Philanthropy is often discussed as a source of money. That may be the least interesting thing about it.
Laurence Tubiana and Claire Bulger make a more consequential argument in Alliance: as climate action becomes entangled with trade, finance, industrial policy, infrastructure, security and domestic politics, the difficult part is no longer simply agreeing that climate change is a problem. It is keeping cooperation possible when the actors involved have different interests, incentives and exposure to the transition.
That changes the question for philanthropy.
Instead of asking, “What should philanthropy fund?”, we might ask, “What has to exist before governments, markets and institutions can act together?”
The answer is often surprisingly unglamorous: trusted relationships, independent analysis, technical standards, secretariat capacity, political-economy knowledge, spaces where disagreements can be worked through, and institutions patient enough to remain involved when attention moves elsewhere. Tubiana and Bulger describe this as part of the infrastructure of climate diplomacy. Their point is that cooperation does not simply appear because the problem is urgent; someone has to build and maintain the conditions that make cooperation possible.
This is easy to underestimate because these conditions do not look like climate action in the conventional sense. A solar plant is visible. A flood barrier is visible. A new investment fund has a number attached to it. A trusted dialogue between governments, regulators, companies and civil society is harder to photograph and even harder to attribute.
But perhaps that is exactly why philanthropy matters there.
Governments work within electoral cycles, diplomatic constraints and public budgets. Businesses need commercial logic. Development banks usually require defined programmes and formal counterparties. Philanthropy has more freedom to fund things whose value appears later, sometimes on somebody else’s balance sheet.
That is a strange comparative advantage. Success can make the original funder almost invisible.
Consider climate standards. Before capital can move confidently across borders, institutions need some agreement about what is being measured, which risks matter and what counts as credible action. Or consider a coalition working on a politically difficult transition. Before governments sign anything, people may have spent years producing evidence, understanding competing interests, finding areas of agreement and maintaining relationships through periods when official negotiations stalled.
The final agreement gets the attention. The infrastructure that made agreement possible usually does not.
This strengthens an idea I have been trying to understand: philanthropy may create its greatest value by funding the conditions for action rather than the final action itself.
But the argument needs a warning label.
Almost anything can be described as “building conditions.” Weak programmes can hide behind words such as convening, ecosystem-building and capacity. A room full of important people is not automatically a coalition. A report is not institutional change. A network is not valuable merely because it exists.
The test has to be harder.
Did the intervention change who could act? Did it create information that altered a decision? Did previously disconnected institutions develop a way to work together? Did a technical standard allow capital or policy to move? Did an informal coalition become durable enough to survive the original funder? Did another actor eventually take responsibility?
If none of these things happened, philanthropy may have funded activity rather than conditions.
The article also makes another important move. Tubiana and Bulger argue that climate philanthropy should look for “nodes of interdependence” where relatively targeted action can influence much larger systems: insurance, trade rules, industrial policy, critical minerals, standards, supply chains and public finance.
This is a useful way to think about leverage. Not every small grant is catalytic merely because it is small. Catalytic capital works when it acts on a constraint that is holding back a much larger system.
That distinction matters increasingly in Asia. Climate risk is rarely contained inside a climate ministry. Heat becomes a labour and productivity issue. Flooding affects infrastructure and fiscal systems. Energy transitions alter industrial competitiveness and supply chains. Carbon rules created in one market affect producers somewhere else. The relevant unit of action therefore becomes larger than a project but smaller than “the whole system.”
It may be a particular institutional bottleneck.
A particular relationship.standard,project-preparation capability, coalition or even a missing piece of evidence.
That is where philanthropy could become unusually useful.
The deeper implication is that philanthropy should perhaps stop asking only how much capital it can mobilise and start asking what becomes possible because it acted first.
Sometimes the answer will be another investment.
Sometimes it will be a policy.
Sometimes it will be an institution capable of acting without philanthropy at all.
And perhaps that is the most interesting form of leverage: not multiplying your own money, but making yourself less necessary.
Source: Laurence Tubiana and Claire Bulger, “The next phase of Paris needs philanthropy,” Alliance Magazine, 15 September 2026.
Arunabha Bhattacharya 
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