The New Washington Consensus: Millennial Philanthropy and the Making of Global Market Subjects

The New Washington Consensus: Millennial Philanthropy and the Making of Global Market Subjects Katharyne Mitchell and Matthew Sparke Department of Geography, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA; [email protected]; [email protected] Abstract: This paper outlines the emergence of a New Washington Consensus associated with leading philanthropies of the new millennium. This emergent development paradigm by no means represents a historic break with the market rationalities of neoliberalism, nor does it represent a radical departure from older models of early 20th century philanthropy. Rather, it is new in its global ambition to foster resilient market subjects for a globalized world; and new in its employment of micro-market transformations to compensate for macro-market failures. Focusing on reforms pioneered by the new philanthropic partnerships in education and global health, the paper indicates how the targets of intervention are identified as communities that have been failed by both governments and markets. The resulting interventions are commonly justified in terms of “return on investment”. But the problems they target keep returning because the underlying causes of failure are left unaddressed. Keywords: neoliberalism, philanthropy, development, education, global health We believe every person deserves the chance to live a healthy, productive life (Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation). “They desire the existing state of society minus its revolutionaryanddisintegrating elements.” This is how Marx and Engels (2004:44) described the “socialistic bourgeois” in The Communist Manifesto,includingeconomists,philanthropists,and humanitarians in a long list of 19th century liberal reformers. Today in the 21st century does the description still stick? We live inanerawhenanextraordinarilydiversified cast of characters are involved in humanitarianreformeffortsaroundtheworld.From celebrities such as Bono and Angelina Jolie, to politicians, social enterprise leaders, microfinance developers, corporate social responsibility planners, and a vast array of NGOs, we hear many different voices echoingtheegalitarianargumentsforphilan- thropic humanitarianism made by the Gates Foundation. But can we describe the contemporary global expansion of care as anefforttopreservetheexistingstateof global society, while eschewing its revolutionary and disintegrating elements? Our answer here is broadly affirmative, and yet we argue that the historical and political-economic shifts of the years since Marx and Engels penned their famous polemic also make for important differences in how humanitarian reform is currently envisioned and implemented. Much of contemporary philanthropy might still be Antipode Vol. 00 No. 0 2015 ISSN 0066-4812, pp 1–26 doi: 10.1111/anti.12203 © 2015 The Author. Antipode © 2015 Antipode Foundation Ltd. Antipode summarily described as capitalists rescuing capitalism from capitalism. But there is something new about the ways in which a vast variety of people today are being philanthropically enlisted into entrepreneurial market-mediated partnerships, and pulled away from making demands on the stateforprotectionandrelieffromsocial injustice. We suggest that to understandthesedevelopmentsitisnecessaryto analyze how new millennium interventions by liberal philanthropists reflect the ways in which liberal capitalism has itself mutated since the 19th century. From the first gilded age of late imperial liberalism, through Keynesianism, and on to neoliberalism, the general trajectory of liberal capitalism has been well traced in the scholarly literature (Amable 2011; Foucault 2008; Mirowski and Plehwe 2009; Peck 2010; Peck et al. 2012). But, as has also been highlighted by its scholars, the contemporary term neoliberalism is a confusing neologism for the complex assemblage of pro-market ideologies, rules, ties, and orientations associated with globalization (Harvey 2005; Larner 2000). Moreover, even amongst its critics, the tendency to associate neoliberalism with the policy orthodoxy of the Washington Consensus leaves under-examined a significant transition in hegemonic development ideas, governmental practices, and forms of adaptation and resistance in the so-called Post-Consensus period of the new millennium (Leitner et al. 2007). Following critical development scholars such as Atia (2013), Essex (2013), Roberts (2014) and Roy (2010), we think that the new formations of today’s transi- tional moment are not adequately addressed as just a Post-Consensus or Dissensus moment. Not only do such terms downplay the global disagreements with the original tendentious claim on “Consensus”, they also obscure an important point about how the rationalities and imperatives underpinning pro-market development are articulated globally: namely, that neoliberal development norms and practices continue to co-evolve in terms of hegemony and changing contextual conditions of implementation. They are not fixed ideas that were set once and for all, whether on Mont Pèlerin, or in Chicago or in DC; these different locales themselves allow for changing articulations of neoliberal ideals (Peck 2010). Moreover, even if members and critics of the neoliberal thought collective often share a belief that it is the ideas more than their reception and implementation that matter most, geographical research indicates that we need to develop less deterministic accounts of the incom- plete, uneven and context-contingent development processes through which neoliberal ideas and actions continue to co-generate one another (Mitchell 2004; Peck and Theodore 2012; Sparke 2006). Millennial philanthropy makes clear how opportunistic as well as iterative the co- generation process can be. We are calling the resulting norm-setting and targeted intervention a New Washington Consensus, but in a way that is meant to highlight rather than hide the hegemonic steering of a highly contingent process. Our point is not to announce an epochal historical rupture with the neoliberalism of the international financial institutions based in Washington DC. Even if today’s debates over the new Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank do index DC’s decline as a development hegemon, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund remain enor- mously influential, and geopolitical references to a Beijing Consensus or Mumbai Consensus are better understood as fearful Beltway bullet points rather than serious assessments of developments and Development as they are actually articulated and © 2015 The Author. Antipode © 2015 Antipode Foundation Ltd. The New Washington Consensus practiced. Our concern rather is with the new visions of development that are being put into practice at once globally and, importantly for our argument, personally. We are evoking “new”-ness in this sense in the theoretical spirit of The New Way of the World (Dardot and Laval 2013). We do so to address the productive (if not always deliberate) neoliberal formation of new market subjects and the ways in which this cultivation and enlistment of individuals is increasingly being imagined and implemented across national borders from local to global scales. Building on the scholarship of others, we argue that millennial philanthropy is playing an espe- cially significant role in these processes (Fassin 2011; Hay and Muller 2014; Kapoor 2013; Kovacs 2011). In short, we argue it is advancing a New Washington Consen- sus that opportunistically shores up global market practices and rationalities through local social projects that at once acknowledge and cover for market failure while simultaneously cultivating new market subjects. How exactly does this triple movement work? The Triple Movement: Making Market Subjects In some significant respects millennial philanthropy still resembles early 20th century philanthropic practices, with similar ideas about the cost-effectiveness, the scientific dispersal of funds, the top-down deployment of quick-fix technical solutions, as well as moral arguments about the rights of human beings to live educated, healthy, and productive lives (Parmar 2012; Zunz 2011). Carnegie and Rockefeller, much like contemporary philanthropists, sought to apply business principles to their private foundations, leveraging their big business reputations and networks as well as introducing strategies designed to maximize human poten- tial in what they saw as rational and efficient ways (Carnegie 1962; Lagemann 1989). Similarly, they addressed problems of social dysfunction with bold ambi- tions to solve them by tying the socially marginalized to the opportunities offered by the marketplace. For the same reasons, the projects they funded tended towards experimentation and short-termism: two tendencies that are also notable continui- ties with philanthropy today. Yet there are also some critically important differences between the earlier era and the millennial moment. Whereas Carnegie and Rockefeller were interested in the benefits for capitalism that would follow health and education improvements, many of the philanthropically funded interventions being developed today create benefits for business—for big pharma, for education management organizations, and for a wide range of enterprising consultants and data managers. Moreover, and more importantly, coming after the many disastrous pro-market policy exper- iments of the 1980s and 1990s, early 21st century innovations in philanthropy are characterized by a distinctive pattern of offsetting market failure using market tools to develop market subjects. Although the normal economistic formulation

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