French translation

Here is my contribution to the European Commission consultation on the EU’s civil society funding strategy. Only the formatting was updated and links added as they were lost in the final publication. I plan to raise some of these points on funding and foundation transparency with the European Ombudswoman to highlight the threats to EU policymaking caused by the shift in the influence levers. The European Commission consultation and their reaction to the most recent NGO funding scandals shows how they are looking in the wrong places for an answer to the wrong questions.

The European Union has to stop using a 1970s definition of civil society. We have today two definitions:

• Service clubs (Lions, Rotary, Kiwanis…), crisis and medical assistance groups, associations for people with disabilities – these CSOs are doing great things but are under-funded and mostly volunteer- and membership-based.
• Then there are activist NGOs who are essentially lobbying and communications firms like Friends of the Earth, PAN, HEAL, EPHA, EEB. They do not speak on behalf of their members but operate as large campaign organizations with a small steering committee.

These latter groups suck up all of the EU funding and network governments at the highest level (remember their relationship with Timmermans and the support for his Green Deal)? They use the European Parliament via affiliated MEPs for their lobby campaigns. With funds and networks, they have grown too close to the policymakers.

Actually there is already too much money available for NGOs. Take for example:

• The European Climate Foundation. Their last public declaration from 2023 – a two page balance sheet – showed an annual budget of €274 million. They are not at all transparent how they spend this money but they donate to almost every environment and health NGO in Europe so when they decide to launch a policy platform, all of the NGOs are compelled to join in. Most of their work is done at high levels in the European Commission, the UN COPs and the WEF where they employ their “flotilla” of NGOs to support their initiatives.
• The Agroecology Fund gets 100 million USD a year (it isn’t even a registered NGO but a project managed non-transparently by a fiscal sponsor) to fund anti-farming fear campaigns and the FAO agroecology programme.

These two regranting groups get their funding from US tech billionaire philanthropists and their budgets have been growing as foundations get more professionalized.

Beware of foreign funding of European NGOs by outside interest groups. I recently published an exposé into how Corporate Europe Observatory gets around half of their million plus in funding from US-based interest groups. Given this NGO tries to disrupt EU innovation and trade policies, it does not take too much to imagine whom, in the US, would profit from a weakening of EU business interests. Who donates these funds to Corporate Europe Observatory? We dont know. They are not transparent – CEO gets US donations from US foundations that manage dark (anonymous) donor-advised funds. So we have here a transparency NGO that refuses to be transparent about its foreign funding. And it is tax deductible. Sweet!

The best thing the European Commission can do on a future civil society strategy is:

• Stop funding the big NGOs that are essentially lobbying firms.
• Remove their privileged status in the policy process (look at the restrictions placed on industry actors but not on NGOs) and treat all stakeholders the same.
• The days of begging the NGOs to participate in European Technology Platforms are long past. Stop the charade.
• On transparency, the European Commission needs to demand full transparency from foundations who are acting as NGOs but have created tools to hide the sources of their funding like:
  • dark donor-advised funds
  • projects pretending to be NGOs managed by foundation-connected fiscal sponsors
• These dark foundation funding tools should be banned in the EU.

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