Thirteenth Global Studies Conference

Abstract

The past two decades have witnessed a paradigm shift in progressive grantmaking. While the ‘old paradigm’ took the form of a crowded field of NGOs offering services or advocating for changes in national laws on behalf of disaffected groups, the ‘new paradigm’ is said to cut out the NGO middle-man by funding grassroots social movements directly. These social movements, in turn, promise the kind of structural change the old paradigm has been condemned for failing to realize. Yet this new paradigm rests at the intersection of conceptually different political projects: the legal, formal, bureaucratic world of grantmaking, human rights, and development NGOs, and the fluid, spontaneous world of grassroots movements. Through an analysis of materials on social movement funding developed by CARE, Human Rights Funders Network, Ayni Institute, Ford Foundation, and Solidaire, this paper seeks to understand what this turn to movements reveals about the flavors of idealism and kinds of political action available in the context of institutional (specifically NGO) responses to neoliberal globalization in the United States. I argue that the new paradigm is marked by a high-modernist ideology invested in a social scientific approach to social movements, and a distinctive temporality that sees social movements as simultaneously cyclical (the natural course of politics) and disruptive (inaugurating new conceptions of politics). These discursive features take form through the concept of a ‘social change ecology’ that aims to account for the multiple though at times conflicting kinds of political action—reform, legal advocacy, protest, community organizing—that make up social movements.