When the money moves, we should watch the politics. Institutional change and money, it turns out, do not (need to) arrive at the same time. Economist, Mariana Mazzucato has long argued that to understand a social innovation ecosystem, you have to understand what each actor brings to it, the public sector included, not as a passive funder but as a market shaper. I kept thinking about that framing during one of the most revealing talks of the conference, because it turns the usual question inside out. If the state is an active player rather than a wallet, then when its money moves, the movement itself is worth reading.
That was the heart of a study presented by Christopher Dougherty of the University of St Andrews, comparing how government funding for charities shifts after elections in Canada and the United Kingdom across two decades. It is always a pleasure to see Canada represented in international rooms, and this was Canadian scholarship at its careful best, patient with the data and alert to what the data was really saying. As an economist trained in Canada, I was proud to be in the room.
The finding that stayed with me is deceptively simple. When a new government comes in, some charities gain funding, some lose it, and the shifts are often larger than any overall change in the public purse would explain. Which raises the question Dougherty put at the centre of the work: to what extent is this actually a budget constraint, and to what extent is it something else? When the size of the pot stays roughly constant but the distribution lurches, it implies that the story is no longer fiscal as it starts to be political.
And then came the comment that was close to a mic drop, from a scholar presenting related work on the relationship between civil society organisations and the state in Poland. Most of the time, they said, when governments claim they have no money, it simply is not true. We hear that there is nothing in the pot, and then we watch money flood into new foundations, programmes, and funds. The money exists. It is just that the organisations working for and with people in need and the collective good are not the ones who get it. As a Canadian, this one hit close to home, and was all the more rattling for how relatable it was.
Both countries make good test cases because both run Westminster-style, multi-party systems where polarisation is multi-polar and shifting. In Canada the fault lines over this period ran largely regional, western alienation and anglo-franco tensions in Quebec. In the UK they braided together region, class, and the long arguments over devolution, Brexit, and Scottish independence. As parties compete, they are expected to use charities both to appease identity-based constituencies and to reach blocs of voters. Funding, in other words, becomes a signal of who a government wants to be seen supporting.
This is where the work speaks directly to a theme that ran through the whole conference: the shrinking space for civil society. If funding flows track political sorting rather than need, then some causes find their room to operate quietly expanding while others watch it contract, as the political weather turns rather than the budget. The value of a study like this is that it lets us see which spaces are shrinking, under which pressures, and which causes have managed to hold or grow their ground.
It is a reminder that the flow of money through civil society is never just fiscal accounting – it is a map of political attention, and learning to read it is part of defending the sector’s ability to do its work and scale up to and replicate in municipal, provincial, federal levels.
Dilek Sayedahmed is an associate professor in social policy at NYU Paris.
