Corporate control of public sphere

The Gates Foundation gives to scientists, not farmers As can be seen in Graph 2, the single biggest recipient of grants from the Gates Foundation is the CGIAR, a consortium of 15 international agricultural research centres.

Efforts to implement the same model in Africa failed and, globally, the CGIAR lost relevance as corporations like Syngenta and Monsanto took control over seed markets. Money from the Gates Foundation is providing CGIAR and its Green Revolution model a new lease on life, this time in direct partnership with seed and pesticide companies.5

We could find no evidence of any support from the Gates Foundation for programmes of research or technology development carried out by farmers or based on farmers' knowledge, despite the multitude of such initiatives that exist across the continent. (African farmers, after all, do continue to supply an estimated 90% of the seed used on the continent!) The foundation has consistently chosen to put its money into top down structures of knowledge generation and flow, where farmers' are mere recipients of the technologies developed in labs and sold to them by companies.

Does the Gates Foundation use its money to tell African governments what to do? Not directly. The Gates Foundation set up the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa in 2006 and has supported it with $414 million since then. It holds two seats on the Alliance's board and describes it as the “African face and voice for our work”7.

GRA intervenes directly in the formulation and revision of agricultural policies and regulations in Africa on such issues as land and seeds. It does so through national "policy action nodes" of experts, selected by AGRA, that work to advance particular policy changes. For example, in Ghana, AGRA's Seed Policy Action Node drafted revisions to the country's national seed policy and submitted it to the government.

In a similar vein, the Gates Foundation provides Harvard University University with funds to promote discussion of biotechnology in Africa, Michigan University with a grant to set up a centre to help African policymakers decide on how best to use biotechnology, and Cornell University with funds to create a global “agricultural communications platform” so that people better understand science-based agricultural technologies, with AATF as a main partner.

“Listening to farmers and addressing their specific needs” is the first guiding principle of the Gates Foundation's work on agriculture.10 But it is hard to listen to someone when you cannot hear them. Small farmers in Africa do not participate in the spaces where the agendas are set for the agricultural research institutions, NGOs or initiatives, like AGRA, that the Gates Foundation supports. These spaces are dominated by foundation reps, high-level politicians, business executives, and scientists.

Our limited review makes it clear that the greatest pressure to change land and seed laws comes from Washington DC – home to the World Bank, USAID and the MCC.

But for many governments and corporations, it means the creation of Western-type land markets based on formal instruments like titles and leases that can be traded. In fact, many initiatives such as the G8 New Alliance explicitly refer to securitisation of “investors'” rights to land. These are not historic or cultural rights at all: these are market mechanisms. So in a world of grossly unequal players, “security” is shorthand for market, private property and the power of the highest bidder.

When it comes to seed laws, the picture is reversed. Subregional African bodies – SADC, COMESA, OAPI and the like – are working to create new rules for the exchange and trade of seeds. But the recipes they are applying – seed marketing restrictions and plant variety protection schemes – are borrowed directly from the US and Europe.

The G8 New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition was launched in 2012 by the eight most industrialised countries to mobilise private capital for investment in African agriculture. To be accepted into the programme, African governments are required to make important changes to their land and seed policies. The New Alliance prioritises granting national and transnational corporations (TNCs) new forms of access and control to the participating countries' resources, and gives them a seat at the same table as aid donors and recipient governments.3

As to seeds, all of the participating states, with the exception of Benin, agreed to adopt plant variety protection laws and rules for marketing seeds that better support the private sector. Despite the fact that more than 80% of all seed in Africa is still produced and disseminated through ‘informal’ seed systems (on-farm seed saving and unregulated distribution between farmers), there is no recognition in the New Alliance programme of the importance of farmer-based systems of saving, sharing, exchanging and selling seeds.

The effect is to create larger unified seed markets, in which the types of seeds on offer are restricted to commercially protected varieties. The age old rights of farmers to replant saved seed is curtailed and the marketing of traditional varieties of seed is strictly prohibited.

The World Bank is a significant player in catalysing the growth and expansion of agribusiness in Africa. It does this by financing policy changes and projects on the ground. In both cases, the Bank targets land and seed laws as key tools for advancing and protecting the interests of the corporate sector. The Bank's work on policy aims at increasing agricultural production and productivity through programmes called “Agriculture Development Policy Operations” (AgDPOs).

In Africa, AgDPOs support the National Investment Plans through which countries are implementing the Comprehensive African Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP, adopted in Maputo in 2003). As of July 2014, three countries have been granted World Bank assistance though AgDPOs: Ghana, Mozambique and Nigeria. Besides financing AgDPOs, the World Bank directly supports agriculture development projects. Some major World Bank projects with land tenure components are presented in Annex 2, with a focus on the legal arrangements developed to make land available for corporate investors. These projects are much more visible than the AgDPOs and their names are well known in each country: PDIDAS in Senegal, GCAP in Ghana, Bagrépole in Burkina. These programmes make large amounts of funding available to enable foreign investors to get large scale access to African farmland – similar to the G8 New Alliance projects but without the political baggage of intergovernmental relationships.

It is the brainchild of Cameroonian notary Abdoulaye Harissou, a member of the International Union of Notaries. Harissou argues that African states must abandon the principle of state ownership of land, and decentralise land administration and management to municipalities. His idea is to have TSS co-exist with the formal land titling system.

Information about, and accountability for, the land partnerships is handled by the Global Donor Platform for Rural Development (Donor Platform), a network of 37 financing institutions, intergovernmental organisations and development agencies created in 2003.19 The Donor Platform has three activities on land: managing a database of more than 400 land projects funded by its members, operating a Global Donor Working Group on Land and serving as communication hub for the G8 LTI.20

The people or agencies representing three of those countries within the Platform are the same ones that lead their countries' G8 land partnerships. But the Donor Platform is not responsible for the LTI: its secretariat just provides information about it on the G8's request.

The partnership may also have links with other activities of the donor state in the African partner. In Burkina Faso, for example, the partnership with the US builds on the MCC’s support to implementation of the country's Rural Land Act. No further details could be obtained from the platform secretariat or individuals in charge of coordinating specific partnerships, much less the budget.

The Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) is a US aid agency that was created by the US Congress in 2004 with a mandate to promote free market reforms in the world’s poorest countries. The MCC's works towards this goal by providing least developed countries with grants (or at least the prospect of grants) for large projects that they and the MCC identify in exchange for the adoption of free market reforms. The projects are implemented and overseen by agencies known as Millennium Challenge Accounts (MCA).

The MCC's various land reform efforts in Africa have consistently sought to formalise customary or informal land systems; map out and divide lands with the use of new cadastral and mapping technologies; allocate individual titles to lands; simplify and facilitate land transfers; and promote and facilitate agribusiness investment. The approach is not to completely sidestep customary forms of land management or local participation. The MCC typically integrates some basic elements of local practices to map out and allocate lands as a means to then establish forms of title that can be transferred (i.e. sold). As MCC puts it, "Formalisation of existing practices and rules is a way to make them more compatible with modern economies and production systems."24

Details of the MCC's involvement in nine African countries are presented in Annex 3. What they show is a deep and powerful engagement by the US government to transfer and transform customary systems of land management and control (in)to formal markets and private property. Deep, because the MCC's in-country work has changed not only laws but the institutional fabric to administer new land rights. And powerful because they have been very effective.

n Burkina, its work to transform and absorb customary systems into Western-type markets is making headway and being carried further by the US government within the context of the G8 Land Transparency Initiative. In Ghana and Mozambique, the MCC has been quite effective in getting land titles distributed to replace traditional systems.  

Both ignored their co-panellist and Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, Raghuram Rajan, who called for development efforts to support the policies that developing countries want. Rajan also noted that global transparency on taxes and removal of barriers imposed by rich countries on exports from the developing countries would help build a more equitable world.

t would appear from the panel that it is easier for the Bank to implement top-down policies with the help of a multi-billionaire than to partner with developing countries to tackle deeply-rooted market flaws and tax evasion. If there is any irony in partnering with a private, tax-exempt foundation like the BMGF to give lessons on public governance to the rest of the world, the World Bank fails to see it.

Between 1990-1993, four neo-liberal US magazines received $2.7 million from different foundations (The National Interest, The Public Interest, New Criterion, American Spectator). In contrast, four progressive US magazines with a national audience (The Nation, The Progressive, In These Times, Mother Jones) were given ten times less over the same period.

A somewhat astonishing conclusion can be drawn from all this: the right is a hot-bed of Marxists! Or at least of Gramscians. They know full well that we are not born with our ideas and must somehow acquire them; that in order to prevail, ideas require material infrastructures. They know, too, that these infrastructures will largely determine the intellectual superstructure: this is what Gramsci meant by capitalism's 'hegemonic project'. Defining, sustaining and controlling culture is crucial: get into people's heads and you will acquire their hearts, their hands and their destinies. Alas, as a friend of mine says, progressives can't seem to tell a hegemonic project from a hedgehog. What has the 'side of the angels' been up to all these years? Has it spent its time and money promoting and defending the ideas it professes to believe in? Precious little. Not only do progressive institutions appear complacent as to their side's intellectual superiority, but they've been cruising along as if there were no need to justify their positions, nor even to worry about the nearly hegemonic intellectual hold of the right. The 'angels' have, rather, seen their task as funding projects and programmes for the poor and disadvantaged; focusing on the grass roots, enhancing 'community empowerment'. Laudable goals all - but what happens when governments subscribe, instead, to structural adjustment which utterly devastates the lives of the poor in the South, or pass anti-welfare, anti-worker legislation in the North? What happens when the World Trade Organisation has more to say about community survival than the communities themselves? Or when public funds for health, education, housing, transport, the environment, etc. etc. dry up?

So far, I've not bothered to declare an interest. I assume readers know or have guessed I have one, since I am a professional researcher, writer and, when I can manage it, thinker. So yes: I have all too often heard or read the dread phrase, 'Your proposal is very interesting but we don't fund research and writing'! The point is not, however, private disappointment but mass denial. Progressive donors have sent out stacks, vanloads of rejections in response to proposals for intellectual work; their refusals positively litter the landscape. I have no reason to doubt that the goals of these donors are social equity, poverty alleviation, human rights, conflict resolution and sustainable development: such people, such institutions do, thank God, exist. I have always felt, too, that progressives are not just more decent but more interesting and more intelligent than people of the neo-liberal persuasion: this may be, selfishly, the ultimate reason behind my own choices and friendships. So I am mightily perplexed by their behaviour.

Why have we not learned from the single-mindedness of the right? Why can we not see that, for example, the destruction of welfare in the US or the threats to trade union achievements in Europe would have been impossible without the creation of an intellectual climate making such onslaughts appear not morally repugnant and regressive but natural and inevitable? Why is the 'project' approach not seen as self-defeating? As neo-liberalism dismantles the gains of the past fifty years and ever greater numbers of its victims are cast adrift, the pressure to fund only 'projects' will grow intolerably, pushing us into a self-reinforcing and unending procession towards the definitive dysfunctional society.

Funders should give up the 'project' approach in favour of institution building. Donors, understandably and quite rightly, want to discuss the substance and the politics of a project with the person who will be carrying it out, not with a professional fundraiser. But for that person, this process can be counter-productive, preventing him or her from getting on with the intellectual work. Drafting several project proposals, defending them separately, in different countries, before different audiences, by mail and in person; following up with correspondence, additional information, progress reports, accounts - all this is hugely time consuming.

Project funding, as opposed to institution building, offers no hope for an end to the cycle of low productivity.

Donors should fund not just the intellectual work itself but the means for making sure it will be widely used.

By focusing almost exclusively on projects, progressive funders have helped to insure right-wing dominance of the debate. The pernicious consequences of not taking Gramsci seriously are amply described above. We used to laugh at the idea that market mechanisms could solve social problems: such things are now said every day with a straight face. Issues we used to take for granted, including the third world itself, have almost vanished from the debate.

The exclusion of a tenth or a third or more of their members is, however, precisely the situation that obtains in societies regulated almost exclusively by the 'laws of the market'. There is a dangerous semantic slippage from 'law' to 'laws of the market'; from the body of democratically established rules for the proper functioning of society to the blind operation of economic forces. Neo-liberals want 'market law' to become the sovereign judge of the rights of persons and of societies as a whole.

closer engagement with the policy world and more explicit efforts at public outreach are not without their own pitfalls. Scholars who enter government service or participate in policy debates may believe that they are “speaking truth to power,” but they run the risk of being corrupted or co-opted in subtle and not-so-subtle ways by the same individuals and institutions that they initially hoped to sway. Powerful interests are all-too-willing to use the prestige associated with academic scholars to advance particular policy goals, and scholars are hardly immune to temptations that may cloud their judgment or compromise their objectivity. Furthermore, scholars who embrace the role of a “public intellectual” may be tempted to sensationalize their findings to attract a larger audience or find themselves opining on topics on which they have no particular expertise. Instead of improving the quality of public discourse, such behavior may actually degrade it.

When citizens and leaders seek to grasp the dizzying complexity of modern world politics, therefore, they must inevitably rely upon the knowledge and insights of specialists in military affairs, global trade and finance, diplomatic/international historians, area experts, and many others. And that means relying at least in part on academic scholars who have devoted their careers to mastering various aspects of world affairs and whose professional stature has been established through the usual procedures of academic evaluation (e.g., peer review, confidential assessments by senior scholars, the give-and-take of scholarly debate, etc.).

Because scholars are protected by tenure and cherish the principle of academic freedom, and because they are not directly dependent on government support for their livelihoods, they are uniquely positioned to challenge prevailing narratives and policy rationales and to bring their knowledge and training to bear on vital policy issues. If we believe that unfettered debate helps expose errors and correct missteps, thereby fostering more effective public policies, then a sophisticated, diverse and engaged scholarly community is essential to a healthy polity.

Within academia, by contrast, even intense disputes are supposed to be conducted in accordance with established canons of logic and evidence. Ad hominem attacks and other forms of character assassination have no place in scholarly discourse and are more likely to discredit those who employ them than those who are attacked.

Because academic scholars are free from daily responsibility for managing public affairs, they are in an ideal position to develop new concepts and theories to help us understand a complex and changing world.

The picture sketched here is obviously something of an ideal type, and I am not suggesting that that the academic world consistently lives up to these expectations. As noted above, university-based scholars of international affairs—and especially the disciplines of political science and history—have increasingly focused on narrow and arcane topics and are contributing less and less to policy formation or public discourse.[9] And when academics do address topics of obvious policy relevance or public interest, the results are often presented in impenetrable, jargon-ridden prose and disseminated in venues that neither policymakers nor the public are likely to read. Even when scholars have something useful to say, in short, their tendency to “speaking in tongues” diminishes their impact on the public sphere.

Yet the growing gap between theory and practice and the declining role of scholars in the public sphere also reflects the professionalization of academic disciplines and the norms and incentives that prevail in the scholarly world. In particular, the academic disciplines that are most concerned with global affairs (political science/international relations, history, economics, sociology, anthropology/area studies, etc.) are largely governed by university-based scholars who have little if any experience in the policy world. With rare exceptions, policymakers, policy analysts, or public intellectuals do not play significant roles in the governance of academic disciplines, leaving the latter free to set their own norms and criteria of merit. Not surprisingly, scholarly disciplines have come to privilege highly specialized research (as opposed to teaching, public service, or public engagement) because that is what most members of these fields prefer to do.

