Transparency in Philanthropy: An Analysis of Accountability, Fallacy, and Volunteerism
This book explores how degrees of transparency in philanthropy currently fit with accountability under existing federal law, including applications of quid pro quo economic benefit arguments and stakeholder "rights" theories. The book also analyzes and ultimately rejects the most commonly asserted calls for changing the law to mandate more transparency from foundations, including broad notions of judging accountability and effectiveness, correcting "power asymmetry," foundations’ abilities to affect public good, and simply because doing so is good/moral/pure in its own right. Finally, it advocates that foundations do more to consider ways in which greater voluntary transparency can serve their individual strategic and operational objectives.
Founders, Families, and Futures: Perspectives on the Accountability of Australian Private Ancillary Funds
This research explores perspectives on the accountability of Private Ancillary Funds (PAFs), a type of Australian endowed philanthropic foundation. PAFs are relatively new giving structures that have experienced strong growth over the past 15 years. With limited regulatory obligations and exemptions available from public reporting, PAFs have discretion in various forms of public accountability. Using Ebrahim’s conceptual framework of nonprofit accountability, this study explores PAF accountability in terms of to whom, for what, how, and why, examining tensions between PAFs’ private form and public purpose. Through in-depth interviews with managers and trustees of 10 PAFs, findings reveal that PAFs engage in accountability for internal reasons relating to their mission and purpose, and their desire to lead others in philanthropy. PAFs are influenced by philanthropic peers, in particular other PAFs; but their accountability does not necessarily include public disclosure or transparency. Four variations to Ebrahim’s accountability framework are proposed.
Decidability of some intuitionistic predicate theories
Suppose T is a first order intuitionistic theory (more precisely, a theory of Heyting's predicate calculus, e.g., abelian groups, one unary function, dense linear order, etc.) presented to us by a set of axioms (denoted also by) T. Question. Is T decidable? One knows that if the classical counterpart of T (i.e., take the same axioms but with the classical predicate calculus as the underlying logic) is not decidable, then T cannot be decidable. The problem remains for theories whose classical counterpart is decidable. In [8], sufficient conditions for undecidability were given, and several intuitionistic theories such as abelian groups and unary functions (both with decidable equality) were shown to be undecidable. In this note we show decidability results (see Theorems 1 and 2 below), and compare these results with the undecidability results previously obtained. The method we use is the reduction-method, described fully in [12] and widely applied in [3], which is applied here roughly as follows: Let T be a given theory of Heyting's predicate calculus. We know that Heyting's predicate calculus is complete for the Kripke-model type of semantics. We choose a class M of Kripke models for which T is complete, i.e., all axioms of T are valid in any model of the class and whenever φ is not a theorem of T, φ is false in some model of M.