Just fundraising? Campaigning gendered inequalities in changing CSO fundraising markets in Finland

Abstract

Civil society organisations (CSOs) often communicate global gendered inequalities simplistically from a fundraising framework to Global North audiences. While the stereotypical and racialising portrayals of women and girls in the Global South have been widely criticised, the diverse perceptions and experiences of development professionals regarding contested campaigning practices have been less discussed. Furthermore, literature has focussed on the Anglo-Saxon world, while the complex relations between gendered representations and neoliberal fundraising have been less studied in the Nordic context, where the marketisation of development apparatus is a fairly recent phenomenon. Drawing on a poststructuralist critique of development apparatus and postcolonial feminist reading on representations of the Global South, this article investigates how CSOs discursively frame gendered inequalities in their fundraising campaigns. By examining three fundraising campaigns in Finland, we demonstrate how CSOs are not only turning towards the use of a technical and neoliberal gender discourse, but doing so within an unforeseen advertising framework, in times of right-wing populist politics and a collapse in development funding. Basing our findings on qualitative data, we argue that CSOs are pressured to create simplified knowledge on gendered issues, which has provoked critical views not only from activists, but also from within CSOs.