Michael Edwards (academic)


Michael Aubrey "Mike" Edwards is a writer and activist who has worked in various positions in foundations, think-tanks and international development institutions and who has written widely on civil society, philanthropy and social transformation. He has been a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Demos in New York and has worked in senior management positions for Oxfam, Voluntary Service Overseas, Save the Children, the World Bank and the Ford Foundation. He also co-founded the Seasons Fund for Social Transformation which made grants to organizations that link their work for social justice with spiritual principles and contemplative practices before it closed in 2010. His writings examine the global role of civil society and its institutions, the purpose and impact of philanthropy and the not-for-profit sector, the role of business in solving social problems, and the links between personal and social transformation.

NGOs and civil society

After completing his undergraduate education at Oxford University and his PhD in geography at University College London, Edwards left academia to join the NGO sector. He first came to prominence in the 1980s during his work with Oxfam when he criticized the “Irrelevance of Development Studies” in an article that sparked many years of debate about the extractive nature of social science research, a theme that he has continued to pursue ever since. In the 1990s he and David Hulme from the University of Manchester turned their attention to non-governmental organizations and hosted a series of influential conferences on scaling-up their impact, strengthening their performance and accountability, assessing the costs and benefits of closer ties between NGOs, governments and international donor agencies, and exploring how NGOs could adapt to globalization and the increasing diversity of the “North” and the “South.” More recently he has been critical of trends in the NGO sector towards growth and bureaucracy, which he argues may dilute their commitment to radical social change. These views are summarized in a piece entitled "" which appeared on openDemocracy in 2016.
In the 2000s Edwards began to write about civil society more broadly than NGOs, and published an influential introductory text called “Civil Society” which was updated in 2009 and again in 2014 to take account of changing developments in the field. By disaggregating the concept of civil society into theories of associational life, the good society and the public sphere and then analyzing the links that exist between them, Edwards’ work has helped to clarify the confusion that has surrounded these ideas. His conceptual framework has been used by many others including and the that was published in 2011.

Philanthropy and the role of business in society

In 1997 Edwards left the NGO sector to join the World Bank, and then moved to the in 1999 where for nine years he directed the Governance and Civil Society Program. Just before leaving the Foundation in 2008 he wrote a controversial pamphlet for Demos and the Young Foundation called “Just Another Emperor: The Myths and Realities of Philanthrocapitalism,” which challenged the trend to introduce business thinking into philanthropy and the not-for-profit sector, later expanded into a book called Small Change: Why Business Won’t Save the World. Since then Edwards has continued to oppose this trend in his writing, arguing that "business should become more like civil society, not the other way around."
Edwards has also pushed back against closer ties between philanthropic foundations and the corporate sector, arguing that they need to be separate in order for foundations to retain their independence. He of Ford Foundation president Darren Walker to on the board of Pepsico Inc in a series of articles published in 2016. More broadly his work shows why even high and rising levels of philanthropy have on inequality and injustice at a national scale.

Personal change and social transformation

The final theme in Edwards’ work is the need to connect personal with social transformation, taking up ideas that were developed by Gandhi in India and by Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement. Writing with colleagues such as Gita Sen and Stephen G. Post, Edwards is a member of an emerging movement for social and spiritual change called “spiritual activism.”
In recognition of this work, Edwards received the Gandhi, King, Ikeda Award from Morehouse College in 2011 at a ceremony held at the Coady International Institute in Canada.
In 2013 Edwards launched a new section of the web-magazine openDemocracy called "Transformation" "to tell the stories of those who are exploring boundary-breaking solutions in politics, economics and social activism by bringing personal and social change together into one integrated process." He introduced this project in an article that explores the relationships between love and social justice in the modern world, followed up in a series of essays on , , the amid increasing polarization, and the "."

Key works