly, 2012). Neither approach seems satisfactory: one presents the risks of a definitional straitjacket; the other the risk of ‘anything goes’. Given that the term does enormous political work – it rallies support and opposition, underwrites privileges, and frames expectations – how do we reconcile this? One way is to take a problematisation perspective. By acknowledging and accepting that philanthropy is both fixed and flexible, that we, individually and collectively, carry different ideas and ideals on philanthropy, the task moves from discounting, defending, or denouncing to one of discernment and envisioning; by articulating our commonalities and contestations, we can identify philanthropy’s tension points that need to be navigated and negotiated (Jung, 2024). Such work is not semantics for its own sakes: it is the precondition for meaningful and effective policies and practices, and provides the foundations required for more robust data, information, and knowledge on philanthropy.
Alongside, although philanthropy often considers supporting and strengthening knowledge as a priority – illustrated by its longstanding investments in education – it remains curiously reluctant to invest in knowledge on and of itself. Despite periodic efforts to strengthen philanthropy’s knowledge ecology, we still know remarkably little about its scale, scope, and significance. Outside the United States, and even there research capacity is increasingly constrained by shifting political priorities and pressures, infrastructure for philanthropy studies is sparse. As a result, scholarship tends to be dominated by Anglo-American traditions and thoughts, leaving other philanthropic practices and perspectives marginalised. Even within this dominant frame, however, reliable, comparable, and robust insights remain limited and unevenly distributed. The result is that philanthropy remains a field where debates often outpace data, and which is shaped more by idealism than realism, more by assumptions than by evidence. Unclear concepts and limited knowledge are not merely academic problems; they are practical impediments to philanthropy’s coherence and credibility.
Not working: questioning practices
Philanthropy’s ambitions often seem vast, its achievements comparatively modest. The chasm between what philanthropy aspires to do, what we expect of it, and what it can deliver is too often shaped and sustained by the imagery surrounding a handful of global mega-foundations and billionaire donors. These are the exception rather than the rule. Any honest reflection on whether philanthropy works must therefore begin by recognising the limits of what it can realistically accomplish. Grand declarations of intent, such as the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s ambition to “cure, prevent, or manage all disease within our children’s lifetime”, raise questions about philanthropy’s optimism and its capacity to actually deliver. They point to a recurring pattern in which claims to potential seem to exceed practical means, fuelling expectations that cannot be met, and sustaining a mythology that philanthropy itself struggles to inhabit.
If means are limited, so too are the mechanisms through which they are mobilised. The very structures that give philanthropy its continuity, such as foundations, family offices, and donor-advised funds, can also restrict its agility. Frequently designed to safeguard assets more than to deploy them, they reflect a conservatism that emphasises market cycles rather than needs: when investment portfolios fall, grant budgets contract, precisely when need is greatest. The problem is not that these structures are flawed per se, but that they are used in ways that prioritise individual and institutional comforts and considerations over societal needs. The result is an architecture that protects philanthropy’s endurance more effectively than it advances its purpose. Such structural caution seeps into philanthropy’s daily practices.
Practically, philanthropy has become increasingly enamoured with the ideas and ideals of markets and measurement, drawn to their promise of clarity and control. This managerial turn might have professionalised the field, but also narrowed its horizons, recasting philanthropy as a technical exercise in optimisation. The pursuit of efficiency and quantifiable outcomes privileges what is tidy and measurable, while marginalising and discouraging what is complex, long-term, or politically uncomfortable. Measurement, in this context, functions as both guide and shield: it offers reassurance amidst uncertainty but also protects funders from moral and political exposure; metrics create the appearance of rationality and transparency while displacing responsibility when initiatives fall short or falter.
Furthermore, philanthropy’s market orientation fuels a restless search for novelty. Innovation becomes an end in itself, with models, frameworks, and instruments continually reinvented, or rebranded as breakthroughs: ‘strategic philanthropy’, ‘venture philanthropy’, ‘catalytic philanthropy’, ‘impact investing’, ‘effective altruism’. Each promises transformation; few transcend their predecessors. In its appetite for the new, philanthropy often forgets to learn from the old, mirroring the churn of the marketplace it seeks to emulate: restless, reactive, rudimentary, an innovation treadmill that favours fashions over reflection and motion over meaning.
The managerial logic reinforces philanthropy’s power dynamics. Donors and foundations, armed with data and dashboards, position themselves as architects of solutions rather than participants in collective endeavours. Communities become ‘stakeholders’ to be managed or ‘users’ to be consulted; knowledge flows upward to funders while accountability rarely flows back. In emulating the discipline of markets, philanthropy reproduces their hierarchies and inequalities, rewarding those best able to navigate their language and logic. At its best, measurement can sharpen focus and clarify learning; at its worst, it sanitises struggle and domesticates dissent. The managerial sensibility replaces moral and political imagination with a comfortingly neutral vocabulary of effectiveness, emphasising process rather than purpose or progress.
Not right: questioning boundaries
Philanthropy’s moral confidence often outpaces its moral clarity. It assumes that the acumen to acquire and the ability to give confer authority to decide: wealth masquerades as wisdom. Even when derived from exploitation or excess, wealth can be reintroduced as civic virtue, and with the authority to advise and decide, through the soft power of generosity. By mistaking privilege for expertise, philanthropy risks not merely misunderstanding the problems it confronts, but redefining them according to its own assumptions and interests. The result is a closed moral circuit in which conviction circulates among the privileged, substituting for the wider processes of consultation and consent. However well-intentioned, the right to act becomes self-assumed rather than socially granted; civic questions are recast as private choices, public responsibilities reduced to matters of discretion.
As public institutions strain under austerity, and governments retreat from their social obligations, philanthropy is invited, at times expected, to fill the void. It funds what budgets cut, and supports what policies neglect: welfare, healthcare, education, humanitarian aid. Yet, every such intervention, however necessary, subtly shifts the moral coordinates of responsibility. Relief turns into replacement; the exceptional becomes the expected. When social provision is left to private discretion, rights become reframed as gifts or investments, and the social contract thins into a series of transactions. By stepping in where the state steps back, philanthropy risks normalising withdrawal and reinforcing the very fragilities it seeks to repair.
Philanthropy’s confusion of roles is mirrored in a conflation of language. The term is increasingly invoked in relation to a diversity of ideas: social finance, social enterprise, social innovation; social this, and social that. While all of these may deliver social value and public good, their underpinning logics tend to differ: altruism is absorbed by advantage, and philanthropy becomes a moral accent adorning markets, brands, and balance sheets. When every gesture towards public benefit is described as philanthropic, the concept itself begins to fray. Such conceptual cloaking does not just blur categories but confuses accountability and corrodes trust. Philanthropy becomes everything and nothing; it is everywhere and nowhere. It is stripped of the distinctiveness that can lend it legitimacy.
Knowing better, working wiser, doing right
Philanthropy’s three troubles are neither new nor insurmountable. They persist because each sustains the next. Not knowing means that philanthropy acts without fully understanding either its nature or its knowledge-base. Not working exposes the gap between ambition and achievement. Not right exposes the distortions that arise when philanthropy’s maxims outrun its mandate, and when its label is used to apply a veneer of virtue to privilege, profit, or political neglect. Together, they undermine philanthropy’s coherence, credibility, and contribution. Overcoming them calls for a reorientation, for an approach that grounds philanthropy in humility, reciprocity, and moral resolve.
Knowing better begins with intellectual humility: the recognition that philanthropy must learn about itself as much as it seeks to teach others. It cannot act effectively while remaining conceptually uncertain or empirically underinformed. To know better is to invest in knowledge that is plural rather than parochial, critical rather than celebratory, and open to the lessons of history as much as the demands of innovation. It means questioning not only the effectiveness of philanthropic interventions but the assumptions that justify them. Philanthropy’s legitimacy rests as much on its capacity to learn as on its capacity to give.
Working wiser requires a shift from performance to purpose. Philanthropy must learn to work with rather than on the societies it serves. Wisdom lies neither in wealth nor in metrics, but in discerning the meaning and consequence of its acts. Wiser work values depth over display, continuity over novelty, and partnership over paternalism. It demands attentiveness to context and an openness to correction. Working wiser also means redistributing not just resources but voice, recognising that those closest to problems can often be closest to their solutions. Such wisdom does not weaken philanthropy’s agency; it refines it.
Doing right depends on remembering both proportion and principle. Philanthropy cannot claim to serve the public good while eroding the public sphere that gives it meaning. Its role is to complement, not replace, democratic institutions, to strengthen the commons, not to privatise virtue. To do right is to act with restraint as well as resolve, aware of the limits of private discretion in public life. Yet doing right also demands backbone. Philanthropy must defend its own moral and conceptual integrity from appropriation. When its name is used to dignify self-interest, corporate marketing, or governmental retreat, it must have the courage to say: ‘this is not philanthropy’. Its duty is not only to act well but to safeguard the realm of the good from being hollowed out by pretence. To know better, work wiser, and do right is not an endpoint but an ethic, a means for philanthropy to recover proportion, purpose, and public trust.
References
Daly, S. (2012). Philanthropy as an Essentially Contested Concept. Voluntas, 23, 535-557. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11266-011-9213-5
Jung, T. (2024). To unlock philanthropy’s potential for Japan, we need to understand its meaning. Japan NPO Centre. https://www.jnpoc.ne.jp/en/insights/to-unlock-philanthropys-potential-for-japan/
Sulek, M. (2010). On the Classical Meaning of Philanthrôpía. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 39(3), 385-408. https://doi.org/10.1177/0899764009333050
To cite this piece: Jung, T. (2026). Not knowing, not working, not right: three ongoing troubles with philanthropy. Working Paper 2026/1. Centre for the Study of Philanthropy & Public Good, University of St Andrews. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18164907