American Foundations and the Made-in-BC ENGO Solution: Domesticity, Governmentality, and Democracy in the Great Bear Rainforest.

Enviromental campaigns to save the Great Bear Rainforest (GBR), 8 million hectares (21 million acres) of coastal temperate rainforest in British Columbia, have led the Government of BC to establish a series of protected areas and use conservation financing to support ecosystem-based land-use planning for the remaining territory. American charitable foundations played a central role by funding the campaigns of several environmental nonprofit organizations (ENGOs) and helping to raise $60 million for the conservation financing fund. This paper argues that analyses of the GBR campaigns and the resulting policy changes need to be informed by a more sophisticated understanding of the role that American foundations played; it also argues that this case study opens important questions about the politics of domesticity, governmentality, and democracy in contemporary times. By studying the relationships between three American foundations that funded campaigns and six ENGOs that received this funding, I develop a more detailed picture of the influence that foundations and their capital investments played in the development of ENGO campaign strategies and subsequent Government policies. First, this case challenges claims that American foundations operate only indirectly, though domestic ENGOs, and questions the pervasive assumption of political sovereignty over domestic policy. I argue that this shift to non-domesticity highlights the connection between foundation philanthropy as a form of capital accumulation and distribution and the increasing neoliberalization of a globalizing economy. Second, I note that American foundation funding had a direct influence on the constitution of the relevant BC policy network: the prioritization of ENGO actors within it and the exclusion of ENGO actors from it. I argue that it is helpful to consider foundations as another source of policy decisions, an authority that develops its own policy priorities and constitutes policy networks out of (potential) grantees. Third, I argue that ENGOs encountered significant pressure to shape themselves according to the business-oriented operations models used by foundations in order to secure the resources necessary to continue as part of both the foundation and BC government policy networks. I suggest that this influence can be usefully understood as a form of governmentality: techniques for constituting subjectivies according to established or desired norms. Throughout these three lines of investigation, the relationship between foundations and the neoliberalization of environmental campaigns continually reappears and bears direct influence on the models of democracy that are promoted through these activities. The changing spaces, forms, and practices of politics that neoliberatization brings have implications for traditional understandings of democracy, which have been linked in historically-contingent ways to formal structures and processes defined by and confined within territorial state governments and to more informal practices that are invoked through claims about local, grassroots, and community-based self-government. While the policy decisions between 2001 and 2007 were widely acclaimed as a "made-in-BC" solution, the questions of authority, political space, subjectivity and democracy raised here suggest that this case is not nearly so clear. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]