“People should have a hand, and they should have an equal hand, in shaping the collective norms that significantly affect them.” This statement of the All-Affected Principle (AAP) is a rough one, and deliberately so. Scholars who work on the AAP disagree about not just the principle’s validity, but also the sense in which the relevant affecting might be significant, and the most appropriate way to cash out the multivalent ideal of political equality. In this chapter, although I touch on these issues, my principal focus is the notion of “shaping … collective norms.” My central claim is that those who would apply the AAP should articulate it in a way that is attentive to structural power. Doing so requires a focus on not decisions, but power relations. It directs attention to not just the definition of political boundaries and the allocation of votes, but more generally the conditions that enable and constrain multiple forms of political action.
The chapter proceeds in three parts. In the first, I sketch a series of familiar critiques of the AAP (that it threatens freedom of association, political identification, and collective self-determination) and introduce a case (public school desegregation in the contemporary American metropolis) for which these concerns are minimized. Here my aim is to introduce a new critique: to show that the AAP is largely inattentive to structural power. In the second section, I develop that critique. I make the case that people can be significantly affected not only by the decisions that other people make, but also by structural constraints, which are defined by institutionalized and objectified collective norms. In the third section, I suggest that those who would apply the AAP should focus not exclusively on decisions, but more broadly on relations of power, because people can be significantly affected by nondecisions, by doxic norms, and by positioning in systemic relations of domination. My argument recommends a reformulation of the AAP, one that broadens it, even if at the cost of rendering it less realizable: People should have an adequate and equal social capacity to shape the power relations that delimit their fields of possible action.
The AAP and Local Political Boundaries
In its standard formulation, the All-Affected Principle identifies those agents who should be included in democratic processes; it is a normative principle that explains how to draw political boundaries, and how to allocate votes.1 The AAP is often interpreted as supporting forms of transnational democratization that are radically at odds with the geopolitical status quo.2 In addition, some proponents of the principle recommend applying it to domains where democratic rights typically are not protected, such as workplaces, civic associations, families, and other economic and social institutions.3 That the AAP pushes us to interrogate settled beliefs about democracy’s confines is among its strengths. The world we inhabit is characterized by profound cross-national interdependencies. Relations of power – by which I mean relations among social actors who have the capacity to shape one another’s fields of possible action4 – do not stop at the political boundaries that define nation-states. Instead, actions taken in one political society often significantly affect people who live outside its borders, as well as nonmembers who reside within. Hence putatively democratic institutions and practices that base political rights on citizenship-as-membership can have anti-democratic implications.
The AAP decenters membership. It pushes against the logic of citizenship as the basis for rights, especially rights of political participation, challenging what Linda Bosniak calls the “normative nationalism” that often informs (and often only implicitly informs) democratic theory – the assumption, that is, that “the territorial nation-state is the rightful, if not the total world of … normative concern.”5 The inclusion of all affected can require unbundling the rights and privileges attached to membership in a territorially based political society and linking them to multiple, overlapping regimes of governance – regimes that traverse the boundaries that delimit political communities. What is more, because power relations not only cross political borders, but also exceed formal institutions of governance, they are not contained by the boundaries that divide public from private, and state from society and economy. If people should have a hand in shaping the collective norms that affect them – rather than only the laws and the policies to which governments subject them – then democrats must think creatively about procedural and institutional mechanisms that give significantly affected persons political voice at home, at work, and in other social and economic realms that are not administered by states.
Its intuitive appeal notwithstanding, the AAP has been challenged by critics who find it problematic for at least three analytically distinct reasons. First, some worry that if the principle recommends democratization across political boundaries and within nonpolitical associations, then it conflicts with the right to freedom of association.6 Just as no one but me should help decide whether I marry and, if so, whom (the argument goes), so no one but “us” – the members of our political society, or our association – should help decide where we draw our boundaries and what we do within them. Much like the institution of arranged marriage, these critics charge, the AAP violates the right not to associate with particular others, including others (like the potential partners I choose not to marry, or the would-be members our association does not admit) who are significantly affected by the exercise of that right.
Critics worry, second, that applying the AAP might undermine people’s capacities to identify with a political society or with another cooperative association. Within this group of critics, some see identification as instrumentally valuable. David Miller, for example, claims it is critical for motivating people to participate in cooperative schemes that involve self-sacrifice.7 Others view it as intrinsically valuable – a process that enriches people’s lives by defining what Michael Walzer calls “communities of character,” that is, “historically stable, ongoing associations of men and women with some special commitment to one another and some special sense of their common life.”8 Political identification need not be rooted in ethically thick understandings of who “we” are; instead, it can be rooted in constitutional principles, including principles of constitutional democracy.9 In any case, the concern is that if others outside our collectivity have a say in what we decide and how we act, they can alter the very practices, values, and principles according to which we define our shared identity. They can change who we are, jeopardizing our capacity to identify with our political society, or with the other associations through which we “[pursue] in common the objects of common desires.”10
The third concern derives from the first and second. Some worry that the AAP extends democracy’s reach at the cost of undermining what is arguably the core democratic value: collective autonomy. For people to author the laws and the other norms with which they govern themselves, they need boundaries within which they can decide those norms, absent outside interference. In addition, they need to identify politically – to experience themselves as part of a “we” for the sake of which they are willing to “moderate their [self-interested] claims in the hope of finding common ground on which to base political decisions.”11 Absent such identification, the worry is, “rule by the people” may devolve into the coercion of the minority by the majority – a form of government under which citizens do not experience themselves as having authored any collective decisions except those they explicitly endorsed.
For these (as well as for other, more pragmatic) reasons, some critics of the AAP suggest that affectedness should trigger not the right to participate in political decision making, but merely the right to have decision makers afford one’s interests consideration. People may have duties to those whom their decisions affect, the idea is, but they can discharge those duties without granting votes to outsiders, and without opening the borders that delimit their communities and define their associations. Thus, Kit Wellman writes that he is “inclined to agree that the emerging global infrastructure entails that virtually all of us have increasingly substantial relationships with people all over the world,” but emphasizes that people can discharge their “duties to those outside of [their] borders … without necessarily allowing those to whom [they] are duty bound entry to [their] country” or political voice.12
I return to these critiques near the end of this chapter. But for the greater part of it, I bracket them, because my principal aim is to introduce a separate concern about the AAP: its inattention to structural power. As a first step toward explicating this problem, I want to introduce a case for which worries about threats to freedom of association, communal identification, and collective autonomy are minimal, because the power relations involved are subnational, rather than transnational, and situated within not a private association, but a nearly universally agreed-upon sphere of democratic governance. The case is that of school desegregation in the post-Civil Rights era United States.
Perhaps the best place to start is with the famous 1974 US Supreme Court case, Milliken v. Bradley, which addressed a proposed interdistrict school desegregation plan in metropolitan Detroit. The key point to note with respect to this case is that, had the desegregation program at issue been implemented, it would have crossed political – in this case, school district – boundaries. The Detroit Board of Education had proposed the plan two years prior, in response to an order by the US District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan, which had argued that, by that point in the city’s history, only plans that included suburban districts could be effective in desegregating Detroit’s schools. The District Court had ruled, and the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals had affirmed, that desegregation plans need not respect local school district boundaries, since those jurisdictions are no more than “instrumentalities of the state created for administrative convenience.”13 In other words, school districts are quite unlike Walzer’s “communities of character.” It seems uncontroversial to claim they are not crucial sites of either political identification or collective self-determination. Although Americans identify politically, and they practice collective self-government, in local communities like townships and municipalities, as well as at the level of the nation-state, this is significantly less the case in single-function administrative units like school districts.
Nevertheless, the US Supreme Court disagreed with the lower courts. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice Warren Burger expressed concerns that interdistrict desegregation would undermine collective autonomy by entitling citizens who live in one district to vote in school board elections in another. In a lengthy series of rhetorical questions, he asked, in part:
[Were the inter-district plan to be adopted, w]hat would be the status and authority of the present popularly elected school boards? Would the children of Detroit be within the jurisdiction and operating control of a school board elected by the parents and residents of other districts? … Who would construct attendance zones, purchase school equipment, locate and construct new schools, and indeed attend to all the myriad day-to-day decisions that are necessary to school operations affecting potentially more than three-quarters of a million pupils?14
Local control over the educational process” the Chief Justice underscored, “affords citizens an opportunity to participate in decision-making.15
I quote this passage at length because the anxieties to which Chief Justice Burger gives voice – not only his practical worries about implementing cross-jurisdictional governance, but also his normative concern about detaching democratic rights from extant political jurisdictions – mirror those of many critics of the AAP. However, in the context of American urban politics, these anxieties are curious. Surely the state of Michigan could centralize to the metropolitan level, or to some intermediate unit of government between the local school district and metropolitan Detroit, both electoral control over public school officials and collective decision making about attendance zones, educational equipment, infrastructure, and the like. People can and do form bounded political communities, they can and do identify politically, and they can and do exercise collective autonomy at levels of government considerably more centralized than local public school districts. The normative claim that an interdistrict desegregation plan would undermine collective autonomy is dubious.
Yet it is also revealing. The parallel between Burger’s worries and those of many critics of the AAP suggests that part of what some find jarring about the principle may be simply that it problematizes jurisdictional boundaries that are taken for granted, because they are relatively long-standing, because they are attached to physical spaces that are the sites of differential patterns of investment and disinvestment, and because (to borrow Charles Mill’s language) they are “normed” to populations that are constructed as socially or culturally different.16
The AAP and Structural Power
Milliken v. Bradley reinscribed the jurisdictional boundaries at issue. In a decision that would hamstring efforts to desegregate American schools for decades to come, the Supreme Court reversed the lower court’s judgment. It ruled that federally imposed desegregation plans cannot cross school district lines, except in those cases in which decisions made in one district are shown to have caused segregation in another, or in which it is proven that the district boundaries themselves were drawn with the intent to promote segregation. There is an obvious sense in which the ruling pushed against the logic of the All-Affected Principle. It reified extant political boundaries, asserting that democratic processes (here, the popular control of school boards through local elections) must be tied to territorially based political jurisdictions. At the same time, it implied, implausibly, that the status quo delineation of school district boundaries mapped onto and contained the effects of the “myriad day-to-day decisions” that regulate access to educational opportunity in metropolitan Detroit.
