By Finn Ashley, Matthew Collinson, Frankie Coltman, Amelia Thomson, Thea Butler

Each year, philanthropic foundations and humanitarian regimes channel vast quantities of financial capital toward populations navigating the complexities of crisis and endemic poverty. In 2024, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), an international forum tracking and analysing financial data across 100 countries, recorded $212.1 billion in ‘official development assistance’ (OECD, 2025). These systems involve multiple layers of actors, from individual donors and institutional foundations to frontline workers and recipient communities. While the stated aim is to alleviate suffering, anthropological research reveals that the structures through which aid is delivered shape what counts as need and who gets to define it. Drawing on Mauss (1966), the theory of the gift highlights that giving is rarely disinterested and instead creates social contracts that centre on indebtedness between donors and recipients. Such exchanges involve not just wealth but ‘courtesies’ and ‘contracts’ (ibid, p. 6) where economic transaction is only one part of the process. Considering this ‘total social phenomena’ (ibid, p. 76) of giving (its economic, social and ethical dimensions), we argue that centralised power and decision-making at donor and stakeholder levels is ineffective, and that aid initiatives should be community-led, decentralising the power to define need.

We employ this critical perspective by ‘studying up’ (Nader, 1974), reflexively analysing the internal hierarchy of aid systems to understand how decision-making elites shape the conditions they claim to address. Our exhibit visualises this critique through five open shoeboxes stacked as a cross-section of an office block, each representing a layer of the aid system: donors, stakeholders, programme coordinators, frontline workers and recipients. Red ribbons descend from upper floors, showing how financial capital becomes diluted through bureaucratic layers. Blue ribbons ascend from below, representing situated community knowledge that is sidelined as it travels upwards.

The donor level sits at the top of this structure, controlling the flow of capital while remaining removed from the communities it aims to serve. Donors engage with aid primarily through tools of abstraction: impact dashboards, progress reports, and curated narratives of need. Eyre (2021) shows how financial devices shape philanthropic decision-making, so that what counts as a ‘good’ cause is often whatever can be most efficiently measured, a logic he calls ‘expedience.’ Prioritising measurability filters out the situated knowledge held by communities lower in the structure. This pattern intensifies under ‘philanthrocapitalism,’ where for-profit companies exploit charitable organisations as market opportunities, turning suffering into a resource for capital accumulation (Adams, 2014). At this level, funders have the power to define need, far removed from those actually experiencing it.

Secondly, the stakeholder/board level converts donor financing into strategy, shaping the criteria for what makes ‘good’ aid. When dictated by governance and market logics, framing aid as an investment, rather than being given in solidarity, the ‘varied social meanings and values’ (Shutt, 2012, p.1529) surrounding aid become obscured. Thus, as Black (2009) details in relation to microloan platform Kiva, beneficiaries become inclined to lead with ‘narrative intimacy’ (p.276), to reflect ‘ideal visions’ (p.285) of compliant, grateful, ‘worthy’ recipients. Funding priorities are thus shaped by distant, bureaucratic ideas of who/what deserves help.

Next, the programme coordinator translates board priorities into practical action while managing pressures from above and below, converting complex community experiences into simplified reports and data. As Li (2011) argues, expert knowledge makes social situations legible but necessarily simplifies them. Decisions at this level are shaped by what can be measured rather than what is actually needed, reinforcing the mismatch between financial capital and local knowledge that runs throughout the aid system.

Volunteering sits at the operational heart of the aid system while remaining structurally marginalised. As Fechter (2016) argues, aid work constitutes a form of ‘moral labour,’ emotional and ethical work that institutions depend on but rarely acknowledge. Positioned between donors and recipients, volunteers translate funding-driven priorities from above while navigating complex lived realities below. Mittermaier (2014) shows how framing aid as individual compassion can reproduce hierarchies by casting recipients as passive. This floor demonstrates that failures in aid stem not from individual shortcomings but from a system that extracts human care while privileging institutional metrics.

Finally, the community level is where knowledge is produced through lived experience but is rarely recognised as legitimate within the aid system. Communities possess detailed understandings of their conditions, yet this knowledge is translated into simplified narratives that align with donor expectations. As Tuck (2009) argues, this reduces communities to ‘damage,’ flattening complexity into manageable problems. Kenworthy (2018) shows how crowdfunding platforms direct resources towards curated individual stories rather than locally defined priorities. Access to support is also uneven, shaped by existing hierarchies that determine whose claims are recognised (Mostowlansky, 2022). Capital flows in ways that appear effective but remain misaligned with community realities.

By physically rendering this mismatch between capital and situated knowledge, our exhibit highlights that centralised decision-making at donor and stakeholder levels fails to deliver aid effectively. For both humanitarian relief and longer-term development, what counts as a ‘worthy’ cause, and who is decided to be helped, is shaped by the system itself. Without addressing this imbalance, philanthropic financing risks reproducing the very hierarchies it claims to dismantle. Anthropological perspectives point towards community-led initiatives that decentralise power, ensuring resources are distributed according to what is situationally needed rather than what is institutionally manageable.

Bibliography

Adams, V. (2014). ‘Charity, Philanthrocapitalism, and the Affect Economy’, in Markets of   Sorrow, Labors of Faith: New Orleans in the Wake of Katrina. Durham: Duke University Press, pp. 153-175.

Black, S. (2009). ‘Microloans and Micronarratives: Sentiment for a Small World’, Public Culture, 21(2), pp. 269-292.

Eyre, B. (2021). ‘Effective or expedient: Market devices and philanthropic techniques’, Economic Anthropology, 8(2), pp. 234-246.

Fechter, A-M. (2016). ‘Aid work as moral labour’, Critique of Anthropology, 36(3), pp. 228-243.

Kenworthy, N. (2018). ‘Drone Philanthropy? Global Health Crowdfunding and the Anxious Futures of Partnership’, Medicine Anthropology Theory, 5(2), pp. 168-187.

Li, T.M. (2011). ‘Rendering Society Technical: Government through Community and the Ethnographic Turn at the World Bank in Indonesia’, in Mosse, D. (ed.) Adventures in Aidland: The Anthropology of Professionals in International Development. Oxford: Berghahn Books, pp. 57-80.

Mauss, M. (1966). The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies. Translated by Cunnison, I. London: Cohen & West. The Internet Archive. Available at: (Accessed: 21 April 2026).

Mittermaier, A. (2014). ‘Beyond Compassion: Islamic Voluntarism in Egypt’, American Ethnologist, 41(3), pp. 518-531.

Mostowlansky, T. (2022). ‘Exemplary Lovers: Humanity and Hierarchy in Muslim Philanthropy’, Public Anthropologist, 4(1), pp. 1-20.

Nader, L. (1974[1969]). ‘Up the Anthropologist: Perspectives Gained from Studying Up’, in Hymes, D. (ed.) Reinventing Anthropology. New York: Vintage Books, pp. 284-311.

OECD. (2025). International aid falls in 2024 for first time in six years, says OECD. Available at: https://www.oecd.org/en/about/news/press-releases/2025/04/official-development-assistance-2024-figures.html (Accessed: 20 April 2026).

Shutt, C. (2012). ‘A Moral Economy? Social Interpretations of Money in Aidland’, Third World Quarterly, 33(8), pp. 1527-1543.

Tuck, E. (2009). ‘Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities’, Harvard Educational Review, 79(3), pp. 409-427.

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