Climate change and its politicization by and within Italian organized philanthropy

Abstract

The international research community has yet to thoroughly examine the role of organized philanthropy in climate transition policymaking, while no studies have investigated the positioning of Italian climate philanthropy. I address this knowledge gap by analysing the main climate-related networks that include Italian foundations and their justificatory grammars, using the conceptual pairing depoliticization/politicization as a heuristic key. My research hypothesis is that the involvement of philanthropic networks in climate policymaking contributes to shifting political responsibility from governments to non-political actors, and that this entails both a discursive depoliticization of public action and a governmental and social politicization in the practices of non-political actors. Drawing on a large corpus of official documents and a set of semi-structured interviews, I explore this hypothesis at two levels: the form and role assumed by Italian climate networks (social and governmental politicization) and the values and ideas they convey in the context of national and international climate governance (discursive depoliticization). My analysis appears to confirm the initial hypothesis: these networks function as political entre- preneurs and field-builders and as such they foster the depoliticization of public action at the discursive level, similarly to international philanthropy. Furthermore, at least at the network level, Italian philanthropy is internally in agreement on how to tackle climate change