That said, there is a sense in which the majority decision was not at odds with the AAP, or at least with many influential formulations of that principle. The court emphasized not only limits to cross-jurisdictional responsibility for racial segregation and racial inequality in Detroit’s schools, but also limits to responsibility for racial inequalities that are structurally induced. The majority underscored that “[t]he boundaries of the Detroit School District, which are coterminous with the boundaries of the city of Detroit, were established over a century ago by neutral legislation when the city was incorporated.”17 Justice Stewart, in a concurring opinion, stressed that Detroit and its public school system had become “predominantly Negro” due not to decisions that had been made by identifiable individual or collective agents, but instead to “unknown and perhaps unknowable factors such as in-migration, birth rates, economic changes, or cumulative acts of private racial fears.”18 On the majority’s view, the focus of efforts to desegregate Detroit’s schools should be the effects of clearly identifiable decisions. It should not be the effects of uncoordinated, large-scale social processes that interact in ways that are “unknown and perhaps unknowable.”
Of course, the Court’s aim in Milliken was not to apply the All-Affected Principle, it was to interpret and apply the principles of the US Constitution. Yet there is a slippage in the majority’s reasoning that I want to suggest can be instructive for those who aim to specify the AAP in a way that enables its application: a mismatch between, on one hand, the goal of tying “significant affecting” to democratic control, and on the other, an exclusive focus on the explicit decisions that individual and collective agents make. In Detroit in the 1970s, “significant affecting” not only traversed the jurisdictional boundaries that defined local public school districts, it also exceeded the control of agents who were positioned to make decisions informed by the intent to discriminate. Racial segregation in late twentieth-century Detroit was produced and reproduced, in significant part, through the uncoordinated actions of multiple actors pursuing reasonable ends (parents seeking the best education possible for their children, for example, or elected officials acting to advance their constituents’ interests) in a context of structural racial inequality.
As the Detroit case illustrates, people can be significantly affected by the interaction of large-scale structural processes, and yet it can be exceedingly difficult – at the limit, it may be impossible – to isolate the decisions that constitute those processes. If the ethic informing the AAP is a deeply democratic one, if the AAP urges that people should have a hand in shaping all the collective norms that significantly affect them, then the principle requires attention to structural power.
Let us define structural power as a network of collective norms that are, to varying degrees (1) institutionalized, (2) objectified, (3) internalized as motivational systems, and (4) embodied as what Pierre Bourdieu calls relatively enduring dispositions (habitus).
In order to clarify how structural power is relevant to the All-Affected Principle, I will expound briefly on each of these four ideas.19
1. When norms are institutionalized, they are built into rules, laws, and other institutional forms, which distribute rewards and sanctions that reinforce them. An example relevant to the case of twentieth-century Detroit is the underwriting standards that were created by the US Federal Housing Administration (FHA) beginning in the mid-1930s. From that time, and for three decades after – a period during which the agency not only insured mortgages for a third of new housing in the nation, but also profoundly shaped the private mortgage insurance market – the FHA required that the estimate of a property’s value reflect the presence in the surrounding area of what it called “Adverse Influences,” which it defined to include “incompatible racial and social groups.”20
2. When norms are objectified, they are built into material forms (or object forms) that people experience corporeally as they engage in practical activity. A case in point is racialized urban and suburban space in postwar Detroit. Consider, for instance, the suburb of Grosse Pointe, which borders the city and is headquarters to one of the fifty-three school districts involved in the proposed desegregation plan at issue in Milliken. As of the 2010 census, Grosse Pointe was 93 percent white, and just 3 percent black.21 According to the nonprofit Edbuild, in 2016, the border between the Grosse Pointe and Detroit public school districts marked the single largest socioeconomic disparity between any two public school systems in the United States.22 Grosse Pointe touts its public schools on its homepage, where it announces, in bold letters, “Excellence is our proud tradition!” It elaborates:
The City of Grosse Pointe is a community nestled along the shores of Lake St. Clair … a place where lovely homes grace tree-lined streets. Residents are afforded a scenic waterfront park with two outdoor swimming pools and a private marina. Our community takes pride in its excellent private and public schools. The City strives to offer an environment that is safe for both young and old.23
But why is Grosse Pointe “lovely,” “scenic,” and “safe”? Why is it home to “excellent” schools, while neighboring Detroit, with a poverty rate close to 50 percent, has a public school system that has been in a state of financial emergency since 2009? Because political decisions – like local decisions to zone to require large lots or to limit the construction of multi-family housing, as well as state and federal decisions to channel public investment toward suburban exclaves, and away from older cities – produce norms that become objectified in material form.
Think of the detached, single-family house or the “tree-lined street.” Objectification depoliticizes. It makes “loveliness,” “safety,” and “excellence” appear to be qualities that emanate from physical forms, obscuring the collective decisions that produce political effects like the creation of the stark disparities between Grosse Pointe and neighboring Detroit.
3. When social norms are institutionalized, they define incentive structures that agents internalize as motivational systems. Imagine a white homebuyer who wanted a government-backed mortgage for a house in Detroit in the postwar years. To qualify, they would have had to buy in a racially exclusive white enclave. In Detroit, as in other American cities, white buyers responded to this incentive by moving en masse to the housing developments that were built with generous federal subsidies in the new postwar suburbs. It is deeply misleading to depoliticize this phenomenon by psychologizing it: by characterizing it as “cumulative acts of private racial fears.” It is equally misleading to privatize it: to characterize it as “cumulative acts of private racial fears.” No doubt it is true that racist attitudes informed the decisions many individual whites made to exit from cities like Detroit. Yet, at the same time, “white flight” was the predictable result of the public subsidy of suburban home ownership in a dual housing market.
4. When social norms are objectified, they form the material context of people’s practical activity. Hence, competent social actors master them implicitly. That is to say, they learn to conform to them, not just through conscious decisions, but also through a kind of practical know-how that powerfully supplements judgment and choice. Bourdieu characterizes such know-how as “a feel for the game.” “Action guided by a ‘feel for the game,’” he writes, “has all the appearance of the rational action that an impartial observer, endowed with all the necessary information and capable of mastering it rationally, would deduce.” He continues:
And yet, it is not based on reason. You need only think of the impulsive decision made by the tennis player who runs up to the net to understand that it has nothing in common with the learned construction that the coach, after analysis, draws up in order to explain it and deduce communicable lessons from it.24
Much like Bourdieu’s tennis player, the contemporary resident of Grosse Pointe, Michigan can master the common sense of racial practice even if they do not endorse, even if they are never consciously aware of, the collective decisions that helped to create it.
Track Power, Not Decisions
A decision that is “neutral” in the sense in which Chief Justice Burger says the definition of school district boundaries was in nineteenth-century Detroit, when institutionalized and/or objectified, can interact with other social structures to shape large-scale processes (like the migration processes and the urban economic restructuring that Justice Stewart calls “unknown and perhaps unknowable”): processes that significantly affect what people can do and be. Those who are committed to the democratic principle that people should have a hand in shaping the collective norms that significantly affect them must subject institutionalized and objectified norms, along with social processes that produce systematic inequalities, to the same scrutiny to which we subject decisions. What would that entail? I want to suggest that articulating the AAP in a way that is attentive to structural power requires attending to not only decisions, but also (1) nondecisions, (2) doxic norms, and (3) systemic relations of domination.
Let me say something more about each of these ideas.
1. I borrow the term “nondecision” from the postwar literature on power’s so-called “second face.”25 E. E. Schattschneider famously argued that “[s]ome issues are organized into politics while others are organized out.”26 However, what Schattschneider called the “mobilization of bias” is not simply a matter of agenda-control; it is not only in effect when agents make decisions that intentionally delimit the terms of political conflict. It is also a matter of the inertial force of institutionalized collective norms, and of the political interests that institutionalized norms construct.
Think of the definition of public school district boundaries to coincide with the definition of municipal boundaries in mid-nineteenth-century Detroit. Over the course of the following century and a half, this institutional arrangement would interact with interregional migration and urban economic restructuring to incentivize “white flight” to Detroit’s racially exclusive suburbs. Multiply that incentive by the fifty-three suburban districts that would have participated in the proposed school desegregation plan, and by the thousands of residents of each of those fifty-three districts, and you have a wide-ranging set of socially constructed racial interests, centered on home ownership, property values, and restricted access to well-funded, high-performing schools. Now it is not just decisions, but also nondecisions – not deciding to intervene to countervail the flight of jobs and capital from city to suburb, for example, or for that matter, not deciding to desegregate across school district boundaries – that significantly affects the residents of contemporary Detroit.
2. I borrow the term “doxa” from Bourdieu, who uses it to signify collective norms that function as background assumptions: taken-for-granted expectations about aspects of the social world that many people experience as natural or otherwise inevitable.27 The idea is closely related to his notion of habitus (discussed above), since agents internalize doxic norms in the form of intersubjectively shared cognitive, perceptual, and affective dispositions, or what William Sewell calls “schemas.”28 Sally Haslanger writes that schemas “are embodied in individuals as a shared cluster of open-ended dispositions to see things a certain way or to respond habitually in particular circumstances.” She elaborates: “Schemas encode knowledge and also provide scripts for interaction with each other and with our environment.”29
For an example of a doxic norm that people internalize as an intersubjectively shared schema, recall the jurisdictional boundary that divides Detroit from neighboring Grosse Pointe. The discussion in the previous section suggests that some people experience that boundary not as a socially produced norm that helps create and maintain inequality, but as a physical frontier that merely reflects (pre-political) differences between what is “lovely,” “safe,” and “excellent,” and what is not.
3. Social structures that create patterned inequalities can position people in relations of systemic domination. They can do so, I want to underscore, even if no agent directs or controls them, and even if none intends the relevant outcomes. I use the word “systemic” to contrast my view with that of many contemporary neo-republicans, who understand nondomination as “resilient noninterference” – that is, as one agent’s capacity to act without being subjected to the will of another.30 On this view, although domination need not involve actual interference (it entails only the possibility of interference within some specified range of action), it is, necessarily, an agent-centered phenomenon – that is, it consists in a direct relation between an agent who dominates and one who is dominated. To quote Philip Pettit, domination “cannot be the product of ‘a system or network or whatever’.”31 In this respect, neo-republicans echo theorists of power’s “third face,” for whom power ends where structure begins.32
I disagree. Structural forms of constraint, like the school district boundaries at issue in Milliken, are social in origin, and they can limit people’s fields of action no less so than can decisions made by other people. Steven Lukes famously worried that attention to structural power can make it difficult to theorize responsibility for unjust power relations.33 My own view is consonant with that of Iris Marion Young, who argues that people can be subject to systemic forms of domination for which no identifiable agent is causally responsible, but emphasizes that attention to structural power highlights what she calls the “forward-looking” political responsibility to act with others to change unjust structures.34
In sum, attention to social structure directs democrats to re-specify the All-Affected Principle. It directs us to track not decisions, but power. Granted, one aspect of having “an adequate and equal social capacity to shape the power relations that delimit one’s field of action” is having adequate and equal decision-making power. The view I recommend is one that supplements, rather than supplants, those that emphasize decision making. For this reason, the implications of the All-Affected Principle that have been sketched by some scholars of local government law remain apposite. Consider Gerald Frug’s proposal that people be legally empowered to cross jurisdictional boundaries and to cast votes in the elections of any local government in the metropolitan areas in which they live.35 Frug makes the case for granting each voter multiple votes, which they can cast in the local election(s) of their choice. Thus, a resident of the city of Detroit who wanted to influence the zoning regulations that prevent them from moving to Grosse Pointe and sending their children to its “excellent” schools might cast some, or even all, of their votes in Grosse Pointe’s local elections. Of course, a voting system like the one Frug proposes could have perverse effects. It might further empower the already-privileged, by enabling affluent suburban voters to coordinate to vote in Detroit’s elections, influencing city politics in ways that exacerbate existing inequalities. The practical challenge for those who focus on decision making is to develop governance regimes that grant all affected persons – especially those who are marginalized by the status quo – an adequate and equal capacity to help shape collective decisions.
As I have argued throughout this chapter, an additional challenge for those who would apply the All-Affected Principle is that “shaping” power relations is not reducible to participating in formal decision making. If people are significantly affected by nondecisions, by doxic norms, and by systemic relations of domination, then democrats must think creatively not only about how to reform voting laws and other institutions, but also about how to promote people’s capacities to reshape political agendas and to problematize the taken-for-granted. For this reason, the AAP can recommend political changes that have nothing to do with voting. These might include, for example, providing aid to the relatively powerless to help them bring claims in court; protecting and enhancing people’s capacities to organize collectively, to protest, and to engage in a wide range of direct actions, including strikes; and devoting collective resources to supporting forms of public expression, such as public art, that problematize the dominant terms of discourse and unsettle doxic beliefs.
Although interventions like these have not been the principal focus of most theorizing about the AAP, they can play a critically important role in giving people an adequate and equal hand in shaping the norms that significantly affect them. How would an approach that moves away from an exclusive focus on voting and boundary drawing fare in light of the three objections to the AAP cited at the start of this chapter? The first, recall, was the worry that applying the AAP would undermine the right to freedom of association. The fact that the principle need not dictate how to define membership in political societies alleviates this concern. To return to the marriage analogy, in my own case, I did decide to marry a person who (happily) decided to marry me. No other people can compel us to admit them to our union. That does not mean, however, that no one does or should have the capacity to help shape other-regarding facets of our relationship. To cite one obvious example, the US government taxes my income today at a different rate than it did before I married. It seems entirely unobjectionable, from a concern about freedom of association, that my spouse and I do not independently decide the tax bracket to which we are assigned.
Second, if the AAP does not require forcing people to allow others to join their associations, but instead recommends giving them the capacity to shape the power relations that affect them, regardless of the definition of associational boundaries, then applying the principle need not undermine people’s capacities to identify with “communities of character.” If there is something about identifying as an American that is instrumentally and/or intrinsically valuable – or for that matter, if there is something valuable about identifying as a resident of Grosse Pointe, Michigan – then the challenge for democrats is to find ways to support and enable identification, while at the same time institutionalizing members’ responsiveness to outsiders’ legitimate claims. Suppose what is distinctive about “us” as residents of Grosse Pointe is that we value excellence in public education. If that means no more than that we devote a substantial percentage of our fair share of public resources to building schools and paying to staff them, all well and good. Perhaps a neighboring community, comprised entirely of elderly residents without school-aged children, will channel its fair share of resources toward some other end. But the fact that we value excellence in public schooling does not license us to pursue said excellence on the backs of our neighbors. If “pursuing in common the object of [our] common desires” affects the significant interests of people outside our association, then democratic norms demand that those others have a say in how we pursue our ends. One way to support communal identification in a case like the one at hand would be to detach some rights and/or benefits from communal membership. For example, perhaps Grosse Pointe should not have the right to collect property taxes and use them to fund local public services. If what is at stake is truly a communal valuation of education over other public goods, then a tax-revenue sharing system might preserve local decision making about priorities, while at the same time reducing the extent to which Grosse Pointe residents’ decisions affect people in neighboring Detroit.
Third, although the concern that applying the AAP might undermine collective self-determination is valid, it is worth underscoring that collectivities’ rights to self-determination, much like the self-determination rights of autonomous individuals, are not absolute. As I type these words, part of the lawn in the front of my house has been torn up by the local water utility, which has scheduled a water main replacement project in my neighborhood. Because I write from home, and because the noise distracts me as I write, I would prefer for them not to dig on my property at this time. Were I to realize that preference, however, it would delay the project, affecting my neighbors’ significant interests. My property rights are abridged in this instance, and rightly so, because I live in a community with other people who would be significantly affected were that not the case. In a similar vein, collectivities’ rights to self-determination can and should be abridged when the decisions they make are not purely self-regarding. In the case of school desegregation in the contemporary metropolis, Chief Justice Burger may be right that “[l]ocal control over the educational process affords citizens an opportunity to participate in decision-making.” That said, funding can be centralized without undermining people’s capacities to shape many local decisions about curriculum, pedagogy, and other educational concerns.
Conclusion
By way of conclusion, I want to say something about what I see as the principal strength, and the principal drawback, of the approach to theorizing the AAP sketched in this chapter. I am reminded of the advice that my son’s chess coach gave him many years ago, when he used to play competitive chess. The coach would emphasize that, to grow as a player, he needed to think imaginatively, sometimes even in ways that seemed counter-intuitive. The coach advised that, while considering his next move, my son should think not only about what he might do, and what his opponent’s likely response would be to each possible move, but also about what he might do were he to find himself in a different tactical situation than the one he currently faced. “Ask yourself fanciful questions,” he would prompt, “like: ‘What if that rook weren’t there?’”
My central aim in this chapter has been to draw attention to the significance of structural power for specifying and applying the All-Affected Principle. In the case of US school desegregation post-Milliken, realizing that principle would require nontrivial changes not only to how Americans organize school districts and other subnational governments, but also to how they understand their rights (as students, as parents, as property owners), their interests, and their identities. It would require changes that would challenge longstanding hierarchies and threaten the privilege of those who benefit from the status quo. If it is difficult to imagine building the political will among the American citizenry to enact such change, that difficulty highlights an unfortunate ramification of my argument. Rather than rendering the AAP more attainable, I have suggested a reformulation that makes it more elusive. My argument pushes not toward neat, or even obviously feasible policy applications, but instead toward “big think” about structural change.
I am of two minds about this outcome. On the one hand, I appreciate the need for a realistic specification of the AAP, if the goal is to move closer to actualizing it. The more expansively the principle is defined, the more challenging it becomes to apply and to realize. At the same time, however, I want to make a plea that political theorists not become so hemmed in by concerns about feasibility that we fail to consider applications that might work only were we to find ourselves in a different tactical situation than the one we currently face (only “if that rook weren’t there”). Politics, like chess, requires not just strategy, but also imagination.
The All-Affected Principle (AAP) in democratic theory claims that all who are affected by a decision should be able to have a voice in that decision. Questions immediately arise: How wide is the scope of the principle and what are its grounds? In this chapter, we focus initially on a question concerning scope. The AAP is most frequently assumed to apply to formal political decision making. We explore whether the principle should have any purchase in a particularly prominent and powerful extra-governmental domain: philanthropy. Should the All-Affected Principle be an important norm of good philanthropic practice?
If the AAP is understood modestly, then perhaps this is already the case. Donors and grant-making foundations often acknowledge the importance of learning from the feedback of two groups affected by their decision making: the grantees whose activities may be shaped by donor preferences and conditions (the strings attached to grants), and the beneficiaries whose interests those grantees attempt to advance. However, there is reason to doubt this modest application of the AAP. In foundation philanthropy, it remains rare to provide unrestricted general operating support to grantees, and many of the most prominent foundations deploy a decidedly technocratic approach (sometimes called strategic giving) that relies on highly targeted grant making. This approach treats grantees as subcontractors whose task it is to carry out a particular component of a vision or theory of change developed by philanthropists. The voices of beneficiaries and the knowledge possessed by grantees are routinely neglected.1
In general, foundations pay lip service to the notion of empowering grantees and beneficiaries, while reserving the right to define for themselves the interests and effects that are relevant to their objectives in grant making. An honest assessment of the AAP as applied to philanthropy reveals that the ways that most foundations have attempted to incorporate grantee and beneficiary voice fall very far short of the kinds of democratic reforms that the AAP envisions.
In what follows, we provide an example of the kind of dispute that can arise from foundations’ technocratic orientation, and we use the case to reflect on whether the AAP should be applied to philanthropic decision making. Thinking about the AAP in the case of philanthropy invites exploration of the scope of the All-Affected Principle (and its application to nongovernmental actors). Against common interpretations of the AAP that apply it only to formal political decision making, we argue for extending to philanthropy the AAP’s demand that affected parties be included in decision-making processes. We do so without relying on an expansive reading of the AAP that interprets it as applying to all kinds of decisions, public and private. Rather, we argue that the reasons we have for endorsing the AAP – for thinking that it is wrong for people to be denied influence over exercises of power that affect them – do not pick out formal political decision making as a uniquely important site of inclusion. Parallel reasons apply to philanthropy and some, we think, have particular force in that domain.
Our revisionary argument about the scope of the AAP also illuminates questions concerning the principle’s grounds. Philanthropy is an interesting test case for our intuitions about the grounds of the AAP, because it calls attention to important differences between two ways that the AAP is often framed: as a demand to consider affected interests in decision making, or as an obligation to enfranchise the bearers of those interests. Of course, enfranchising affected interests is often an important instrumental strategy – probably the most reliable one – for ensuring that the relevant interests are considered: often, the goals of considering and enfranchising affected interests will overlap. But in the case of philanthropy, they often come apart: in general, philanthropists are attempting to consider and advance the interests of their intended beneficiaries, but not to grant beneficiaries or grantees control over how their interests are advanced. The case of philanthropy therefore provides resources for considering whether the AAP is instrumental to the consideration or advancement of substantive interests, or also grounded in respect for the autonomy of the people who bear those interests. By considering the appropriate scope of application of the AAP, we hope to underscore the broad implications of a commitment to democracy for the organization of social and political relationships in circumstances – as is the case of philanthropy – of unequal power.2
Case: Philanthropic Effects without Inclusion
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s global health grant making in Africa has attracted criticism for its starkly technocratic orientation. Consider the case of Botswana, a democracy whose rate of HIV/AIDS prevalence has consistently ranked among the highest in the world.3 The Gates Foundation launched a pilot program for HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment, the African Comprehensive HIV/AIDS Partnerships (ACHAP), in Botswana in 2000. By 2005, deaths from AIDS had fallen significantly (although prevention efforts showed less success).4 However, over the same period, pregnancy-related maternal deaths and child mortality both increased. This led to concerns that the foundation’s initiative had drained many doctors away from primary care and into the foundation’s areas of priority (Gates-supported salaries in the HIV/AIDS sector were significantly higher).5 In response to criticism, the director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria (a Gates partner) acknowledged that their interventions may have had a “distorting effect,” but said, “we’re a Global Fund for AIDS, TB, and malaria. We’re not a global fund that funds local health.”6 The Global Fund reserved the right to determine the effects in which it was interested and for which it owed justification.
The Gates Foundation, like many large foundations, expresses a commitment to the empowerment of its beneficiaries; its announcement of the ACHAP grant is titled “Working with Botswana to Confront its Devastating AIDS Crisis” (my emphasis). However, in the face of complaints that democratically elected Batswana officials were excluded from decision making around the program,7 Gates Foundation officials have defended selective interventions delivered outside countries’ general health systems and targeted to the foundation’s areas of focus. The stated rationale is that they do not want government departments to become dependent on foundation money. Dr. Tadataka Yamada, the executive director of the Gates Foundation’s global health program from 2006–2011, explained that “What [the Foundation] can’t do is fill the gaps in government budgets … It’s not sustainable.”8 Rather, “What we do is we catalyze … We are not replacement mothers.”9
Such comments, like those of the Global Fund director, reflect a potentially troubling combination of impulses: on the one hand, philanthropists’ desire for impact; on the other, a reluctance to assume responsibility for effects (direct or indirect) that lie outside specific program goals. Philanthropists and foundations that have been exceptionally generous in giving money for the relief of global poverty and related problems have been less willing to cede control over how that spending is allocated and evaluated. This reflects a more general resistance, on the part of philanthropists, to characterize their relationships with beneficiaries as political relationships that involve significant differences in power. Many large foundations assume that the relevant knowledge resides primarily in the foundation itself, whose leaders and staff have their own theories about how to produce social change and strategies to test and measure those theories through grants. Democratic norms of inclusion and accountability are exactly what the foundation seeks to avoid. Put differently, foundations represent a form of technocratic or expert voice within democratic institutions and civil society. The question is whether this represents a problem from the point of view of democratic governance.
Applying the All-Affected Principle to Philanthropy
On virtually any interpretation of the AAP, it will already be obvious that Batswana citizens ought to have a voice in decisions that affect their interests as significantly as healthcare allocation does. But it is also unclear how this principle affects the obligations of the Gates Foundation. Most discussions of the All-Affected Principle focus on formal political decision making, at the level of state and interstate institutions.10 The normative claim is straightforward: people whose interests are (significantly) affected by political decision making should have the opportunity to influence those decisions by, minimally, having their preferences consulted or, more ambitiously, by directly participating in the decision making. But should the AAP apply outside of formal political institutions?
Perhaps not. One possible reaction to the case discussed in the previous section is that democratic institutions, at the national, sub- and supranational levels, ought to ensure that citizens have a voice in the decisions that affect them. But in the absence of such institutions (or perhaps, in the domestic case, against the backdrop of democratic institutions), private actors operating on a voluntary or commercial basis are entitled to act as they like, provided they follow the rules set by political actors. In the philanthropic case, this means that the Gates Foundation, and any other philanthropic entity, is entitled to act in such a way to produce the effects that it thinks are desirable (and that may really be desirable). The framework is one of private contract: the foundation offers a grant, it is entitled to attach whatever strings it wishes in order to carry out its vision, and the potential grantee can either accept these strings or reject the grant altogether. To the extent that grantee or beneficiary voice is present at all, it is at this moment of initial negotiation and contract. Construed in this manner, provided they follow the rules set by political actors, the prerogative of foundations to discount or ignore the voices of beneficiaries and grantees is straightforward. If there is a problem here, it exists at the level of background institutions, and we should focus on resolving the problem at that same, political, level.
We question this argument. Private actors (and not only states and intergovernmental organizations) can acquire duties to allow the people affected by their decisions real influence over those decisions (and not, as is now common practice, simply to take those decisions with reference to the interests of the people affected). There are two principal reasons to apply a principle of affected interests to the activities of philanthropists.
First, the claim that private actors would be entitled to exercise broad discretion against the backdrop of distributively and politically just international institutions does not imply that they enjoy the identical moral discretion absent such institutions. In ideal theory, the AAP is generally understood as a principle regulating higher-order lawmaking and the design of political institutions, not as a requirement that individuals have a say in each and every decision that affects them. (Nozick’s example – proposing that all hopeful suitors have a say in the decision of whom, if anyone, a woman should marry – is a famous reductio of the latter possibility.)11 This restriction of democratic principles to higher-order institutions is a common feature in democratic theory, and the priority of equal influence over political institutions is clear enough, at least when we are operating in ideal theory. As Kolodny puts it, “if we do have equal influence over political decisions, and those decisions have final authority over nonpolitical decisions, then that itself contributes to moderating the threat … posed by unequal influence over nonpolitical decisions,” since in such a society “whatever hierarchy there may be is ultimately regulated or authorized from a standpoint of equality.”12 This might seem to provide a rationale for restricting the AAP to higher-level public institutions – ones capable of regulating the downstream, nonpolitical distribution of influence. The practice of philanthropy would be such a downstream location, and the inclusion of beneficiaries in decisions about the targets and terms of donations might then be supererogatory. At the ideal end of the ideal–nonideal spectrum, the presence of just background conditions may make plausible a contractual framework of transacting parties in a voluntary exchange.13
In nonideal circumstances, this position is untenable. There is a case for applying the AAP to the activities of philanthropists, even if one thinks that, in ideal theory, the AAP could justifiably be restricted in its application to political institutions. This argument does not rest on the implausible claim that there is a first-order normative obligation to give all people affected by any decision a say in making that decision. Rather, when there are serious defects in either distributive or political justice, either globally or domestically, the AAP’s demands for inclusion and empowerment can devolve on actors on whom it might not otherwise be binding.
One important reason for treating the AAP as a norm of philanthropic practice concerns the devolution of responsibilities of inclusion in contexts where democratic domestic and/or transnational institutions are missing. To return to the Botswana case that we’ve been discussing: if global institutions were arranged in compliance with the AAP, such that the international political order was as responsive to the interests of Batswana citizens as it is to those of citizens of any other country, matters would look different. But it’s clear that foundation officials driving a hard bargain can not, in the real world, excuse themselves by pointing out the prior opportunities for Batswana citizens and officials to shape the rules and norms that distribute global economic and political power. While Botswana itself is a stable and functioning democracy, its officials and citizens are constrained by injustices and power asymmetries in the international system. On one interpretation of the AAP, which makes it solely a principle of ideal theory, this is just one way of restating the injustice of the international system (and perhaps of trying to motivate change). But on another interpretation, this changes the obligations of secondary actors: acknowledging the failure of political institutions at the transnational level, domestic political institutions and private actors may be morally constrained to grant rights of participation. Put simply, the case for restricting the AAP to higher-level institutions in ideal theory does not suffice to insulate secondary actors from responsibility for directly satisfying the principle in nonideal theory, where the just division of institutional labor envisioned in ideal theory is inoperative. If the AAP is a genuine ethical or political principle (and not just a diagnostic tool), then we ought to consider its implications for individuals and private actors under conditions of injustice (which is to say, under all actually existing conditions).14
In a world where the All-Affected Principle was realized at the level of political institutions, people would (by assumption) have a say in the scope for action and political regulation of private actors. In nonideal circumstances, absent such higher-level principles of political inclusion, private actors exercise their superior power in a way that lacks full democratic authorization and legitimation. Against the backdrop of distributive unfairness and the presence of unjustly vulnerable or disadvantaged populations, the efforts of private actors through philanthropy to ameliorate inequality, to secure the dignity of the vulnerable, or to improve the prospects of the disadvantaged are often laudable. But charity is no substitute for justice. And even if charity is a second-best response to injustice, the standing of private actors to direct their charity as they please, and to exercise their discretion without including the voices of those whom they seek to affect, may not hold. To the extent that one holds a normative commitment to the All-Affected Principle, the failure to realize that principle through political institutions affects the downstream normative standing of private actors. This point applies broadly, for example to the activities of for-profit private actors.15
Second, separable from the presence of background injustice, there is a particularly strong case for applying a principle of affected interests to philanthropic decision making. It arises from the fact that, in the case of philanthropy, it is often the very interests of the people affected that foundations and NGOs invoke when defending the effects produced. This is different from what generally occurs in the case of for-profit multinational corporations. Of course, it might still be troubling when corporations produce effects (especially negative effects) on people in ways that those people are not able to influence. But one might argue for something like a version of the doctrine of double effect here: perhaps private actors pursuing their own interests are entitled (within some range) to produce negative effects on others, so long as they do not specifically intend those negative effects.
But the intentional structure of philanthropy is different, in ways that should encourage us to reflect on the kinds of effects that ground claims for inclusion in decision making. It is especially disrespectful to exclude people from influence over decisions that affect them while claiming that one is promoting the interests of those people. For most liberals, the normative standards for seeking to affect or influence someone for her own benefit are actually more stringent than the standards for affecting her as a by-product of the pursuit of one’s own interests. And so a commitment to anti-paternalism could ground a particularly strong case for enfranchising affected interests in philanthropic contexts. The case of philanthropy invites conversation both about the domain of application of the All-Affected Principle, and the kinds of interests that ground claims for inclusion and influence.
Our argument does not require thinking (implausibly) that philanthropic action is distinctively likely to cause harm; we assume as overwhelmingly likely that profit-seeking corporate activities produce more negative effects than do those of philanthropists. Nor does our argument require thinking that philanthropies like the Gates Foundation produce more harm than good: it is likely that the good effects of Gates Foundation activities far outweigh the bad. Rather, we challenge the assumption that it is primarily the risk of negative effects that grounds people’s claims to inclusion in decision making. The reasons underlying the pursuit of different effects also have a place when assessing claims for inclusion. On this argument, one need not think that all people potentially affected by Bill and Melinda Gates’s philanthropy are entitled to a say in how they spend it, before they take any decisions about where to donate: the anti-paternalist argument is compatible with thinking that donors enjoy wide discretion as to whether and where to give. An anti-paternalist specification of the principle of affected interests focuses rather on how one gives and on how control of philanthropic funds is distributed between the donor, beneficiaries, and other affected interests.
Put differently, considering whether the AAP should apply to extra-governmental domains such as philanthropy opens up a conversation not just about the scope of the principle but about its very grounding.
Instrumental and Intrinsic Justifications for the AAP
Why exactly ought the interests of those affected by a decision be included in the decision-making process? In the case of philanthropy, one answer is that doing so is very likely to produce better outcomes: by incorporating the voices of grantees and beneficiaries, philanthropic interventions are improved. On this view, the AAP has an instrumental justification: its application in philanthropic decision making tends to improve what it is that philanthropists or NGOs seek to produce.
Within the world of philanthropy and NGOs, this is not an especially controversial view, at least when expressed as an aspiration or as a general principle. Foundations often claim that they aim to incorporate the voices of grantees and their beneficiaries in their decision making for the simple reason that doing so is a basic condition for learning how to improve philanthropy and produce better outcomes. Foundations that seek to be learning organizations will routinely look to their grantees and beneficiaries as the sources of local knowledge and try to access that knowledge through organizational processes that routinize grantee feedback. However, given the obvious power imbalance between foundations and their grantees, creating meaningful feedback loops and learning mechanisms is structurally difficult. And foundations lack substantive forms of accountability for their performance (they neither have competitors, as do firms in the for-profit marketplace, nor governance structures, as do government agencies in a democratic society, that could force the replacement of leaders through regular elections16), so they can easily operate without incorporating grantee or beneficiary voice. And apart from these considerations, in an age of highly technocratic philanthropy there is ample reason to doubt whether foundations do more than offer hollow gestures to the importance of grantee voice. The AAP might have an instrumental justification in the domain of philanthropy, but abiding by or operationalizing it in practice is evidently difficult if it is endorsed just as a norm of good practice. And this despite its being in the interest of donors, assuming that donors actually seek to produce good outcomes and to improve their grant-making practice over time.
We believe that the philanthropic context also reveals a potential intrinsic justification for the AAP. Suppose one believed that there are clear benefits to purely technocratically driven philanthropy (accepting that neglecting grantee and beneficiary voice is compatible with, or even necessary to produce, good outcomes), and suppose further that philanthropy was undertaken in the presence of fully just background conditions, giving philanthropists a wide discretion to practice grant making as they wish. Even so, we have reason to endorse an application of AAP to philanthropy.
The argument here is the anti-paternalism case we have briefly developed. Technocratic philanthropy might deliver uncontroversially good outcomes for grantees and beneficiaries, with those outcomes acknowledged by both grantees and beneficiaries. But in acting paternalistically, philanthropists wrong the agents they intend to benefit. Such paternalism is morally objectionable, and all the more so when we view philanthropy dynamically, as more than a one-off interaction between one donor and one grantee.
The germ of the argument can be seen in a cliché often invoked by grantees or critics of philanthropy: that philanthropy is something that should be done with rather than done to the people who benefit from it. Some of these cases can be understood on the instrumental argument that we discussed above, or as exposing the pitfalls of hierarchically organized social practices. But we can also understand the undemocratic practice of philanthropy as objectionable in itself, on anti-paternalist grounds that speak to the grounds of the AAP (and of democracy) more generally.
The AAP as an Anti-Paternalist Principle
One reading of the moral principle underlying the AAP is this: that each person’s comparably important interests deserve equal consideration.17 This interpretation of the grounds of the AAP makes the AAP something close to a principle of justice. What’s fundamental is the obligation to consider and promote the interests of all; how this is to be done is a downstream question.
We believe that a different premise grounds the appeal of the AAP: that people should be treated as both competent and entitled to articulate and promote their own interests, rather than, in the worst case, being vulnerable to powerful actors who can negatively affect their interests with impunity or, in the best case, relying on technocratically benevolent but unaccountable external actors to promote their interests on their behalf. Democratic decision making is not merely instrumental to the protection of people’s substantive interests (grounded in the empirical claim that if people are denied a say in the decisions that affect them, their objective interests are likely to be underserved). It is also required by respect for autonomy: affected people need to be able to define for themselves what their interests are. This interpretation of the AAP (unlike the one calling for equal consideration) makes it a fundamentally democratic principle: the grounds of the principle are not just about an open-ended commitment to the equal moral worth of persons but also about how we implement equal consideration (that is, by giving power to the people we want to be considered). On our reading, commitment to the AAP implies commitment to anti-paternalism: hierarchically organized consideration of affected interests is insufficient to satisfy the AAP.
We use the term paternalism broadly, to refer to attempts to influence an agent’s decisions or actions that express the judgment that the agent’s ability to choose or act well on her own behalf is deficient or inferior in some relevant respect. Our focus is therefore on the insult that paternalism expresses toward the person paternalized.18
We do not restrict our definition of paternalism to cases where the paternalizer engages in coercion or where there is otherwise some defect in the consent of the person paternalized. This is a controversial choice: some will judge it overinclusive, and instead wish to restrict the definition of paternalism to cases where the paternalizer coerces the person paternalized or otherwise infringes on her rights.19 On the latter, more restrictive definition of paternalism, it will generally be difficult to see how the activities of philanthropists could count as paternalistic, since philanthropists are usually understood to be adding to the options available to beneficiaries rather than removing any preexisting options. Perhaps one could argue that background conditions are so flawed that the offers extended by philanthropists count as coercive (since grantees or beneficiaries lack any acceptable alternative) or that the grantees or beneficiaries are incapable of genuine consent. While we accept that such conditions might sometimes obtain, we do not believe that classifying philanthropy as paternalistic depends on accepting such claims.
Paternalism is not, on our understanding, a subset of coercion but a broader category of wrong: it is objectionable not (or not only) as an unjustified liberty restriction but as a failure to show respect for autonomous agents and a threat to relations of equality. It can be expressed not only where paternalizers unilaterally intervene in ways that restrict liberty relative to a pre-intervention baseline, but also where they attempt to put in place structures to restrict the future scope for choice of beneficiaries (even if beneficiaries consent to those structures). Suppose that a prospective beneficiary B has X range of liberty or scope for choice at time T. At time T+1, philanthropist A offers B a benefit, conditional on restricting B’s scope for choice to X−Y at time T+2. On our reading, what is relevant to the assessment of paternalism is not only whether there is any coercion or liberty-infringement at time T+1 (we assume there is not: that B’s scope for choice at T+1 is actually greater than X, because of the added option that A offers), but A’s reasons for seeking to constrain B’s scope for choice at time T+2. If those reasons refer to B’s inability to judge or act well on her own behalf, A’s action can be paternalistic even if B is better off overall at time T+2 and if her consent to receive the benefit with the attached conditions was genuine.
To motivate the possibility of noncoercive, non-rights-infringing, consensual paternalism, consider the following example. Suppose that wealthy parents set up a trust for their children, which is designed to be unlocked in stages over the life spans of the children: they come into an initial bundle of money at age 18, another at age 30, another at age 45, and so on. At each stage, there are conditions that specify whether the child is entitled to the money, and perhaps also conditions on how the money may be used (e.g. only for education, housing, or childcare). Stipulate that the adult children are not owed this money as a matter of justice: the parents have fulfilled their duties of care, the children are now self-sufficient, and by not receiving the money in the trust they would not be left badly off in absolute terms (we might even think that the money they receive through the trust may, in the big picture, leave them unjustly well-off).
It is easy to see that complying with the conditions in order to access the trust makes the adult children better off in welfarist terms – at least in one way (i.e. in respect of money) and presumably overall (since they have the option of refusing to comply with conditions that they judge to be too onerous, and of forgoing their claims to the money in the trust if they judge that the tradeoffs aren’t worth their while). We can assume that the adult children’s consent to the terms of the trust (if they accept them) is genuine and unforced. Still, we take it that such a trust represents an expression of distrust of the agency of the adult children, and that the parents in this case act in an insultingly and objectionably paternalistic way. (One might think this even if one still thought the parents had a moral and legal entitlement to dispose of their property as they see fit; we are not arguing that all forms of paternalism are all-things-considered impermissible or that they should all be legally barred.)
The reason for this intuition – and something important about paternalism that this case helps bring out – is that paternalism is often a feature of ongoing relationships, and not always of one-off transactions. Part of what can be objectionable about paternalism is the attempt to put oneself in a position of longer-term authority over an autonomous agent, even if that attempt proceeds by getting the agent to agree to defer to another person’s judgment about the agent’s best interests.20 Assessing the consensual or noncoercive character of individual transactions does not always give us sufficient information to assess whether or not a social or political relation is objectionably paternalistic: we need more information about the ongoing patterns of interaction between the relevant actors, in particular regarding whose judgments are taken as authoritative in making decisions about an agent’s important interests.
This understanding of paternalism has significant advantages for evaluating paternalistic treatment in globalized contexts of widespread injustice, where entitlement claims may be complex and obscure. Standard liberal definitions of coercion focus on the behavior, aims, and intentions of the coercer, not on the range of options or subjective experience of the person putatively coerced. While coercion does not require the exercise of force, it does require that the coercer have the intention and the ability credibly to threaten to make some of your preexisting options less attractive if you fail to act in the ways that they want.21 Whether or not something is coercion also depends on the background structure of rights and entitlements. If I threaten to withhold something that you have a claim on unless my terms are met, that is coercion; if I offer you something that you do not have a claim on, subject to conditions, it becomes a noncoercive offer. In the case of international philanthropy, whether a philanthropist’s action is coercive or not – and, derivatively, whether it is objectionably paternalistic or not – will depend on whether or not putative recipients have a claim on the good in question, and whether that claim is assignable to the philanthropist making the threat or offer. Often the answer will be mixed: for example, it will often seem plausible to say that potential recipients have a claim on someone for resources to meet basic needs, but that the claim is assignable to their own governments (or perhaps, derivatively, to the international community) and not to any particular philanthropist or group of philanthropists. So although aid recipients may encounter an unjustly constrained set of options, this is a fact that philanthropists are at worst exploiting rather than creating or threatening to create. Relative to the no-donation baseline, they are not coercing the recipients. And yet from the point of view of beneficiaries and an evaluation of their relationships, this seems beside the point; background injustice plays a significant role in motivating beneficiaries’ consent to restrictions on their autonomy, and we should be able to register the unfair and insulting character of the resulting relationships. This requires a diachronic understanding of paternalism that shifts attention from the character of the paternalizer’s infringement (at the moment of intervention) to ongoing curtailments of the paternalizee’s autonomy.22 The AAP is a useful anti-paternalist guide because it provides a better heuristic for avoiding paternalism than do calls to avoid coercion.
In summary, then, we believe that the case of philanthropy can be useful in illuminating both the scope of the AAP (and, in particular, how the democratic demands of that principle can devolve from public institutions to secondary actors in nonideal theory, where choice sets are tainted by background injustice) and its grounds (in particular, the insufficiency of a hierarchical organization of consideration).
Conclusion
How might enfranchising affected interests work in the case of philanthropy? Here there is a spectrum of possible responses. At the weak end, recognizing democratic deficits at the institutional level and incorporating commitments to anti-paternalism could encourage donors and foundations voluntarily to expand the kinds of nonbinding community “consultation” that they sometimes currently engage in. They could also choose to channel gifts through (rather than outside) democratic governments where those exist; where democratic institutions are absent, they could expand unconditioned gifts to civil society groups and individuals – more general operating support rather than targeting grant making. These are ways of incorporating a commitment to enfranchising affected interests as a matter of ethical theory – that is, of converting it into moral advice for donors.
As a matter of political theory, there are also ways that we might try to challenge the presumption that donors are entitled full discretion in controlling and assessing their spending. There are a range of possible mechanisms by which we could attempt to accomplish this, in ways that do not rely on distributing all control to governmental actors: for example, we could adjust tax incentives for philanthropic donations to favor unconditioned giving. We could insist upon community representation on the governance boards of foundations. We could demand greater transparency in grant making so that both grantees and beneficiaries have the opportunity to examine the records of past and current foundation activities. The challenge of implementation here is to increase people’s control over the decisions that affect them, in ways that do not rely on exaggerated estimations of the democratic responsiveness of either philanthropists or actually existing states.
As the trust case we sketch above suggests, paternalism can occur even in the presence of consensual transactions that make the paternalized better off. Paternalism can be morally objectionable even under such conditions. But consent does make some difference, politically; the same respect for agents that moves us against paternalism should make us hesitate to block genuinely voluntary transactions, since to do so would be to prevent agents from pursuing what they take to be the best options available to them. In the Botswana case, for example, it would seem outrageous for the US government to block the Gates Foundation’s philanthropy, given that the terms of the aid were in this case accepted by democratically elected and accountable officials in Botswana. In addition to bearing its share of responsibility for international distributive injustice, the United States would then be responsible for the added injustice of preventing Batswana officials from accessing remedial options that would otherwise be available to them.
However, there can nevertheless be reasons to adjust voluntarily (and, where possible, politically regulate) the terms of voluntary transactions with a view to equalizing bargaining power. The case for this does not require arguing that the consent of putatively paternalized agents (or representatives of paternalized agents) is not genuine. We can think that people really are choosing the best option available to them, but that the option set from which they are choosing is itself unfair. This in turn introduces unfairness into an outcome that is nevertheless chosen (and chosen in a way that makes a real moral difference). The appropriate response is not to block the people paternalized from choosing what they wish, but to try to improve their bargaining position. This might be attempted in a range of ways: most weakly, by making ethical (or merely instrumental) appeals to philanthropists; more strongly, by incentivizing unconditional giving (unconditional cash transfers, for example, to the unjustly disadvantaged and their representatives) and by subjecting to public criticism giving that exploits the unfair inequalities in bargaining position that currently obtain internationally.
Philanthropy, especially big philanthropy as practiced by large foundations that seek to ameliorate inequality or respond to injustice, is characterized by – perhaps defined by – a situation of unequal power. One clear upshot of our arguments here is that philanthropists deserve scrutiny, not just gratitude, in exercising their power. Such scrutiny is warranted not merely for the reason that we should wish for philanthropists to be effective in ameliorating inequality or responding to injustice, and that scrutiny may contribute to effective philanthropic projects. It is warranted because we should recognize and illuminate the paternalism that is often at the core of big philanthropy.
Beyond scrutiny, however, we have argued more demandingly that the All-Affected Principle has purchase in the extra-governmental domain of philanthropy. This is so for instrumental and intrinsic reasons. Incorporating the voices of affected grantees and beneficiaries in philanthropic decision making is instrumentally valuable in bringing about more effective philanthropy. And incorporating the voices of grantees and beneficiaries in philanthropic decision making is intrinsically valuable in mitigating a situation of deeply unequal power and responding to potentially morally objectionable forms of paternalism at the heart of philanthropic relationships. The case of philanthropy thereby reveals important dimensions of the scope and grounds of the AAP.
“Why do I, as the black woman, have to fix that? …
I want white men to make the noise.”
According to the All-Affected Principle (AAP), all and only those individuals who are significantly affected by a decision should have a say in, or influence over, that decision.2 This principle is typically applied to questions about the boundaries of political communities and the scope of government institutions (Warren, this volume). Some scholars, however, have argued that it should be applied more broadly, for example to philanthropic foundations (Saunders-Hastings and Reich, this volume) and workplaces (Gould, this volume).3 Fung characterizes this extension as a shift from “governments” to “governance.” “We should,” he argues, “interpret the [all-affected] principle as applying not only to legislatures but also to administrative agencies, private corporations, civic organizations, and governments of other societies.”4
In this chapter I take up this invitation by considering whether and how the AAP ought to be extended to large-scale, Western-based INGOs such as Oxfam, Care, and Doctors Without Borders. These INGOs undertake humanitarian, development, and/or advocacy work across borders, either directly or by funding other organizations. I focus on the AAP’s relevance not to INGOs’ internal governance structures, but rather to their “external”5 relationships with their intended beneficiaries,6 donors, local community members, host governments, domestic NGOs and civic organizations in the countries where they work, and people affected by their advocacy campaigns (see Gould, this volume).
While they are sometimes celebrated as saints or heroes, these INGOs are also frequently criticized for being, in effect, undemocratic. As one prominent report based on thousands of interviews with aid recipients and community members in dozens of countries concluded,
The nuances are different, but the message is the same: humanitarian action is a top-down, externally driven, and relatively rigid process that allows little space for local participation beyond formalistic consultation. Much of what happens escapes local scrutiny and control. The system is viewed as inflexible, arrogant, and culturally insensitive … Never far from the surface are perceptions that the aid system does not deliver on expectations and is “corrupted” by the long chain of intermediaries between distant capitals and would-be beneficiaries.7
What leverage does the AAP offer for recognizing and grappling with these sorts of issues? Would greater compliance with the AAP be a good way to address them? In response to these questions, I argue that efforts to extend the AAP to INGOs (and other non-state actors that engage in governance) almost always analogize them to governments. This analogy deploys what I call the AAP’s “inclusive face”: it tells us that like conventional governments, INGOs should include those they significantly affect in their decision making. For example, Oxfam should include those significantly affected by its advocacy campaigns in its decisions about those campaigns. Yet because inclusion is a rather conservative political project, the AAP’s inclusive face offers only a limited basis for critique.
There is, however, another way to extend the AAP to INGOs that has gone virtually unacknowledged: rather than analogize INGOs to governments, we can analogize them to unaffected individuals (or any other unaffected entity). This analogy deploys what I call the AAP’s “exclusive face.” It tells us that INGOs such as Oxfam should not have a say in or influence over decisions that do not significantly affect them; they should be excluded.8 The AAP’s exclusive face offers a more radical basis for critique of INGOs than its inclusive face.
However, even the AAP’s exclusive face has serious limitations in the context of INGOs. These limitations are due to INGOs’ social position as elites seeking to address social problems that they have good reasons to help address, but that primarily affect others. INGOs in this position run up against what I call the involvement/influence dilemma: they can be involved in addressing social problems or they can avoid undue influence, but it is difficult for them to do both simultaneously.9 I therefore turn to three organizations that directly and intentionally address the question of how elites should help address social problems that primarily affect others: SURJ, Thousand Currents, and the Solidaire Network. These organizations do not fully reject the AAP, but they reinterpret and recast it in ways that are relevant to, and generative for, other entities in a similar situation, such as Western-based humanitarian, development, and advocacy INGOs.
Before turning to the argument, I briefly sketch how I am interpreting the AAP for the purposes of this chapter. I interpret “affected” to mean having one’s basic interests significantly affected. I also conceive of affectedness as proportional: the more one’s basic interests are affected, the more influence one should have. While still quite vague, these specifications help to prevent the AAP from having highly regressive and inegalitarian implications, such as wealthy US corporations having a say in Mexican environmental policy because it will slightly reduce their profits.
As noted above, the AAP is typically taken to apply to formal decisions. However, if the point of the AAP is to give people meaningful influence over the forces shaping their lives, limiting its scope to formal decisions – like limiting its scope to conventional governments – is too narrow.10 In response to this worry, Hayward recommends a “focus on, not decisions, but [structural] power relations” (this volume). While Hayward acknowledges that her conception of the AAP is so broad that it might be difficult to implement, some expansion of the AAP beyond formal decision making is necessary for the principle to have force or relevance in the context of INGOs. I thus adopt a wide conception of decision making that extends beyond discrete decisions. (I discuss what this might look like in more detail below.) To summarize, I conceive of the AAP as a claim that people should have influence over decisions (and other processes and practices) that significantly affect their basic interests, to a degree that is roughly proportional to how much their basic interests are affected.
The AAP’s Inclusive Face and the Government Analogy
The AAP is, most obviously, a principle of inclusion; Dahl calls it “very likely the best principle of inclusion you will find” (see the introduction to this volume). The AAP’s “inclusive face” focuses on bringing individuals into decision-making processes that affect them; it offers remedies for members of disenfranchised groups (e.g. women and African Americans in the US context), colonial subjects, and individuals harmed by the activities of foreign governments.
Scholars who extend the AAP to non-state actors have focused almost exclusively on the AAP’s inclusive face. This is because they analogize INGOs to governments. The logic of this government analogy proceeds as follows: the AAP applies to conventional governments. Some non-state actors function like conventional governments in that they engage in governance. Humanitarian INGOs, for example, are sometimes said to engage in “humanitarian governance.”11 Just as individuals should have a say in decisions made by conventional governments that significantly affect them, they should also have a say in governance decisions by non-state actors that significantly affect them.
While they do not necessarily use the vocabulary of the AAP, many INGOs have tried to comply with its inclusive face. They have done this by, for example, hiring and promoting employees from among the populations with which they work, consulting more closely with (reasonably) legitimate political leaders of those populations, and holding “listening sessions” with members of especially vulnerable social groups, such as disabled or lower-caste people. They have instituted complaints mechanisms and local ombudspersons, and undertaken surveys to solicit feedback. While some of these efforts have had little practical effect – e.g. complaints mechanisms sometimes go unused because they require literacy in places where literacy rates are low – they have, on the whole, gone some ways toward addressing the criticisms of INGOs cited at the outset of this chapter. But beyond whether it suggests incremental steps in the right direction, does the government analogy leading to the AAP’s inclusive face offer a compelling and persuasive vision for how INGOs might act more consistently with democratic norms?
In one sense, the answer to this question is clearly yes. For at least three decades, scholars, aid practitioners, and others have argued that INGOs are not merely collections of well-intended, virtuous individuals engaged in acts of charity. They are, instead, political actors that engage in governance activities.12 Analogizing INGOs to governments brings this argument to life. It suggests that INGOs should be analyzed as political actors and held to democratic norms such as transparency and accountability.
In the context of the AAP, however, analogizing INGOs to governments has at least two drawbacks. First, the idea that INGOs should govern more inclusively normalizes governance by INGOs. Focusing on how INGOs govern (i.e. more versus less inclusively), shifts attention away from whether they should be engaged in governance in the first place and how to reduce their governance role. This is troubling because compared to conventional governments, INGOs are severely limited with regard to both their democratic legitimacy and their ability to provide services at large scales for extended periods.13 Even if INGOs are the only entities able and willing to serve a governance function in a particular place at a particular time, a focus on making their governance activities more inclusive can further entrench their governance role and undermine relationships of responsiveness and accountability between populations and their conventional governments.14
Second, as noted above, the government analogy deploys the AAP’s inclusive face, and inclusion – while sometimes crucial15 – is in many respects a rather limited and conservative political project.16 As one commentator wrote, echoing more academic critics of inclusion:
[I]nclusivity at its heart never aims to shift the status quo. Bringing underrepresented voices into a previously constructed process that was never designed by or for them simply does not work. The power dynamics set up by the premise of inclusion don’t welcome new ideas.17
While this statement is perhaps overly sweeping, it captures the ways in which inclusion as a political project frequently leaves too much unquestioned and unchanged.
The AAP’s Exclusive Face and the Individual Analogy
Given the limitations of the AAP as a principle of inclusion, it is noteworthy that the AAP is also a principle of exclusion: it tells us not only that individuals who are significantly affected by a decision should have a say in that decision, but also that those who are not significantly affected should not have a say. Both intrinsic and instrumental justifications for including the affected in decision making are undermined if the unaffected are also included.18 This exclusive face of the AAP focuses on excluding unaffected individuals (and other entities) from decision-making processes that don’t affect them; it rejects unwanted meddling by outsiders, e.g. unwanted “humanitarian” military intervention.19
While analogizing INGOs to governments leads to the AAP’s inclusive face, analogizing INGOs to unaffected individuals (or simply recognizing that they are themselves not relevantly affected) leads to its exclusive face; just as individuals should not have influence over governments’ decisions if they are not affected by those decisions, non-state actors such as INGOs should not have influence over governments’ decisions if they are not affected by those decisions. (An exception is if INGOs are acting as legitimate representatives of those who are significantly affected.) This individual analogy flips the government analogy on its head. While the government analogy demands that Oxfam include people who are affected by its decisions, the individual analogy demands that Oxfam be excluded from decisions that don’t affect Oxfam.
To summarize the argument so far: the government analogy centers INGOs’ governance role and says that those who are significantly affected by their decisions should be included in those decisions. It invokes the AAP’s inclusive face, articulating a complaint about exclusion, the remedy for which is inclusion. In contrast, the individual analogy centers governance by conventional governments. It says that if INGOs are not significantly affected by those governments’ decisions, it should not have a say in those decisions. Invoking the AAP’s exclusive face, it articulates a complaint about meddling and interference, the remedy for which is exclusion. While INGOs more frequently acknowledge and seek to demonstrate their compliance with the AAP’s inclusive face, they also sometimes acknowledge and seek to demonstrate their compliance with its exclusive face. For example, human rights and humanitarian INGOs sometimes describe themselves as (1) witnesses engaged in témoignage who simply report what they see, (2) technical experts, (3) “microphones” that “amplify” the voices of those who are significantly affected by a given issue, and/or (4) connectors that help other actors find and network with each other. These formulations of INGOs’ role suggest that they exercise limited independent power and influence.
There are, however, limits on how much INGOs can comply with the exclusive face of the AAP, even when they construe their role in these ways. That is, there are limits on how much they can limit their own influence. This is because it is difficult for powerful elites be involved without also having influence. Like King Midas they change what they touch, in ways that sometimes undermine their intentions. For example, in part to reduce their own influence, INGOs frequently fund local organizations. But in so doing, they empower some organizations but not others, and create incentives for local organizations to anticipate and conform to INGOs’ own expectations and preferences.20 Likewise, INGOs that try to “amplify” the voices of others choose which voices to amplify. One striking example of this phenomenon is cash transfer programs. Cash transfer INGOs such as GiveDirectly are explicitly committed to the value of non-paternalism and minimizing their own influence. However, even cash transfer programs can have unintended negative effects; there is some (contested) evidence that people who do not receive cash transfers, but who live near people who do, experience reduced life satisfaction, asset holdings, and consumption.21 GiveDirectly is also involved in policy discussions with governments about cash transfers, efforts to test universal basic income programs, etc. There is not necessarily anything wrong with this – but it does mean that GiveDirectly has influence.22 The broader point is that virtually all involvement by the powerful entails influence, with the result that it is difficult for INGOs to be involved without violating the AAP’s exclusive face.
If this is right – if INGOs cannot be involved without also exerting influence – then the AAP’s exclusive face has much more radical implications than its inclusive face. The AAP’s exclusive face suggests that in some circumstances INGOs should simply not exist, at least not in anything like their current form, because they can’t avoid exerting influence even when they are not significantly affected. INGOs addressing important issues should instead be replaced by local organizations run by people who are significantly affected by those issues.23
While its implications are radical, the exclusive face of the AAP also does not offer adequate guidance to INGOs. As this chapter’s epigraph implies, there are sometimes good reasons for privileged entities to help address social issues that don’t significantly affect them. For example, INGOs and their donors (which can be individuals, governments, corporations, foundations, etc.) sometimes cause, contribute to, benefit from, and/or exacerbate the large-scale problems that INGOs seek to address.24 They also sometimes have an especially strong or specialized capacity to address these issues. These can be good reasons for INGOs and/or their donors to be involved in addressing them, by contributing resources, time, expertise, or labor, or taking on some of the risk involved in doing so.
If this is right, then the implication of the AAP’s exclusive face – that unaffected INGOs should not have any influence – is not only too simple, it might let would-be donors off the hook from helping to address problems they helped to create. INGOs therefore face what I call the involvement/influence dilemma: a choice between a) being involved, and thereby exerting undemocratic influence, or b) abstaining from any influence, but as a result not doing what they (or their donors) should to address large-scale problems.
The foregoing two sections suggest two conclusions. First, anyone seeking to extend the AAP to INGOs via the government analogy should explain why the government analogy is more appropriate than the individual analogy. That is, why, from a democratic perspective, is making INGOs more inclusive better than excluding them? Second, even if the exclusive face of the AAP offers more critical leverage than its inclusive face, it does not offer sufficient guidance for navigating the involvement/influence dilemma. In the next section I turn to some organizations that have grappled with this dilemma and offer some helpful guidance in how to do so. First, though, I mention two additional aspects of the AAP that exacerbate the involvement/influence dilemma and are also problematic in their own right.
First, the AAP is entirely forward-looking. It asks, at t1, who will be affected at t3 by a decision at t2. This approach excludes, or at least downplays, the relevance of the past for who should have what kind of influence in the present. This is objectionable insofar as histories of exclusion matter for how influence should be allocated in the present and the future. Not only do these histories remind us of patterns of exclusion and domination that have been perpetuated over time, but for political reconciliation to be achieved, compensatory or rectification-based allocation of influence might sometimes be necessary.25 It is beyond the scope of this chapter to show that it is necessary; my point is just that the AAP leaves no space for incorporating considerations of past exclusion or injustice into determinations of how to allocate influence in the present or future.
Second, the AAP is dyadic. Especially when “decision” is interpreted more narrowly, the AAP conjures a series of dyadic linkages between discrete individuals and a given decision. Those individuals should each have a say in the decision if they will be affected by it; they should not have a say if they will not be affected. The lines of connection run between each individual and the decision, like spokes of a wheel or arms of a starfish; they do not run among individuals, understood as individuals or as members of social groups. The AAP thus downplays ongoing relationships among actors, including structural relationships of domination and oppression. Rather than seeing decisions themselves as effects that emerge out of ongoing power relations, the AAP focuses on the “downstream” question of who should have a say in those decisions once they are being made. (This problem is less acute when we adopt a “wide” conception of decision making, but as Hayward notes in this volume, widening the AAP too much can make it difficult to apply.)
I have argued that the involvement/influence dilemma, future orientation, and emphasis on dyads are all serious limitations of the AAP. However, these limitations do not – to my mind at least – nullify the democratic intuition at the heart of the AAP: the idea that everyone should have a say in matters that affect their basic interests. Rather, these limitations of the AAP suggest the need to think more about how it might be enacted in ways that are responsive to the complexities of influence and involvement under conditions of extreme power inequalities, historic injustice, and ongoing oppressive relationships.
