Sponsoring Nature

Saving the world's flora and fauna, especially high-profile examples such as chimpanzees, whales and the tropical rain forests, is big business. Individuals and companies channel their resources to the preservation of nature through various ways, one of which is the funding of environmental non-governmental organisations (ENGOs) and community-based organisations (CBOs). This book is the first to comprehensively address this issue and focuses on a dominant theme in environmental philanthropy, i.e. the links between ENGOs and CBOs and their sponsors, especially the private sector. It has been argued that donor support is based on recipient's perceived expertise and needs, with no favouritism of flagship environmental organisations as recipients of donor funds. A counterview holds that the private sector prefers to fund mainstream ENGOs for environmental research and policy reforms congenial to industrial capital. The authors show that the debate about these arguments, together with the empirical evidence on which they are based, may shed light on certain aspects of the nature of environmental philanthropy. However it fails to account for the geography of philanthropy in nature conservation, i.e. the extent to which environmental philanthropy has been linked to the creation and expansion of national parks, nature reserves and conservancies. The book evaluates practical examples of environmental philanthropy from Africa and elsewhere against philosophical questions about the material and geographical expressions of philanthropy, and the North-South connections among philanthropists and ENGOs and CBOs.

Maano Ramuisindela is Associate Professor in the Department of Environmental and Geographical Science at the University of Cape Town; Hubert H Humphrey Visiting Professor of International Studies at Macalester College (2010); and Mandela Mellon Fellow of W. E. B. Du Bois Institute, Harvard (2011). Marja Spierenburg Is Associate Professor/Senior Lecturer at VU University Amsterdam in the Netherlands, in the Department of Culture, Organisation and Management, and Extraordinary Associate Professor at Stellenbosch University, in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology. Harry Wels is Associate Professor/Senior Lecturer at VU University Amsterdam, in the Athena Institute, Faculty of Earth and Life Sciences.