The Gates Foundation's Rise to Power

Private Authority in Global Politics

Adam Moe Fejerskov

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351392792
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Global Development Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has established itself as one of the most powerful private forces in global politics, shaping the trajectories of international policy-making. Driven by fierce confidence and immense expectations about its ability to change the world through its normative and material power, the foundation advances an agenda of social and economic change through technological innovation. And it does so while forming part of a movement that refocuses efforts towards private influence on, and delivery of, societal progress.

The Gates Foundation's Rise to Power is an urgent exploration of one of the world's most influential but also notoriously sealed organizations. As the first book to take us inside the walls of the foundation, it tells a story of dramatic organizational change, of diverging interests and influences, and of choices with consequences beyond the expected. Based on extensive fieldwork inside and around the foundation, the book explores how the foundation has established itself as a major political power, how it exercises this power, but also how it has been deeply shaped by the strong norms, ideas, organizations, and expectations from the field of global development. The book will be of interest to scholars and students of global development, international relations, philanthropy and organizational theory.

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1 Introduction

On the West Coast of the United States, way up north in the state of Washington, lies the ‘Emerald City’, Seattle. Nicknamed after the capital of L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Seattle is perhaps better known as one of the liberal strongholds of the US, for its almost 70 per cent white population, and, most of all, it is known for its rain. In reality though, the city only ranks 44th nationwide in annual rainfall. Of all the city’s landmarks the most famous is the Space Needle, a 180-metre-tall observation tower that attracted great attention as the tallest building west of the Mississippi River when it was built in 1962 for the Seattle World Fair. Today, this attention has largely shifted to its most novel neighbouring building. In June of 2012, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation moved into its new $500 million, six-story, 7000 m², and 12-acre campus headquarters. The campus houses the majority of the foundation’s more than 1,400 employees. Visitors without business in the foundation can appreciate the new headquarters from a viewpoint overlooking the campus. Or they can venture into the foundation’s 1000 m² visitor centre, a presentation of its self-proclaimed history and results to the public. Here, they can try their luck at developing a vaccine for malaria by positioning a set of different levers in the right combination, or watch a movie in the cinema on the foundation’s partnership with one of the world’s largest football clubs, F.C. Barcelona, and its star player Lionel Messi.

Venturing into the foundation’s campus, its large reception feels somewhere between the most sterile upscale hotel you have never been to, and a waiting room for meticulously well-dressed adults anticipating an oral test with strict examiners. People sit together in small groups or walk around impatiently while talking on the phone. Some with Washington, DC, and some with China. They talk about planned pitches of ideas and projects, budgets, or results and evaluation frameworks. It is fairly easy to see that people are here for the business of funding. From the reception, one moves down and into the centre of the campus, a courtyard of concrete. In what appears as a pedantically controlled area, trees grow in small squares in the concrete, containing and controlling the wildness and anarchy of nature. Three trees are bigger than the rest and are meant to symbolize three different individuals, each of whom played an import role in establishing the foundation: Bill Gates Sr, his late wife, Mary Gates, and the American epidemiologist William Foege, who has been an inspiration to Bill Gates since the foundation started its work. Rising on either side of the courtyard are two massive building structures, almost entirely clad in glass, that hold the offices of the foundation’s different divisions and departments, and with room for constructing a third building in case the foundation should come to need it. When the campus was inaugurated on a Thursday night in late May of 2012, Melinda Gates took the stage and explained to guests at the reception about the deliberate conspicuousness of the headquarters: ‘We wanted to make a statement’.

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Contrast these images of relative grandeur to the humble beginnings of the foundation. The Gates Foundation started in the basement of Bill Gates Sr’s house in the mid-1990s, from where he would screen incoming requests for charity and pass the most interesting ones on to his son for further inspection and an eventual decision on whether to provide support or not. As the foundation outgrew the basement, it rented scattered and anonymous offices around Seattle, some famously above a pizza parlour. For years, it characterized itself as a small family-foundation, and was lauded by The New York Times for its lean bureaucracy and limited head count,¹ though its endowment grew exponentially to heights above the vast majority of American private foundations. Today, the Gates Foundation’s rise to global prominence is known to most. Or, more precisely, its present-day position as one of the most influential non-state actors in contemporary international political life, both financially and politically, is renowned. More powerful and vastly greater in size than any other foundation in modern history, the Gates Foundation is not simply following a trend of growing influence for foundations, it literally embodies that trend. At present, the foundation is a titanic influence in numerous areas of global development, health and governance, ever-present in international political discussions in fora such as the UN, OECD, the World Health Organization or the World Economic Forum. Its endowment of approximately $40 billion is larger than the Gross Domestic Product of more than 50 per cent of the world’s countries, and its annual grant-making of approximately $4 billion dwarfs the majority of OECD-DAC donors’ development aid. Wielding a diverse repertoire of political influence through its grant-making, investment of its endowment, advocacy and powerful networks, the foundation always seems to have the right tool for the occasion. Yet, despite the familiarity of most with different sides of the financial, normative, and political weight and influence of this comparatively novel foundation, knowledge of its actual rise, the process of becoming what we consider it today, is superficial at best. The majority of the intellectual attention given to it has been to its role in global health² or in US-domestic education,³ or to its specific interventions, including the founding of Gavi,⁴ and the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa or AGRA.⁵ Insights into the internal workings of the foundation have only occasionally been provided by local media from the Pacific Northwest,⁶ specialist philanthropic and other media.⁷

