New philanthropy in Danish public education: institutional shaming, affective worldmaking, and the debt of happiness

• In Event: Privatizing education policy: exploring the role, networks and strategies of philanthropic actors to advance educational reform glocally (Part 1)

Proposal

Corporate private foundations with colossal financial resources are playing an increasingly proactive and influential role in shaping educational aims, practices, and institutions around the world (Srivastava & Oh, 2010; Ball and Olmedo, 2011; Lubienski et al. 2022; Parreira de Amaral et al. 2019). While the concrete involvement of foundations reflects the historical specificities of different contexts, the increasing entanglement of private foundations in public education has been interpreted as reflecting a broad shift in the practices of foundations toward new forms of “hands-on” or “new” philanthropy (Horvath & Powell, 2016; Wilson, 2014). Central to this shift is the repositioning of foundations as change-makers oriented toward developing and disrupting educational forms rather than supplementary actors supporting existing policy schemes by funding projects, teacher training, or scientific solutions that align with formal goals (Saltman, 2010).
Framed in terms of educational governance and politics, the proactive strategies of “new philanthropists” are placing major pressure on the conventional boundaries of democratic control, delegations of responsibility, and legitimacy. The shifting grounds for articulating and enacting democratic control and legitimacy is especially salient in the context of Nordic education and the region’s historical forms of welfare governance. While private foundations in the US and other contexts are, by now, an established (if controversial) agent in educational governance, their increasing engagement in Danish public education poses a significant challenge to conventional understandings of democratic governance as an arrangement grounded in a chain of delegation, public accountability, and trust (Strøm 2000). In contrast to public actors, private foundations need not bother with such structural limitations or concerns about re-election: all they need is money, a legal status, and a public sector willing to play along.
This paper sets out to explore how two large, Danish private foundations navigate the simultaneous condition of democratic deficit and unique opportunity by engaging in new forms of affective worldmaking. Through an in-depth case analysis of websites, documents, and promotional material sponsored by the two foundations, the paper highlights the performative effects of promising happiness and potential through philanthropic partnerships in a Danish public education system currently facing immense economic pressures, staff shortages, and recruitment difficulties. Concretely, the paper shows how the promises of the two foundations generate a debt of happiness for those involved in and around philanthropic partnerships that allows the circumvention of conventional questions and criticisms pertaining to their democratic responsibilities, project transparency, knowledge foundation, and other key concerns of welfare state governance. Understanding the affective dynamics of new philanthropic practices, we suggest, can supplement existing research focused on exploring its effects on education governance as a force that enables policies, money, and technologies to flow across conventional boundaries between nation states as well as between states and markets (Tikly, 2006; Olmedo, 2014). Through the case studies, the paper argues for the analytical necessity of attending to the affective dimensions of this involvement to grasp the current tendencies unfolding in the field – and through this establish a foundation further empirical questions and proper democratic scrutiny.

Author

• Lucas Cone, University of Copenhagen