Viewpoint: Starting With the State
By Tim Hanstad
To build an equitable and sustainable society, the social sector cannot take the place of the government, as Mark Kramer and Steve Phillips recently observed; “Only government has the capacity to address social and environmental problems on a national scale. Philanthropy simply cannot compensate for the ongoing failure of our government to meet the needs of its entire population.” Where we have seen major, population-level, and systemic advances in social and economic well-being, governments have been the primary driving force. Whether it’s the billion people who rose out of extreme poverty in recent decades thanks to the Chinese government’s embrace and effective implementation of pragmatic economic reforms or the swell of entrepreneurship and economic growth lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in India (where the Indian government ended excessive central control of the economy, derisively called the “License Raj”), philanthropy has not played the lead role.
Photo courtesy of name_ gravity.
Source: Stanford Social Innovation Review (link opens in a new window)
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