This book represents the first attempt to genuinely open up the closed book that is the Gates Foundation. Based on fieldwork inside and around the foundation, it provides a glimpse behind the curtains into the processes the foundation has gone through as it has increasingly entered into and sought to establish itself on the international political scene. Specifically, it is a story of the Gates Foundation – how the foundation and its employees think, act, plan, exercise power and work to influence the environments surrounding it. About how, below its public face of fierce and uncompromising ambition, deep inside the organizational machinery of the foundation, we find anything but a unification of thought in which there is no contestation over discourses, practices, ambitions, or priorities. Instead, we find individuals and groups of people, sometimes with vastly different backgrounds, from public policy makers to medical doctors, and with different mind-sets and missions, who contest over ideas, meanings and resources, each one engaged in internal organizational struggles. Only by lifting the lid and not assuming the foundation to be driven by a single mind of monstrosity, as a streamlined machine, can we properly understand this immensely powerful yet also complex organization. This is not a defence of the Gates Foundation but an argued necessity if we are to genuinely scrutinize the foundation and its influence on issues that have ramifications for millions of people, particularly in the Global South. As we shall see, the story of the Gates Foundation is a story of dramatic organizational change, of diverging interests and influences, struggles over the legitimacy of ideas and practices, and of choices with path-dependent consequences beyond the expected.

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Yet, the book is not only a narrow organizational tale of the Gates Foundation and the changes it has been through since its genesis. The findings and arguments made fundamentally speak to and inform at least three major discussions in contemporary international studies. The first concerns the rise of new actors and powers, whether state or non-state, or what I refer to here as the contemporary meeting between forces of heterogeneity and homogeneity in global development. That is, the exploration of what happens as new actors enter into a field that is increasingly being homogenized through global normative frameworks such as the Sustainable Development Goals. By uncovering the multifaceted organizational trajectory of the Gates Foundation over time, we come to learn some of the conceivably common processes that rising powers and emerging actors go through as they enter into and engage with spheres of international political life that are governed by norms, rules, and standards, and are being confronted with established and expected forms of behaviour and thought. Much work in this vein has been focused on how rising powers change global development, and while the Gates Foundation certainly challenges established or traditional practices and discourses, it has also been greatly shaped by these over time. The book accordingly shows the ways in which the foundation has slowly but gradually socialized to dominant modes of thought, practice and operation, and today in many stances resembles the established organizations it somewhat attempts to distance itself from. Second, the book speaks to debates about non-state and private actorness by showing how the Gates Foundation exercises a hybrid form of authority that extends far beyond any characterization as only ‘private’. By negotiating and shifting its organizational identity from situation to situation, the foundation is able to draw on diverse tools of influence that sees it sometimes use those traditionally associated with private foundations, sometimes those associated with NGOs, and in other instances those of a multinational corporation and even of states. This fluidity of authority means it not only crosses different categories of non-state actors, but also increasingly transcends the public–private or state/non-state divide. Third, the book provides what we can call an organizational sociology of global development, drawing on sociological institutionalist perspectives to enrich the study of organizations in global development. It forms a suggestive framework or theoretical vocabulary fit to study the present analytical challenges of what is sometimes referred to as big-d development, that is the global institutional endeavour of development cooperation in the messy interplay between states, organizations and individuals. Exploring and explaining contemporary disruption and change in global development requires an ever-growing conceptual toolbox, and this book provides one way forward in understanding these currents.

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Re-emergence of private foundations in global politics

Since the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation opened its doors in 1999, it has distributed more than $42 billion to national and international issues, with grant-making amounting to $4.6 billion in 2016⁸ and a current massive endowment of $40 billion. From an initial focus on education in the US, as well as international spending on vaccine development and delivery, the last ten years have seen the foundation venturing into the field of ‘global development’, where some of its main areas of intervention include agriculture, water and sanitation, and financial services for the poor. Since becoming a formal programme area in the foundation, this has seen massive scaling up over the last ten years, from $50 million in 2005 to $1.5 billion in 2015,⁹ but so too has the entirety of the organization. Over the last decade, the annual administrative expenses of the foundation have increased tenfold to more than $550 million, and the number of employees has risen to more than 1,400 today. The astounding reach and size of the Gates Foundation is underlined by how the foundation accounts for more than half of all global philanthropic giving to development today.¹⁰

The rise of the Gates Foundation is often used as an illustration of the (re)emergence of private foundations in global politics, though its magnitude means it has no equal in the foundation world. Attention to private foundations in global development has greatly increased over the last decade, mainly with a view to their potential dual contribution of providing additional resources and bringing new approaches to the scene, and this can be rudely reduced to commonly fall into two categories. One side holds that institutional logics transferred from the business world by these organizations render them more successful, innovative and effective than traditional donor organizations.¹¹ The other believes that the transfer of entrepreneurial business skills into the world of relief and global development is not necessarily unproblematic.¹² Particular elements from these logics grounded in business and entrepreneurial lines of thought are believed to diffuse to other actors in the field, entailing a privatization of global development. This privatization can essentially be divided into three elements: (1) increased multiplicity and prominence of private actors and innovative forms of providing aid from individuals; (2) growth in private aid flows to developing countries including absolute and relative financial power of private actors in development; and (3) a shift in the practices and discourses of global development towards ‘Ideas emanating out of business schools’¹³ or what has been referred to as the ‘California consensus’¹⁴ in which mana...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• The Gates Foundation’s Rise to Power
• Routledge Studies in Development and Society
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Organizational Change and New Actors in Global Politics
• 3 Rising Powers, American Capitalism and Private Foundations
• 4 Enter Seattle
• 5 The Power of Ideas
• 6 The Global South as A Laboratory of Experimentation
• 7 From Seattle to The Fields of India
• 8 Chameleon Politics
• 9 Conclusion: The Gates Foundation’s Rise to Power
• Index