Mapping the influence and relevance of philanthropy in contemporary educational systems. A systematic literature review (1980-2024).

• In Event: Privatizing education policy: exploring the role, networks and strategies of philanthropic actors to advance educational reform glocally (Part 2)

Proposal

Internationally, private actors have an increasingly central role in ongoing education reform debates in different countries (Verger et al., 2017). A recent report by GEM-UNESCO (2021) categorizes this sector as “a wide range of non-state actors with a variety of forms, arrangements and motivations, from charity to profit” (p. 5.) and acknowledges that a broad, “catch-all” term is used to describe individuals and organizations involved not only in education provision but also in education financing and in influencing the state’s direction in its obligation to fulfill the right to education. Within this definition, private corporations, philanthropic foundations, non-governmental organizations, civil society, academics, researchers, think tanks, and the media are included (GEM, 2021; Fontdevila et al., 2021). Although these works have made substantial progress in understanding the role of non-state actors, they tend to make invisible specificities of the knowledge accumulated around the differences between these actors.
As a way of responding to this gap, the presentation focuses on mapping and describing the research accumulated in the last 50 years regarding an increasingly relevant actor: philanthropic organizations. Although some research has shown the predominance of philanthropy in the United States (Erfurth & Ridge, 2020) or has synthesized the methods of network ethnography in studies of non-state actors (Rowe, 2022), there are no previous efforts that have sought to exhaustively map the role, influence, and characteristics of philanthropy in educational systems from a global perspective. Through a systematic literature review (Xiao and Watson, 2019), we sought to synthesize and analyze the academic research published in Scopus and Web of Science (WoS) related to philanthropy and the school system, examining more than 150 academic articles.
The results show four main findings. First, academic production on philanthropy is growing rapidly, being a field of study mainly from the last 20 years, with a predominance of studies in Anglo-Saxon countries, but also with a growing literature in Latin American and African countries, although with researchers concentrated in the Global North. Second, and in terms of the objectives and topic, philanthropy regularly appears as one more actor -and not as a central actor- in governance networks. Thus, nearly 40% of the studies have a philanthropic actor as a central actor, with the predominant networks being those built around philanthropy and the influence of philanthropic actors in the design of local educational policies. Furthermore, most studies focus on large global philanthropists, neglecting the role of local philanthropy actors. Third, empirical research shows that there are multiple avenues and forms of philanthropy, including meetingless, advocacy, knowledge generation, program implementation, and promotion of public-private partnerships. Surprisingly, neither funding nor direct support to schools are central to research on philanthropy. Finally, although philanthropy has been studied in countries as diverse as Brazil, Australia, the United States, or Ghana, there is no major reflection on the relationship between the privatization of educational policy and the dynamics of exogenous privatization of educational systems.

Authors

• Macarena Hernandez, Centro de Justicia Educacional, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile

• Cristobal Villalobos, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile

• Lluís Parcerisa, University of Barcelona

• Sebastian Pereira, CEPPE UC

• José Miguel Fuentes, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile