How the Institutional Context Creates a Neoliberal Politics of Aid: An Italian Case Study

INTRODUCTION

In 2019, Save the Children International celebrated its centennial anniversary with a research conference in London supported by the Global Challenges Research Fund.1 At this event, where scholars of the organization reflected together with practitioners on fundamental questions of politics, humanitarianism and children's rights, a curious co-branded logo with Bulgari, the Italian luxury brand, appeared on the screen in front of the podium. During this celebration, no one mentioned publicly the possible conflict of interest between a for-profit brand and one of the world's largest aid organizations. Yet, conversations over ‘neutrality’ and funding — acknowledged as ‘never neutral’ — outlined the necessary distance between helping organizations and the politics of the states that fund them.2 The donation of ‘a part of the proceeds’ from a € 790 pendant with the NGO's logo ‘honouring the 10th anniversary of Bulgari's philanthropic partnership with Save the Children’3 was somehow less political than money with state strings attached.

Transnational ‘helping’, taking form in development, humanitarianism, advocacy and foreign policy, has increasingly involved partnerships with private companies like Bulgari. These partnerships are even enshrined in the ‘common framework’ of the UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) with their own explicit goal, SDG 17 (see Richey et al., 2021). Scholarship on these partnerships across social sciences and business has raised concerns about the possible ‘Faustian bargains’ of neoliberalism (Barnett, 2023). Yet, there remains a gap in our understanding of how state institutional structures create these neoliberal solutions of incorporating private for-profit and philanthropic actors into frameworks of development cooperation and international assistance. To fill this gap, this article looks through the keyhole of the silver, onyx and ruby pendant which aims to save children, to better view the Italian institutional framework for transnational ‘helping’ that produced it. There is a paradox in the case of this donor country, where the church is deeply embedded in political, economic and societal structures and so outspoken in support of carità, or helping those in need, but which is also a prime example of the commodification of compassion and making business profit from transnational helping. Understanding these relationships of power will contribute to a better understanding of our contemporary neoliberal politics of aid.

This article uses the term transnational ‘helping’4 as an umbrella term for understanding the practices of international aid. This is not to dispute that there are different mechanisms and norms that govern humanitarian responses to crisis versus the continuous duty of development assistance. Humanitarian aid and what would later be called development aid went their separate ways after World War II (see Barnett, 2013). But connections between them remained and have become tighter in the 21st century as strategic partnerships have included businesses in the service of profit and do-gooding (Barnett and Richey, forthcoming). Here, ‘helping’ signals the intentionality of the donor agent, not an evaluation on the efficacy of any of the actual practices from the points of view of the donors or their intended beneficiaries. Using an historical institutional approach, this article argues that the governance structure of Italian helping — with its confluence of church, state and market — has been characterized by a strategic co-mingling of public and private aid, development and humanitarian aid, and of helping abroad and within Italy. Conflation across these dimensions has been correlated with and co-constituted by: (1) weakening public trust in Italian non-profits; (2) insufficient national funding in relation to perceived need; (3) the need to diversify funding sources; (4) fundraising from private sources through social networks; and (5) partnerships between businesses and non-profits.

The guiding premise of neoliberalism is the primacy of the market, yet markets do not create themselves and must be embedded within societal institutions. Scholars inspired by Karl Polanyi attribute the successes of neoliberalism to its ability to reshape the societal institutions in which it is embedded, including the state, to prioritize markets. The example of a humanitarian pendant from a collaboration between the Italian branch of Save the Children5 and a successful luxury brand does not result from the usual funding or values of humanitarianism. Instead, it exemplifies significant changes in the societal institutions of transnational helping. Understanding how the details of engagement between the state, church and market in the Italian institutional context led to what may be deemed an absurd product6 will shed light on the neoliberal politics of development.

Italy is a useful case for exploring the banality of neoliberalism in aid because it is, in many ways, an unexceptional, traditional donor. It ranks as the eighth largest donor of the Development Assistance Committee (DAC),7 yet only gives 0.28 per cent of its gross national income in aid, which is less than half of the UN target of 0.7 per cent and significantly lower than the DAC average of 0.45 per cent. A growing share of Italy's bilateral aid (approximately 41 per cent) is currently being used for managing migration within the country, raising concerns that international development efforts are overestimated.8 As this article will discuss, Italy's history of international cooperation has been historically entwined with the Catholic Church, which might suggest that strongly competing values of solidarity would make the country less open to embracing neoliberal development. However, Italy also has an institutional history of linking transnational helping directly with the promotion of Italian businesses. Today, the interface for helping brings together government legislation, state bodies, for-profit organizations, non-profit organizations, the church and individuals. As in other donor countries, there has been a weakening of public trust in the traditional aid sector of Italian non-profits, combined with recently decreasing national funding for humanitarian helping abroad. These trends have led to a growing need for non-profits to pivot their fund-raising campaigns towards individuals, social networks (De Carli, 2019) and businesses.

Italy is under-researched as an actor in transnational helping, yet it was itself a recipient of foreign aid and has now become a donor engaged in multiple forms of institutionalized helping abroad and at home. It is a useful case for examining the interplay between the church, the state and the market and changing values towards a neoliberal politics of development. While it is typically considered the home of church-based charity, Italy also has a long history of political consumerism (Graziano and Forno, 2012), where selling products for local causes is the norm. Analysing official documents including state laws and policies and NGO reports, reviewing the academic literature on international cooperation in Italian and English, and informed by participant observation, selected key informant interviews and conversations, this article argues that the institutional context of Italian aid is constituted by a moving constellation of relationships between the state, the church and NGOs. In this changing institutional context for Italian NGOs, characterized by decreasing public solidarity, negative discursive framing and the need to diversify fund-raising channels, Italian businesses are being sought out for partnerships between profit and non-profit actors (Alonso-Martínez et al., 2020). These businesses are bringing more than funding; they are bringing values that characterize the neoliberal politics of aid. It has never been the case — in Italy or elsewhere — that church, state and market exist as closed value systems with ‘pure’ and fully competing interests. Even though they constitute a deeply enmeshed set of social values and practices enacted by people embedded within cultures, disentangling the differences over time between shifts within the Italian institutional aid context is important for understanding its politics.

The article proceeds as follows: the next section presents literature explaining the use of the term ‘neoliberal’, the trends brought by new actors and alliances in global development, humanitarianism and philanthropy, and what we know thus far about these in the Italian case. The following two sections then explain the formal structures shaping humanitarianism and international development in contemporary Italy and their history, and examine the current framework for development and the organization of the cooperation system that links the state, non-profit and for-profit actors in helping. Next, the article examines the public funding trends for development helping, and then looks at the private funding available. The penultimate section discusses the changes in perceptions of non-state helping and doing good and how these promote neoliberal development. Finally, the article concludes with reflections on what this institutional context suggests for the mix of public and private values, institutions and helping in Italy within an increasingly illiberal global order.

NEOLIBERALISM AND ‘PRIVATIZATION CREEP’ OF NEW ACTORS AND ALLIANCES IN GLOBAL DEVELOPMENT

The neoliberalization of transnational helping is characterized by the significant shift from collaborations between accountable states and international organizations to those among genial elites (Budabin and Richey, 2021). Finalizing this article in the geopolitical context of drastic cuts in humanitarian and aid budgets across major DAC donors also demonstrates what happens when non-genial elites are making funding decisions. This trajectory can be better understood as an extension of, not a deviation from, neoliberal development. Although cognizant of the decades-long debate over the utility of the concept ‘neoliberalism’, it remains useful for characterizing ‘the deep transformations undertaken by national economies toward a greater role for markets, less regulation, and the erosion of state-enforced social solidarity’ (Ban, 2016: 8). The phenomenon of neoliberal ‘triumphalism’ is characterized by ‘[t]he specific market-triumphalist manner in which capitalist globalization has been shaped and reproduced’ (Kingfisher and Maskovsky, 2008: 116), ‘free-market fetishism’ and believing the market to be ‘the most efficient and moral institution for the organization of human affairs’ (Springer et al., 2016: 3), along with ‘the deployment of “enterprise models” that would allow the state itself to be “run like a business”’ (Ferguson, 2010: 170). State and non-state actors justify policies and actions that favour market-based solutions, producing a political rationality that can be studied for its suffusion into other areas of human life, in particular effecting a ‘discursive production of everyone as human capital’ (Brown, 2016: 33).

After the global financial crisis of 2008 and the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, there has been a revived scholarly interest in neoliberalism's resilience to empirical challenges to its triumphalism (e.g. Schuurman, 2009). Yet, even at its best, post-neoliberalism has not been able to make a definitive break from neoliberalism's governance strategies (Córdoba et al., 2014). At its worst, neoliberalism has stripped the capacity of states, disinvested in the education of citizens, and shifted the values of transnational cooperation from public to private.

Today we see new configurations, new ‘eras’ of helping predicated upon the previous rise of NGOs, and their accompanying business partnerships. More participation by business has brought different sources of funding but also different values. Scholars identify differing normative and institutional structures in humanitarianism and development that, while demonstrating consistent elements over the long durée, nonetheless shape into overall eras or epochs of practice. Important changes have taken place that can be traced roughly from the beginning of the 21st century to the present. Barnett and Karunakara (forthcoming) refer to 21st century humanitarianism as the Age of Post-liberal Humanitarianism, in contrast to the previous period, the Age of Liberal Humanitarianism (see also Barnett, 2013). Brooks (2017) charts a shift from the ‘international development era’ to the post-development era. Kumar and Brooks (2021) characterize the financialization and marketi-zation of philanthropic funding for development organizations as the philanthrocapitalist epoch, which followed the partnership epoch (1970s–2000) and the scientific development epoch (1940s–1970s). In this journal, Horner and Hulme (2019) identify a transition from the post-World War II period to the early 2000s as one from ‘international development’ to ‘global development’ (see also Horner, 2019). While differences exist across modalities of international helping, whether we are now in the time of post-(neo)liberal humanitarianism, post-development, philanthrocapitalist or global development, there are common trends across transnational helping.

One trend identified across scholarship on humanitarianism, development and global philanthropy is the increasing role and influence of NGOs which partner with non-traditional actors, including business (see Brainard and Chollet, 2009; Fejerskov et al., 2017). The NGOs’ impulse to partner with businesses emerges partly from the expectation that businesses will bring corporate culture and management to the humanitarian field (Carbonnier and Lightfoot, 2015: 179) and the trends of shaping states to support markets in transnational helping. For example, a career-long leader of an international humanitarian organization explained that ‘NGOs could actually help resource-poor governments in fragile and conflict-affected states to get a better deal with corporations, and maybe a more lasting commitment from corporations, because, you know, the NGOs have a bit more clout, frankly, than the government’.9 In the 1980s, Western governments encouraged NGOs to administer social services at home and act as vehicles for government aid abroad (Lynch, 2013: 56). But the use of NGOs to deliver goods previously guaranteed by the state has not led to the gains expected, despite the use of more efficient, market-based mechanisms, underscoring the fact that the state has not ‘retreated’ from the equation in terms of humanitarian delivery and development aid, but rather has adopted a new role as a donor and monitoring agency (ibid.: 57). In turn, NGOs have adapted their approaches to suit funding and reporting practices in this new configuration. This reorientation has led to an adoption of and reliance on terms such as ‘capacity-building’, ‘partnership’, ‘innovation’ and ‘entrepreneurial endeavours’ for humanitarian goals (ibid.: 58–61).

Infusions of cash from the for-profit or philanthropic arms of business are seen in a positive light for many. As Dees (2008: 126) writes, philanthropists ‘can take the risk, subsidize higher cost structures, and be more patient than profit-seeking investors and the entrepreneurs’. Yet the meanings of these shifting global forces, as exemplified by the SDGs, have only recently been analysed. Mawdsley's (2018) critical commentary on the financialization of development (see also Christophers, 2015) argues that the SDGs’ call for private financing produces its own normalization of private capital relations. As Wilson (2017: 186) writes, ‘philanthrocapitalism suggests that saving the world and good business are one and the same’. The increasing profitability of helping can be situated within a larger realm of marketization of development and humanitarianism (Andreu, 2018; Glaab and Partzsch, 2018; Richey, 2018).

The replacement of the state with businesses in development and humanitarian contexts has, moreover, met considerable pushback. Brooks (2017) explains how the SDGs involve a loss of sovereignty from Southern states to ‘benevolent’ donors. The goals are also the epitome of an instrumentalized and utilitarian approach to humanitarian aid that is no longer based on principles but on effectiveness (Yanguas, 2018). The SDGs are constituted by corporate humanitarian partnerships; understanding how privatization has entered contexts of helping is therefore increasingly relevant.

Still, it remains unclear what the appropriate role for business is in navigating humanitarian contexts (Miklian and Schouten, 2014). As private contractors or sources of philanthropic funding, businesses participate in humanitarian work in ways that ‘can prove highly cost effective in managing reputational risks and bolstering public image’ (Carbonnier and Lightfoot, 2015: 172). Instrumental rationales of businesses include access to new markets, the reduction of business risks and the ability to build relationships with other humanitarian actors, including intergovernmental organizations, governments and local communities (Hotho and Girschik, 2019: 209–10). In partnership with relief agencies, companies ‘influence the political economy of humanitarian crises by affecting the distribution of wealth, income, power and agency in typically fragile institutional environments’ (Carbonnier and Lightfoot, 2015: 174). The case of the Italian institutional environment for cooperation illustrates neoliberal shifts toward helping as privatization creeps into Italian institutions designed to help.

While there has been considerable interest in neoliberal development from the usual suspects of the United States and the United Kingdom, Italian development or humanitarian cooperation is not the subject of much academic interest for scholars of aid overall or for Italian scholars of state–society relations. Nonetheless, there are notable exceptions. The quintessential text for understanding the entanglement of the state and market logic in Italy for providing help is the book The Moral Neoliberal: Welfare and Citizenship in Italy (Muehlebach, 2012). This book charts how neoliberal ideology, with its emphasis on individual responsibility and market-oriented solutions, has shaped the welfare state and transformed the understanding of citizenship in contemporary Italy. Aid, whether it be directed outside or inside the country, has a fundamental role in the struggle to create a ‘civil religion’ in which ‘the state's appropriation of the church's sacred right to administer and distribute carità was one of the primary grounds upon which the sacralization of politics in Italy took hold’ (ibid.: 73). In describing ‘the ethical state’, Muehlebach charts the development of Italy's liberal welfare state and ‘the slow building of social citizenship rights as a way for the state to depoliticize revolutionary struggles’ (Wolin, 1989: 154–55) by causing ‘revolutions to lapse into bureaucracy’ (Feher, 2009: 34), both quoted by Muehlebach (2012: 81).

Thus, while some scholarship has explored how Italian citizens negotiate their rights, obligations and entitlements within a system that increasingly prioritizes individual responsibility over collective welfare (Giudici, 2021; Martin and Tazzioli, 2023; Muehlebach, 2012), this article will look at the bureaucracy itself for insight into the neoliberalization of Italian helping. Italian capitalist helping is embedded within a stronger history of the dominance of the Catholic Church in its transnational politics. Giudici (2021: 45, note 3) argues that the Italian state has, since unification, been struggling not to alienate the Catholic Church, ‘because of its wealth and charitable apparatus’. Transnational helping has been described as the ‘bedrock of the West's late capitalist … expression of secular religiosity; and its mobilization of faith could make it a viable force for liberal renewal’ (Fiori et al., 2021: 17). Yet, as this article will argue, the Italian case shows something quite different. Instead of a struggle between the state, church and market, an historical institutional analysis shows how the Italian state was organized in ways that co-opted the church and Third Sector organizations, placing them on the same institutional footing as private businesses when organizing development and humanitarian aid.

FORMAL INSTITUTIONS OF ITALIAN INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT COOPERATION

The regulation of Italian development cooperation is primarily governed by a law passed in 2014 to align Italian practices with international and European Union (EU) standards. The law defines development cooperation as ‘international cooperation for sustainable development, human rights, and peace’ and an ‘integral and qualifying part of Italy's foreign policy’ (Gazzetta Ufficiale, 2014: 1).10 It sets various policy objectives such as the eradication of poverty, reduction of inequality, promotion of gender equality, democracy, support for peace-building and reconciliation processes and domestic and international development initiatives (ibid.). The law also encourages shared migration policies, which involve migrant communities in Italy, and education, awareness and civic participation in international cooperation and sustainable development measures, both in Italy and abroad (Ministero degli Affari Esteri, 2019). This legal framework encompassing both traditional development aid and aid to migrants in Italy from developing countries enables contemporary anti-immigrant politics to spill over into Italy's transnational helping.

THE CURRENT INSTITUTIONAL FRAMEWORK: THE COOPERATION SYSTEM

ITALIAN FUNDING FOR DEVELOPMENT

Funding is never neutral, whether it comes from the sale of products like those from the humanitarian organization/luxury brand collaboration that began this article, or from the Italian government's ODA, presented in smooth graphs from official data. Data on funding are always contentious. This section will present a brief review of Italian funding trends, first in public funding and then private.

Public Aid

For Italian public aid, MAECI collects data on official assistance from over 130 Italian institutions (ministries, universities, regional and local authorities, as well as AICS), and submits them to the OECD's DAC for validation (Ministero degli Affari Esteri, 2019). Military aid and the promotion of the donor country's security are excluded from such tallies, as are trade measures, such as export credits (OECD, 2019a: 1). Once approved, these data are published online by OpenAID, through a platform set up by the Italian Department for Public Administration aiming to ‘Strengthen national consensus on policy decisions on Italy's commitment in the field of international cooperation’ (Italian Government, 2016: 74)).12 This official website in English and Italian presents summary figures and data on monies committed and used, what they fund, where and how, from 2004 to 2016. The period since 2012 has been covered by Donor Tracker, from the social impact consulting group, SEEK Development, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.13 Aid transparency is no longer the domain of individual DAC donor states but is managed through private and philanthropic actors.

Data supplied by MAECI to OpenAID show that Italian ODA ebbed and flowed between 2004 and 2016; only in 2016 did it return to funding levels reached back in 2005, as illustrated in Figure 1. From Donor Tracker, we see that aid continued to grow until 2019 when the number of people seeking asylum declined, and expenditures fell accordingly (see Figure 2).14 In 2021, as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and a return to higher spending on refugees, aid increased but dropped again in 2023. The data show a broadly upward trend in ODA since 2013, but the increase is mainly fuelled by expenses linked to ‘refugees’15 within Italy, which skyrocketed from € 304 million in 201316 to € 1.5 billion in 2022.17 This has been a point of contention across DAC countries. The New Humanitarian reported that ‘The money DAC countries spent on refugee costs at home outpaced humanitarian aid budgets by about a third — $29.3 billion for so-called in-country refugee costs compared to $22.3 billion on global humanitarian aid’ (Loy, 2023), and an Oxfam researcher cited in the same article claimed that ‘Donors have turned their aid pledges into a farce’ (ibid.). In 2023, over 20 per cent of Italy's ODA budget was allocated for Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni's € 1 billion ‘Albania project’, a refugee processing centre which was intended to keep asylum seekers outside Italian borders (Tondo, 2024), but which is currently ‘on-hold’ because it violates international law.18 Italy often uses multi-bilateral aid that involves giving bilateral donations to multilateral organizations while maintaining political alignment through earmarked funding. From observing the disaggregated reporting on ‘bilateral and multi-bilateral development assistance’,19 two important and linked trends emerge: first, when more money is spent, it is allocated to the category ‘refugees in donor countries’; and second, more modalities for using the funding have emerged over time, including those linked to business.

DISCUSSION: THE CRIMINALIZATION OF SOLIDARITY AND DECREASING PUBLIC TRUST IN BUONISTI

All the institutions mentioned here in the context of transnational helping in Italy are animated by shifting contexts of values and politics in the country. The significant shift in public discourse around the charity sector in Italy led to concerns about ethics and corruption, fuelled by the reporting of scandals in the non-profit sector. For example, there were claims that UNICEF in Italy was redirecting funds to a politician implicated in a scandal, further eroding public trust in the non-profit sector (UNICEF, 2018). These stories have led to a ‘do-it-yourself’ mentality among donors and corporations, who are increasingly creating their own foundations to support social causes instead of donating to existing organizations (Alvaro, 2018).

Reflecting what journalist Daniele Biella (2019) termed ‘the criminali-zation of solidarity’, Italian public attitudes have changed over the last decade also as a result of anti-migration sentiments. Between 2017 and 2019, Italy experienced a significant increase in this criminalization of solidarity, with various legal instruments used to target those aiding migrants. NGOs involved in rescuing migrants in the Mediterranean have been particularly targeted in a series of attacks (Info Cooperazione, 2017). Matteo Salvini, a populist politician who was the deputy prime minister until August 2019, spearheaded political attacks by suggesting that NGOs are working with human traffickers (Salvini, 2019a) and explicitly stated that NGOs help traffickers make money (Salvini, 2018). Salvini has also criticized Caritas, the Catholic pastoral organization established after the Second Vatican Council to promote human development, peace and justice. Salvini's co-deputy and then foreign minister, Luigi Di Maio, has referred to NGOs as ‘Mediterranean Sea taxis’ (Di Maio, 2017). These attacks on NGOs have been part of a broader xenophobic agenda of Salvini and Di Maio's political movement, which came to power in 2018, promising to put ‘Italians first’ and to ‘close ports’. Those who oppose this populist agenda are derogatorily labelled as buonisti or ‘do-gooders’, including individuals and organizations that help migrants, such as non-profits.

The criminalization of solidarity has been criticized by international organizations, including the United Nations and Amnesty International, for potentially violating human rights and deterring humanitarian efforts.21 There has been pushback from the side of the church in Italy, including the formation of a new movement called the Assisi Manifesto (OpenAID, 2020).22 This movement, inspired by Pope Francis's encyclical letter Laudato Si, mobilized a citizen-based movement to create an economy on a human scale against the climate crisis. While this movement emphasizes the importance of leaving no one behind, and of building a civilized, kind world (ibid.), it has not thus far had a noticeable impact on Italy's transnational helping.

Data on donations to non-profit organizations from 2017 show few effects of this change in attitude (Arduini, 2019; Info Cooperazione, 2019a; Vita, 2019). It is unclear how decreasing public trust in the non-profit sector will impact overall effectiveness, but it is opening a space for more involvement by for-profit businesses and for individualization of helping. A 2017 survey found that only 29 per cent of people who view ‘volunteering’ positively also had a positive attitude towards NGOs (Demos, 2017), which suggests that there may be a separation between the two concepts and that their futures may not be intertwined.

