The inability of neoliberalism to address the challenges of our current era has become so clear that a growing number of philanthropic foundations have launched initiatives to build a “post”-neoliberal economy. Funders are underwriting research, media outlets, and organizing with an eye toward reining in—if not completely upending—the market fundamentalism that dominated social and economic life by the end of the 20th century. If funders and their grantees are successful, a new political-economic era will redefine the relationship between the state and market, most likely by growing the role of the state as a provider of goods, protector of liberties, guarantor of rights, and enforcer of regulations.
For philanthropic foundations to name the inadequacies and harms of the neoliberal era is certainly welcome. It is also somewhat surprising, as these foundations enabled the neoliberal era over the 20th century and thrived under it. Philanthropic entities both ideologically committed to neoliberalism and those that abhorred it came to adopt and advance many of its core principles in the closing decades of the 20th century, contributing to the erosion of state capacity and privatization of public goods.
This means that ending neoliberalism is not only a project external to philanthropy—something to be funded and monitored and evaluated—but also a project internal to it and the nonprofit sector. It will take revisiting how and what philanthropic foundations support, reconsidering who can and should deliver public goods, and revisioning the relationship between the nonprofit sector and government.