Adam Moe Fejerskov

The Influence of Established Ideas in Emerging Development Organisations: Gender Equality and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

Abstract This article explores how ideas and practices may find their way into and entail significant changes in organisations as these enter into new fields and are increasingly confronted with dominant normative frameworks. Drawing on sociological institutional perspectives, I conceptualise three analytical processes occurring as ideas find their way into development organisations: i) emergence; ii) international negotiation and consensus production; and iii) external negotiation and appropriation. I then empirically explore these processes through a case study of how ideas and practices on gender equality and women’s empowerment have entered into and been made workable in the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

The New Technopolitics of Development and the Global South as a Laboratory of Technological Experimentation

Science and technology have been integral issues of development cooperation for more than sixty years. Contrary to early efforts’ transfer of established technologies from the West to developing countries, contemporary technology aspirations increasingly articulate and practice the Global South as a live laboratory for technological experimentation. This approach is especially furthered by a group of private foundations and philanthrocapitalists whose endeavors in developing countries are, like their companies, shaped by logics of the individual, the market, and of societal progress through technological innovation and experimentation. This article draws upon critical intellectual thought about the political and social ramifications of technology to reflect on the renascent role of technology in development cooperation. It traces the discourses and practices of philanthrocapitalist organizations, in particular the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, to understand how their experimentalist technology aspirations influence human life and relations in the Global South. This article argues that this newfound focus on technology in development cooperation may challenge the essence of democracy, reduce participation, and have undesirable consequences for populations in the Global South.

Understanding the nature of change: how institutional perspectives can inform contemporary studies of development cooperation

Abstract This article argues that core lines of sociological institutionalist thought provide a set of valuable conceptual and theoretical vocabularies for exploring and explaining contemporary concerns of development cooperation. It identifies four broad categories of issues of central attention in the current study of development cooperation, and couples these with four avenues of sociological institutional research that may provide us with theoretical and conceptual frameworks for further empirically exploring and theoretically extrapolating these. Increasing attention to these theoretical concerns not only helps us progress the study of development cooperation, it may also allow us to inform contemporary institutional thinking.

Development as resistance and translation: Remaking norms and ideas of the Gates Foundation:

This article explores how ideas and practices manifested in a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation-funded project on women’s access to land are continuously remade and transformed as they move through the many layers towards implementation. The article builds a theoretical framework that lets us understand development projects as systems of continuous meaning negotiation and translation. It then discusses the particular project’s three dominant reconfigurations of gender and women—from instrumentalizing, to legal-institutional, to transformative and deeply political understandings of the project—as it is continuously remade on its way from headquarter and towards implementation in the Indian state of Odisha.

Global norms and heterogeneous development organizations: Introduction to special issue on New Actors, Old Donors and Gender Equality Norms in International Development Cooperation

Contemporary development cooperation is characterized by an increasing tension between a growing diversity of actors and significant attempts at homogenizing development practices through global norms prescribing ‘good development’. This special issue shows empirically how diverse development organizations engage with global norms on gender equality. To understand this diversity of norm-engagement conceptually, this introductory article proposes four explanatory dimensions: (i) organizational history, culture and structures; (ii) actor strategies, emotions and relationships; (iii) organizational pressures and priorities; and (iv) the normativeenvironment and stakeholders. We argue that, while development organizations cannot avoid addressing global norms regarding gender equality, they do so in considerably divergent ways. However, the differences are explained less by whether these organizations constitute ‘new’ or ‘old’ donors than by the four identified dimensions.

The Social Construction of Development Cooperation Success and Failure

Determining the success of development projects and programmes is often portrayed and understood as a question of measurable impact and effectiveness. More often than not however, success is a negotiated truth, socially constructed between the involved stakeholders that does not require measurable results of impact, and may very well hold the opposite circumstances. By examining the Intergovernmental Authority on Development in the Horn of Africa, the article investigates one such case of development project success despite substantial impact on the ground. Success in development cooperation, the article argues, is not a matter of attaining impact, but is rather constructed in the overlapping space between representation and interpretation of events, actions and discourses, made and sustained socially between recipient and donor.

Going global? Micro-philanthrocapitalism and Danish private foundations in international development cooperation

ABSTRACT During the past decade, academic attention to the role of private foundations in international development cooperation has greatly intensified. The largest foundations have increased their global giving and moved towards strategic social impact, but we do not know if such processes have also occurred at a more micro level. This article explores this issue by studying the international activities of Danish foundations. It finds that grant-making on global issues is increasing, and that several foundations have undergone transformations in their approach to grant-making, making them surprisingly similar to established development organisations.

Corporatism and the Development of Private Aid Organizations in Denmark

Private aid has long been an important element in the majority of countries’ development assistance. It has provided means by which to engage with populations in developing countries and assist their development without going directly to their governments; it also enables citizens in the more developed countries of the world to organize and support those they identify with in the developing world; a way by which ‘to do some good’. While the emergence and growth of private aid organizations in Denmark might on the surface appear not so different from that found in most other western European countries, there are some important differences that emerge on closer investigation. In particular the corporate nature of Denmark’s development has provided a strong organizational basis from which to organize private aid; it might also have provided for a stronger sense of solidarity with those facing social exclusion and economic marginalization elsewhere. One consequence is also found in the expectations placed upon the Danish government to support private aid initiatives. For its part, the Danish state has proved itself not to be adverse to using this close partnership to serve the government’s other policy agendas. Finally, the Danish economy performed quite strongly in the 1960s and onwards, providing a relatively broad wealth base from which private aid can be resourced, both from the state revenues generated and from private citizens.