Organizational Homophily in International Grantmaking: US-Based Foundations and their Grantees in China

Abstract

Extant research on US foundations has found a generally conservative tendency towards support for professionalized non-governmental organizations (NGOs) rather than for potentially more radical grassroots organizations. Yet, the scholarly literature has had little to say about the decisions that grantmakers make when looking for grantees outside the USA. This article analyses data on over 2500 grants made to China between 2002 and 2009 to show that despite funders' rhetorical emphasis on NGOs and civil society organizations, in reality, the vast majority of funding has gone to government-controlled organizations, including academic institutions, government agencies, and government-organized NGOs. To help explain this gap between funder rhetoric and actual grantee choices, I draw on participant observation data and in-depth interviews with US-based donors and grassroots NGOs and argue that we can best understand the dynamics at work as a kind of ‘organizational homophily’, a process in which the personal preferences of large, elite-led US funders and institutional pressures from both China and the USA converge to systematically disadvantage grassroots NGOs.