Philanthropic foundations as field-builders: insights from two emblematic Italian cases

Abstract

To date, the scholars who have studied Italian philanthropic foundations have mainly focused on their function as the funders of various kinds of initiatives or policies. Only rarely have they investigated the foundations’ input to policymaking processes, while virtually never examining foundations’ role as field builders, that is to say, as actors with the power to influence how fields are defined and delimited in the context of policymaking. Drawing on a large corpus of official documents and semi-structured interviews, the paper addresses this under-studied role of philanthropic foundations in relation to two Italian cases: the university policies of one of the country’s largest foundations of banking origin; the climate policies of the main climate networks to which Italian foundations belong. The foundations’ presumed field-building role is explored from both the organizational-relational and discursive perspectives. Next, the twin concepts of depoliticization/politicization frame discussion of the hypothesis that, in both cases studied, the foundations’ involvement in policymaking entails a discursive depoliticization of public action and a governmental and social politicization of their own actions. The data analysis appears to confirm the research hypotheses, raising questions surrounding the actual innovative reach of philanthropic foundations and the relationship they establish with public actors.