Social Justice Organizations and INGOs as Outsider Elites
To take up this task, I turn to three social justice organizations that explicitly thematize the role of powerful elites in addressing social problems: Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ), a “national network of groups and organizations organizing white people for racial justice”;26 Thousand Currents, an NGO that “funds grassroots groups led by women, youth, and Indigenous Peoples in the Global South”;27 and, Solidaire, a “community of individual donors and foundation allies … [that] work together to address the deep systemic causes of injustice and inequality [by increasing] resources for those who are fighting for a world where everyone can live with dignity.”28 All three organizations are based in the United States and participate in or fund activist social movements in the United States and elsewhere.
These organizations differ from each other and from the INGOs that are my main subject here. They vary in their purposes, structures, and funding sources; they operate at different scales and in different political and social contexts. But despite these differences, they wrestle explicitly with a question that, I have argued, INGOs also confront: How might the AAP’s central democratic intuition be recast in a way that is sensitive to the difficulties that arise when relatively privileged elites seek to address social problems that primarily affect others?
SURJ, Solidaire, and Thousand Currents’ responses to this question are relevant to INGOs not as models to be rigidly replicated, but rather as exemplars that INGOs might learn from and build on creatively. In particular, these organizations suggest how the AAP might be revised in ways that move (1) from the involvement/influence dilemma to accountability for influence, and (2) from forward-looking and dyadic to temporally expansive and relational. The reconstruction that I offer here most closely tracks arguments made by SURJ, but elements of it run through the statements and practices of Solidaire and Thousand Currents as well.
From the Involvement/Influence Dilemma to Accountability for Influence
Social justice organizations dissolve the involvement/influence dilemma for themselves in a few different ways. First, they do not insist that being affected by an injustice is a necessary precondition for being involved in addressing it. Instead, they acknowledge or remain open to other possible grounds and motivations for involvement, including having caused or benefitted from the injustice, or having the capacity to help address it (though they tend not to mention these grounds or motivations specifically).
Second, they recognize that elite involvement entails influence. Rather than denying this influence or trying to eradicate it completely, they seek to moderate and temper elites’ involvement in ways that make their influence more democratic, solidaristic, and accountable. One way they do this is by guiding privileged activists toward experiences and ways of seeing that help them to recognize their shared interests with members of oppressed groups, without resorting to false equivalencies. For example, SURJ seeks to “organize out of mutual interest.”29 It argues that “the system of white supremacy harms all of us – including white people, though in very different ways than people of color.” “We [white people] must find our stake – our mutual interest – in joining these fights.” One way white people can do this is proleptically, by taking action; as SURJ notes, “[i]t is important to make sure new people have a chance to become leaders … Action is how we create commitment to our work!” Solidaire likewise argues that “Only massive social movements, woven together in solidarity, are mighty enough to save the future for us all.”30
A second way that these social justice organizations seek to shape and constrain elite involvement is by making elites accountable to activists from oppressed groups who are themselves accountable to other members of those groups. Thus, SURJ argues that in taking action to end white supremacy, white people should be “in relationship with and take direction from people of color … who are doing racial justice work in the movement and who are accountable to a group of people.” However, this form of accountability-to-the-accountable “doesn’t mean waiting by the phone for a person of color to tell us exactly what to do. It means developing plans to organize in the white community and seeking feedback. Sometimes people of color are too busy organizing in their own communities to provide us feedback. We should act in those cases and not wait for permission.” For SURJ, then, accountability does not mean acting mechanistically as a tool or extension of organizations led by people of color. It means exercising creativity, agency, and discretion, but taking political responsibility for doing so. White people should “[t]ake risks, make mistakes, learn, and keep going.”31 In this way, SURJ avoids both horns of the influence/involvement dilemma: it neither a) eschews all involvement in order to avoid having influence, nor b) gets involved in ways that have excessive or unwarranted influence. Instead, SURJ remains true to the democratic spirit of the AAP by requiring that elites’ influence be constrained by and responsive to those whose basic interests are most significantly affected.
Thousand Currents takes a similar approach. It holds that “[t]he people who can solve [social problems] best are the people whose lives are most affected by them.”32 It therefore structures its grant-giving activities in ways that limit its own influence and that of its donors. Thousand Currents gives long-term “grants with no strings or conditions attached. That means we don’t dictate what activities and strategies [grantees] use, freeing them up to listen more closely to the community. If our partners want to pay the light bill, or start a new program, it’s up to them.”33 At the same time, it acknowledges and takes responsibility for its influence by asking its grantees to evaluate it.34 In this way, Thousand Currents, too, is accountable to organizations that are comprised of, and accountable to, those most affected by the issues it addresses. Likewise, Solidaire states that it “look[s] forward to bringing more of our practices in line with our value of standing with the leadership of those most affected by the issues of our time.”35 It does this by, among other things, incorporating past grantees into decision-making processes to identify new grantees.
What might accountability to the accountable look like in the context of humanitarian, development, and advocacy INGOs?36 We can begin with the idea, discussed above, of shared interests as a basis for action. While appeals to pity or sympathy are more common, humanitarian and development INGOs have sometimes appealed to donors’ self-interest in, for example, avoiding Ebola, terrorism, or an influx of refugees. Yet because they cast the very people whom INGOs seek to assist as threats to donors’ self-interest, these sorts of appeals don’t invoke shared interests. The example of social justice organizations suggests that the difference between self-interest and shared interests is crucial, and that a deeper analysis of the issues that INGOs address might bring the shared interests of INGOs, donors, and the people whom INGOs seek to assist more clearly into view. Because of the importance of avoiding false equivalences, it is vital that this conception of shared interests centers on shared aims shaped by those most affected, rather than shared experiences.37
Alongside efforts to recognize and forge a sense of shared interests, there is also the matter of INGOs and their donors taking political responsibility for their influence. The INGO GiveDirectly, discussed above, tells potential donors that by donating to GiveDirectly they “send money directly to people living in extreme poverty.”38 But of course the donations go to GiveDirectly, which in turn decides how to allocate and otherwise use the money it receives. GiveDirectly’s commitment to anti-paternalism is salutary. But by denying that it exerts independent influence, it reduces its accountability for that influence. In contrast, SURJ, Thousand Currents, and Solidaire acknowledge and take responsibility for their influence.
Beyond acknowledging influence, there is also accountability for that influence. The type of accountability that SURJ and the other social justice organizations model – accountability to the accountable – is fairly indirect, and so cannot replace accountability directly to the people INGOs seek to assist. It is also informal, and so cannot entirely replace more institutionalized and formalized accountability structures within and among INGOs, e.g. “safeguarding” measures to avoid hiring aid workers with a history of sexual abuse. Accountability to the accountable might also be difficult to implement in situations where there are no mobilized groups comprised of and accountable to those most significantly affected, or where it is difficult for INGOs to determine which of these groups is accountable to people affected by INGOs’ actions.39 That said, broader aspects of the accountability-to-the-accountable approach are relevant to INGOs. When they can, INGOs should create accountability relationships not only with those they most significantly affect, but also mobilized legitimate representatives of those they most significantly affect. Even if they are informal, such relationships can function as an effective complement to more formalized and direct accountability mechanisms. For example, accountability to the accountable could help INGOs ensure that their formal safeguarding procedures don’t have the unintended negative effect of excluding local organizations.40
From Forward-Looking and Dyadic to Temporally Expansive and Relational
I argued above that the AAP is forward-looking: it allocates influence over a decision to those who will be most significantly affected by that decision in the future. I also argued above that the AAP is dyadic: it emphasizes relationships between a given individual and the decision(s) that affect that individual, not relationships among those who are affected.
The three social justice organizations that I have been discussing tamp down these aspects of the AAP. They agree that, roughly speaking, the most affected should have the most say. But rather than give the most say in a decision only to those who will be most affected by that decision, they support and follow the lead of mobilized groups comprised of and accountable to those who are and have been most affected by the oppressive social structures that give rise to or exacerbate the problems that they are seeking to address. In other words, because their approach is more attentive to ongoing social structures rather than one-off decisions or events, their sense of how power should be allocated is less focused on future effects. For example, Thousand Currents’ Buen Vivir fund aims “to shift the economy by transferring control of capital to communities most affected by racial, economic, and environmental injustices”41 (my emphasis). By allocating influence with an eye toward ongoing relationships and structures of oppression and domination, rather than who will be most affected in the future by a specific decision, social justice organizations take the idea of giving a say to those who are most affected in a direction that is more temporally expansive and relational/structural than does the AAP as it is usually conceived (and is more aligned with Hayward’s account [see Hayward, this volume]).
In the context of INGOs, this formulation suggests that rather than consulting with those who are likely to be affected by any given decision they take, INGOs should seek to cede power in a more ongoing way to oppressed and disenfranchised groups. While this sometimes won’t be possible, it suggests a somewhat different normative guidepost than what is offered by the AAP in its more conventional forward-looking and dyadic instantiations. Conversely, it suggests that a main reason to exclude INGOs from decision making is not only that they are unaffected by particular decisions, but also that they and their donors sit atop social hierarchies.
Conclusion
The idea at the heart of the AAP – that everyone should have a say in decisions that significantly affect them, and not interfere excessively in decisions that don’t – is a powerful democratic ideal. I have argued that what it actually implies, in the context of INGOs, depends on whether it is extended to them via the government analogy, which deploys the AAP’s inclusive face, or the individual analogy, which deploys its exclusive face. The latter offers a more radical basis for critique than the former. But because INGOs are elites seeking to address social problems that primarily affect others, even the AAP’s exclusive face does not provide them with adequate critical tools or normative guidance. In particular, it doesn’t acknowledge or offer tools for navigating the involvement/influence dilemma, it is too forward-looking, and it is too dyadic.
Turning to three social justice organizations that explicitly thematize the involvement/influence dilemma – SURJ, Solidaire, and Thousand Currents – I argued that they recast the AAP in ways that are generative for INGOs. In particular, they suggest the importance of accountability for influence to organizations that are themselves accountable to, and comprised of, people who are significantly affected by the issues that INGOs address. This chapter has only scratched the surface of what humanitarian, development, and advocacy INGOs might learn from social justice organizations such as SURJ, Thousand Currents, and Solidaire. While there are significant differences between and among them, both types of entities face the question of how elites should address social issues that primarily affect others. Future work might look in much more detail at both types of organizations to understand what the former might learn from the latter, and what the insights and experiences of both can tell us about the AAP.
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