Geopolitical Earmarking: Donor Identity and the Moral Politics of LGBTQ+ NGO Funding

• In Event: Sociology of LGBTQ+ Rights in Times of Crisis

Abstract

Civil society funding increasingly carries contentious political and moral meanings. Because funding links recipients to patrons with reputations that travel across borders, recipients cannot treat that funding as neutral. Those reputations shape what can be accepted and defended at home. This article advances geopolitical earmarking, a process in which non-governmental organizations sort otherwise comparable resources by donor provenance when acceptance signals alignment, invites scrutiny, or threatens legitimacy various audiences and stakeholders. Evidence comes from a conjoint survey experiment with 1,106 LGBTQ+ NGOs in 138 countries fielded from March–September 2025. Paired grant profiles randomize donor source, amount, flexibility, reporting burdens, and public visibility, allowing donor-identity effects to be identified net of material terms. Donor identity is the strongest predictor of choice. U.S. government funding receives a large penalty that exceeds the deterrent effect of major reductions in grant size and rivals or surpasses administrative burdens. Brief write-ins and recruitment correspondence point to how U.S.-linked support reflects their own organizational values to themselves and external constituencies; and, whether this funding jeopardizes the organization to publics and the state. More broadly, geopolitical earmarking is portable across issue fields and patrons, offering a conceptual framework for organizational strategy under rapidly changing civic space.

Authors

• Kristopher Velasco, Princeton University

• Alessandra Rister Portinari Maranca, Princeton University