Philanthrocapitalism and the Compliance-Industrial Complex: Doing ‘Good’, Fighting Crime, and Foreclosing Alternatives

Abstract

Philanthrocapitalism is an extraordinary ideological force, but how do we understand it? Expanding on the legacies of U.S. philanthropic foundations’ power to develop and frame legitimate policy-relevant knowledge and act in the interest of U.S. foreign policy (Parmar, 2012), philanthrocapitalist actors have become instrumental to building hegemonic consensus and shaping global and internal governance, policies, and regulations – public, corporate, and non-profit. While philanthro-policymaking (Rogers, 2011) and the turn to market fixes (McGoey, 2012) and technological fixes, received academic attention (Haydon et al., 2021), the reshaping of global crime governance by philanthrocapitalism has been neglected. I argue that the pluralization and privatization of crime fighting is the reverse side of the philanthrocapitalist ‘business for good’ coin. To understand this, we must interrogate the nature of what I term ‘regulatory and compliance fixes’ that proponents of philanthrocapitalism and their allies advocate and that spring from ‘anti-policies’ around which they unite (Perkowski & Squire, 2019; Walters, 2008) – e.g., anti-corruption, anti-trafficking, anti-money laundering. This entails integrating the reverse side of the philanthrocapitalist coin into our conceptualization of philanthrocapitalism by teasing out its intersection with ‘regulatory capitalism’ (Levi-Faur, 2017) and ‘surveillance capitalism’ (Zuboff, 2019). And, most importantly, analysing the growing power of intermediaries, knowledge, norm and data brokers, within the ‘compliance-industrial complex’ (Kuldova, 2022).