The relationship between politics and funding for Italian aid has been shifting as political priorities change. While there were significant increases in support and funding throughout the 2010s, more recent political priorities have reversed this. According to the OECD Peer Review, Italy's ODA experienced a sharp increase from 2012 to 2017, excluding in-donor refugee costs. However, ODA then decreased in 2018 (OECD, 2019b). Since then, the Italian government has reduced its allocation of funds to ODA, from € 5 billion in 2019, to € 4.7 billion each in 2020 and 2021 (Openpolis and Oxfam Italy, 2019), bringing it back to 2016 levels. Furthermore, ODA funds have been used for what Oxfam terms ‘inflated aid’ for refugees in Italy rather than providing more resources for development elsewhere (ibid.). The increased funding has thus prioritized border controls at the expense of fundamental services such as water, food and education, and has not reduced migration (ibid.: 11). Nonetheless, Italian politician Salvini promised to pursue trade and cooperation agreements only with countries that ensure control over migrants’ departures and readiness for deportations (Salvini, 2019b). This trend is concerning to Italian development professionals, who have expressed frustration over the subjugation of ODA to foreign policy considerations (Info Cooperazione, 2019b).

The current Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, embraces ‘cultural Christianity’ as a brand strategy for her regime's conservativism, but Italy's international development policy has arguably abandoned values of solidary or compassion in aid altogether (Dodman, 2024). Despite her photogenic relationship with the popular former Pope Francis, known for his compassion for refugees (Smith, 2025), Meloni's right-wing coalition government focuses on ever-harsher migration control at home, despite the country's need for migrant labour, and works to ‘prevent’ migration through free-market solutionism that emphasizes strategic partnerships and economic growth, particularly in Africa. In 2023, for example, the government announced a new partnership plan for international cooperation, called the Mattei Plan (named for Enrico Mattei, founder of the Italian energy company Eni) that will invest € 5.5 billion over four years in African countries, intended to counter Islamist radicalism, promote social stabilization, and support economic development by investing in strategic sectors, such as energy. At the 79th UN General Assembly in September 2024, Meloni highlighted Italy's foreign policy priorities: the Mattei Plan; combatting human trafficking; and AI governance. While the 2024 and 2025 aid budgets foresee nominal increases in development spending (reaching € 6.7 billion in 2025), a decline is projected starting in 2026, with an increasing share used for asylum seekers in Italy (Greco et al., 2024). Framed by the institutional relationship between the state, the church and the market in Italy, the neoliberal politics of aid has seen little contestation by the church and an increasing embrace by businesses at the centre of transnational helping.

CONCLUSIONS

The gaps between contemporary elite marketing of ‘development’ and the actual needs of the recipients of Italian public and private aid are not lessened by institutional politics. Where we might have expected more value struggles between the church, the state and the market, we have seen instead the organization of aid for profit. The Italian institutional context places the church and NGOs on the same institutional footing as private businesses. This article has shown how Italy's legal framework — encompassing both traditional development assistance and aid to asylum seekers in Italy — enables contemporary anti-immigrant politics to spill over into Italy's transnational helping. The church's influence is limited to ‘cultural Christianity’ embraced by Italian elites like Meloni, which obfuscates its lack of impact on Italian transnational helping in practice. Returning to the example of the jewelled pendant in support of Save the Children at the beginning of this article, Owen argues that ‘[a]ny organization that hosts gala dinner for billionaire supporters and has a Bulgari jewellery line in its name should accept that it will be seen as part of the elite’ which ‘makes good business sense’ for the organization (Owen, 2021: 53). This raises the question: so what if Italian NGOs want to raise money under the auspices of ‘help’? Is it a reasonable Faustian bargain if more funds are raised, and more children saved? Thus far, we have no reason to believe that the supposed beneficiaries are the ones ‘gaining’ from the neoliberalization of development.

Transnational helping, or the organization of do-gooding, as it was framed by Jo Littler (2008) almost two decades ago, is profitable for businesses and for their NGO partners. