Ideally, philanthropies ought to have disrupted the “traditional” international development players. The entrepreneurial backgrounds of most philanthropists should have meant greater focus on private sector growth and a much higher appetite for risk taking on project design. Yet the international development “field” completely tamed these impulses,

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Unfortunately, being located in the field of international development also means that philanthropies suffer from the same pathologies as “traditional” development outfits — such as ontological solipsism, cynical paternalism, small ambitions, cyclical faddism, obsessive bean counting as an end in itself, and being used by their host governments to

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