Transformative Philanthropy in the Anthropocene. Theoretical and Empirical Investigations

慈善基金会在许多民主国家欣欣向荣。在过去的几十年里，他们在数量和财富上都有所增长。此外，其中越来越多的国家采取了变革性议程。这些基金会不仅想要为共同利益提供资金和抗争不满，而且还寻求改变社会结构。为此，他们参与全球问题描述，并从他们的角度具体说明问题，以便他们能够制定和引入解决方案。盎格鲁-撒克逊慈善资本主义甚至问，“富人如何拯救世界”(毕晓普/格林2008)。基金会数量的增长及其活动的扩大，部分源于极少数人之间财富积累的不均衡，以及基金会创始人心态的转变。然而，同样重要的是，关于基金会问题的立法越来越自由，对民间社会的认识也越来越高。这种欣赏的一部分是理解到，仅靠正式的政治不能充分应对重大挑战，即其中的生态转型。在这种背景下，越来越有影响力的世界观察模式人类世提供了几乎理想的脚本，为基金会的野心和行为合法化提供了非规范性的总体。因此，基金会--无论是明确的还是含蓄的--已经开始采用这一模式，并成为生态转型的有影响力和强大的参与者。在这样做的过程中，它们还塑造了人类世的社会空间性和空间关系。然而，作为一种特殊类型的组织，他们面临着这样一个事实，即他们缺乏对(社会)环境的直接进入。此外，他们也不能采取强制性措施，因为他们认为自己是民间社会不可分割的一部分。为了实现目标，他们必须主要依靠礼物的手段。在此背景下，该项目试图从经验上揭示人类世的变革性慈善是什么，慈善基金会如何制定其生态转型计划，从而也就是人类世，以及它们为什么这样做。由于目前还没有既嵌入一般社会理论又对空间问题敏感的基础组织理论，该项目也旨在发展这样的理论。最后，该项目提供了关于人类世变革性慈善现象的经验见解和理论抽象，使人们有可能更多地了解基金会在社会空间结构转型方面的可能性和局限性。

Philanthropic foundations thrive and prosper in many democracies. Within the last decades they have grown in number and wealth. Moreover, an increasing number of them has adopted transformative agendas. These foundations do not only want to finance the common good and fight grievances, but instead seek to transform societal structures. For that purpose, they engage with global problem descriptions and specify the problems from their perspective so that they can develop and introduce solutions. The Anglo-Saxon Philanthrocapitalism even asks, "how the rich can save the world" (Bishop/Green 2008). The numeric growth of foundations and their expansion of activities partly roots in the uneven accumulation of wealth among a very few and in shifting mentalities of the foundations’ founders. Equally essential, however, is the ever more liberal legislation on foundations’ issues and the growing appreciation for the civil society. Part of this appreciation is the understanding that grand challenges, the ecological transformation among them, cannot be adequately tackled by formal politics alone. In this context, the ever-more influential formula of world observation Anthropocene offers, due to its de- and prescriptive totality, almost ideal scripts for the legitimation of the foundations’ ambitions and deeds. Accordingly, foundations have - both explicitly and implicitly - begun to pick up this formula and have become influential and powerful players of the ecological transformation. In doing so, they also shape the social spatiality and the spatial relations of the Anthropocene. As a particular type of organisation, they are, however, confronted with the fact that they lack direct ingress to their (social) environments. In addition, they also cannot take mandatory measures since they consider themselves as an integral part of the civil society. For goal attainment, they must primarily rely on the means of the gift. Against this backdrop, the project seeks to empirically unveil what transformative philanthropy in the Anthropocene is about, how philanthropic foundations shape their programmes for the ecological transformation and, therefore, the Anthropocene, and why they do it the way they do. Since there is currently no organisation theory of the foundation available that is both embedded in a general social theory and sensitive for spatial issues, the project also aims at developing such a theory. In the end, the project offers both empirical insights and theoretical abstractions about the phenomenon of transformative philanthropy in the Anthropocene which opens up the possibility to learn more about the foundations’ possibilities and limitations for the transformation of socio-spatial structures.