UC Berkeley

How Foundations’ Field-Building Helped the Reproductive Health Movement Change the International Population and Development Paradigm

by

Perrin Liana Elkind

Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology

University of California, Berkeley

Professor Ann Swidler, Chair

Scholars have demonstrated that foundation grants channel social movements by encouraging professionalization and favoring moderate tactics, but they have overlooked critical mechanisms of foundation influence. Advancing Tim Bartley’s (2007) field-building framework, I identify new mechanisms—including grants and activities other than grantmaking—through which five foundations helped channel the international Reproductive Health movement between 1990 and 2005, shaping its composition, trajectory, and outcomes.

The first of its kind, this study combines an analysis of an original data set including 8,103 grants made by five major philanthropic foundations from 1990-2005, interviews with foundation staff and leadership, and archival data, with an historical narrative of the population field and the Reproductive Health movement. I explain foundations’ roles in the Reproductive Health movement’s successful campaign targeting the 1994 United Nations International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD). There the movement transformed the population field’s frame from Family Planning—reducing fertility through increasing access to contraceptives—to Reproductive Health—meeting women’s broader reproductive health needs and advancing gender equality.

Unlike scholars who focus on movement organizations that receive grants, I analyze the grants themselves, including those to both movement and non-movement actors. Through examining the grants’ purposes and the movement’s trajectory, I find that foundations’ field-building mechanisms included grants for research; communications; capacity-building, technical assistance, and training; networks/conference; and policy work. Grants to non-movement actors indirectly contributed to the movement’s success by supporting the movement’s strategy or shaping its context.

In addition to their material resources, foundations apply unique human and symbolic resources toward field-building. Mechanisms other than grantmaking that foundations used included brokerage, advocacy, and coordination. The foundations’ field-building work helped to certify movement actors and frames and to diffuse frames.

Foundations’ operations and programs were influenced by the historical eras in which the foundations were established and by the founders’ involvement. Staff and board members’ professional and personal networks were also influential, as was the presence of movement actors on staff. Status pressures within the foundation, the philanthropic sector, and the program area further shaped the foundations’ work.

From the 1950s through the 1980s, the Ford and Rockefeller foundations helped establish the population field and the frame that the Reproductive Health movement later challenged at ICPD. Ford, MacArthur, and Rockefeller aided the ICPD campaign, including by intervening to afford the movement critical access to the United Nations. Following ICPD, these three foundations plus Packard and Hewlett helped institutionalize the Reproductive Health frame. Two of the funders actively promoted the frame; three resisted the movement but also inadvertently helped advance its frame.

Major funders of movements are themselves movement actors. Foundations were not the most important actors in the Reproductive Health movement field but their support at critical junctures was instrumental to the movement’s success. Understanding the funder-movement relationship requires close examination of how foundations strategically use their material, human, and symbolic resources to build a movement field.