Alliance Magazine and the Gates Foundation

Tom Paulson reports about the articles about the Gates Foundation published in Alliance Magazine.
He refers to Tim Ogden's introduction that points out to the difficulty of honest feedback:


Speaking truth to power

The first is that it is increasingly difficult for anyone to speak truth to power at the Gates Foundation. We were surprised at the number of people who responded to our requests for submissions with some version of ‘I’d love to talk about that, but I don’t think it’s a good idea for me to comment publicly’.
None of these people ever suggested that the Gates Foundation was making any attempt to censor them, but the fact that Gates either funds, funded in the past, or might fund their organization in the future led almost half of the people we approached to recuse themselves. This was not limited to just charities: even personnel at other foundations were keenly aware of the possibility of co-funding with Gates and wary of doing anything that might jeopardize that opportunity.

The foundation’s spending power also has an inexorable impact on any field in which it chooses to invest in a number of ways. First, it attracts researchers to its interests (and away from competing interests) by making funds relatively easily available. Second, the foundation’s spending on advocacy and media affect even what is discussed in its areas of interest.

Lack of accountability

There was also a widely expressed view that the foundation still has a long way to go in terms of openness and accountability. Virtually everyone we spoke to noted that the foundation isn’t accountable to any public institution in a meaningful way. Furthermore, a common refrain was that it is still very difficult to understand how the foundation makes its strategic choices – though, as will become apparent, this varies in different programme areas. While a great deal more information is being shared these days than in the foundation’s early years, the most important information is still obscure in many areas.

These critiques are more substantive than perhaps the most common critique of the foundation: that it doesn’t fund ‘x’. Given the vast resources at its disposal, this swipe at the foundation’s approach seems even more common than it is for other foundations. But no matter its size, the foundation simply cannot fund everything, and complaining about what it doesn’t fund is therefore meaningless.