Younger scholars are cautioned not to “waste” their time publishing op-eds, weblogs, or articles in general readership journals. Scholars who write for Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, or even rigorously peer-reviewed journals such as International Security are sometimes dismissed as insufficiently rigorous, based on arbitrary and dubious notions of what constitutes “genuine” scholarship.”[14]

Professionalization also discourages academic scholars from addressing controversial topics or challenging well-established taboos. Although university scholars are quick to defend the institution of tenure and the principle of academic freedom, in most cases this commitment has more to do with a desire for lifetime sinecures than a commitment to using these protections to take on politically controversial topics. Smart young scholars know that being too controversial can annoy potential donors, alarm deans and department chairs, and alienate senior colleagues, thereby undermining prospects for promotion or later advancement. Focusing one’s efforts on narrow and uncontroversial topics that are of interest only to one’s fellow academicians is by far the safer route to the Holy Grail of lifetime employment. Given this incentive structure, it is hardly surprising that academic engagement in the public sphere and the policy world is declining.

As scholars, therefore, our challenge is to chart a course between the Scylla of hyper-professionalized irrelevance and the Charybdis of corrupt opportunism. We should begin by recognizing that the norms and incentives that guide the scholarly enterprise are neither divinely ordained nor fixed in stone; like all norms, they are “socially constructed” by the academic community itself and by the outside stakeholders who have an interest in what the academy produces.

greater disagreement about the norms used to judge academic work might even be desirable, because a heterogeneous intellectual community working on these issues is probably preferable to a monoculture where a single method, theoretical perspective or political orientation predominates.[18]Even the best social science theories are highly imperfect, and once-popular ideas and approaches are often exposed as hollow with the passage of time. When dealing with vital yet contentious issues (i.e., the sorts of topics that routinely arise in world affairs), we will be better off nurturing a diverse intellectual ecosystem instead of placing all our bets on a single way of trying to grasp something as complex and contingent as international affairs.

First, and most obviously, academic departments could give greater weight to policy relevance and public impact in hiring and promotion decisions. Instead of focusing almost entirely on peer-reviewed professional journals and/or monographs by university presses, for example, promotion review committees could also do a systematic evaluation of a candidate’s other contributions to knowledge and public discourse, including weblogs, popular journals, trade books, or other professional studies (such as National Academy of Science proceedings).

Similarly, instead of focusing primarily on sheer quantity of academic publications or imperfect measures like citation counts, review committees could be asked to perform a more systematic evaluation of a scholar’s impact on public discourse or policy debate.[20] In addition to academic citation counts, for example, a review committee could also track the number of news reports or blog hits that discussed a candidate’s work, or examine citations in both academic and non-academic journals.

Professional associations could encourage greater involvement in the public sphere by doing more to acknowledge and valorize it.

If they enabled younger faculty to stop the clock in this way, however, academic departments would have more members who understood how governments and key global organizations actually worked, and they would become more adept at translating scholarly research into useful knowledge for their students and practical guidance for policymakers and the public at large. Such individuals would probably be better teachers as well, because students, unlike many professional academics, really do care about the real world and have little tolerance for empty scholasticism.

Furthermore, if academic scholars made a practice of asking practitioners what topics or questions might be most interesting or useful, the benefits for both communities might be considerable. For instance, what if people with real-world experience were regarded not just as potential consumers of scholarship or as data points in a survey, but as a source of guidance about scholarly research agendas, methods, and modes of presentation? Instead of deriving dissertation topics or research ideas primarily from lacunae in the academic literature, we could also ask policymakers what sorts of knowledge they would most like to have, or what recurring puzzles merit extended scholarly attention. Among other things, outside experts are more likely to ask “so what?” when confronted by an elegant and well-crafted study addressing a question that is of interest to hardly anyone.

Another way to increase the public impact of universities, as Rogers Smith points out in his own essay in this symposium, is to place greater emphasis on the traditional role of teaching. Effective teaching is one of our responsibilities as scholars and student interest is one way to gauge whether a department’s activities are broadly relevant to contemporary issues.

Scholars who study global affairs also need to have a long-overdue discussion about the broader ethical responsibilities of our profession.

By contrast, social scientists rarely discuss their public responsibilities and this topic plays little or no role in graduate training in most academic departments.[23] If it did, it might raise some awkward but useful questions about whether our profession exists largely for our entertainment and livelihoods, or whether society has a right to expect something more.