Who Can Say No

It has been a few weeks since I last published. Not for lack of ideas - if anything, the opposite. I had more than I could use, and couldn’t decide which of them warranted my opinion rather than just my interest. I only noticed later that the question I was stuck on - who decides what is worth saying - was a smaller version of the one I wanted to write about.

Several years ago, during my time as a locally employed staff with USAID, I attended a refresher training in Crystal City, Virginia. Most of it has faded from memory. One concept stuck: inherently governmental functions.

The idea was simple. Governments can delegate a great deal. They rely on contractors, advisors, and local staff. They draw on expertise from well outside the formal chain of authority. But some functions cannot be delegated, because they involve the exercise of governmental judgment and accountability. Those decisions remain the responsibility of the institution itself.

At the time, the concept named something I had already lived. I held delegated authority. I managed relationships, offered technical advice, shaped program decisions, and had the trust of my colleagues. And still there were decisions I could not make - not because I lacked competence or judgment, but because of the position I occupied. Certain authorities belonged to the institution, not to me.

I often think about that training whenever I hear philanthropy talk about shifting power.

Few ideas have gained as much traction in the sector. Foundations promise to shift power to communities. Conferences convene around shared decision-making. Strategy documents call for participation, proximity, and local leadership. Power-shifting has become the sector’s preferred language for describing a more equitable future.

But I wonder if philanthropy faces a version of the dilemma I met at USAID.

We tend to speak about power as though it were a single object, something one actor can hand to another. In practice it is a bundle of authorities: the power to advise, to convene, to allocate resources, to define priorities, and ultimately to decide. Many of these can be shared. Some can be transferred outright. Others stay stubbornly attached to the institution.

A foundation can build participatory processes, elevate community voices, and devolve real parts of decision-making. But it still controls the endowment. It still defines the mission. It still appoints the board. And it still holds the authority to keep funding - or to walk away.

This is the uncomfortable possibility: philanthropy has its own inherently institutional functions - its own inherently funder functions - forms of authority that cannot be fully delegated without changing what a foundation is. If that is right, the question is not simply how to shift power. It is which powers are genuinely transferable, which remain embedded in the institution, and what accountability demands from those who continue to hold them.

Part of what makes this conversation confusing is that participation and power are often treated as the same thing. They are not.

Over the past decade, philanthropy has expanded participation in real ways. Communities are consulted on priorities. Grantees are invited into strategy. Participatory grantmaking has given local actors a direct voice in funding decisions. Advisory councils and co-creation processes have become common. These are meaningful changes, and many have challenged long-standing assumptions about who gets to shape a philanthropic agenda.

But participation and power operate on different levels. Participation lets people contribute to a decision. Power determines who owns it.

A community board can recommend. A panel can select. A coalition can help shape strategy. But if the foundation keeps the authority to reject the recommendation, redefine the priority, or end the funding, then ultimate power has not moved. It has only become harder to see.

This is not an argument against participation. Most foundations should probably go much further in sharing voice and influence than they do. The problem is what we conclude from it - when we treat a fuller table as proof that the table now belongs to everyone seated at it.

The more revealing question is not who participated. It is who can say no. Who can change the rules. Who can decide that a program ends, a strategy turns, or a relationship concludes. Those answers show where power sits more clearly than any governance diagram.

Consider what this looks like in practice.

A foundation decides to share its grantmaking. It convenes a panel of people close to the problem - organizers, researchers, practitioners, and community members who have lived the issue the portfolio is meant to address. The panel is not ceremonial. Its members read the proposals, debate them seriously, and rank them. The foundation has done the work of building this: recruiting carefully, paying people for their time, and structuring the deliberation so the loudest voice does not simply win. By any reasonable standard, this is participation done well.

The panel makes its selections. And then the recommendations go up - to a program officer, to a director, to a board that approves the docket.

Most of the time, nothing dramatic happens there. The recommendations are accepted. The grants go out. From the outside, it looks like power that has genuinely changed hands.

But notice what remains. The board still had to approve - which means the board could have declined. The foundation set the issue the panel was convened to address, decided how much money was in the room, and defined who counted as close enough to the problem to be invited. The panel exercised real judgment inside a frame it did not set and could not change. Its authority was delegated, and what is delegated can be withdrawn.

This is not a story about a foundation that betrayed its process. It is a story about a foundation that ran the process faithfully - and still never let go of the authority that made the process a gift rather than a transfer. The power to say no did not have to be used. It only had to exist. Held in reserve, unexercised, it was still the truest description of where authority sat.

That is what makes these functions inherently funder functions. Not that foundations refuse to share them, but that sharing them fully would mean ceasing to be the institution doing the sharing.

But identifying retained authority is only half the question. The harder issue is what legitimizes it.

It would be easy to take this as reassurance - some power is simply institutional, so there is only so much any funder can do. That reading gets the analogy exactly backward.

Inherently governmental functions are non-delegable for a reason. Government exercises them under accountability to a public: elections, courts, legislatures, the machinery through which those affected by a decision can contest it. The retained authority and the public accountability come together. One is the justification for the other.

Philanthropy keeps the retained authority and loses the public accountability. A foundation’s answerability runs inward - to a board, to the legal and fiduciary stewardship of charitable assets - not outward to the communities its decisions land on. The powers that are most inherently funder are precisely the ones exercised with the least external scrutiny. Agenda-setting - the authority to define the problem before anyone is consulted about the solution - is where funders hold the most leverage and face the least accountability.

So the analogy breaks in the place that matters most. What makes these functions non-transferable is their tie to accountability. And that is exactly where philanthropy is weakest.

Which turns the usual conclusion around.

If some powers genuinely cannot be transferred, the obligation attached to them should grow, not shrink. “We cannot hand this over” is not a reason to owe less. It is a reason to owe more - because the people affected by these decisions have no vote, no appeal, and no exit.

In practice that means making the retained authority visible instead of quiet. It means saying plainly where a decision was shared and where it was not, rather than letting participation stand in for a transfer that did not happen. It means putting the reasoning behind agenda-setting - why this problem, this framing, these people in the room - where someone outside the institution can see it and question it. It means an accountability that does not rest solely on a board answerable to no one further.

None of this eliminates the asymmetry. Institutions built to steward concentrated wealth will always hold power the people they serve do not. Legitimacy was never going to come from pretending otherwise.

The danger is not the funder who holds on to what could have been given away. It is the funder who treats “this power is ours to keep” as permission to account for it less. The powers a foundation cannot give away are the ones it should have to answer for most.

The views expressed here are my own and do not represent the positions of my employer.