The Assumptions That Underpin Climate Philanthropy: A Call for Debate

Is philanthropy helping perpetuate the very crisis it sets out to solve? When “good quality empirical evidence of the effectiveness of philanthropic strategies is, overall, very scanty”, this can be hard to figure out. What does seem clear is that “everyone now claims to seek ‘systems change’ but…focuses on the outputs from the system – the mitigation of carbon emissions, perhaps through technological change or policy shifts, rather than examining the system itself.” And so “by failing to question the existing system, the ultimate effect of contemporary philanthropy may be covertly to reaffirm and perpetuate the beliefs and mechanisms that have produced the climate crisis.”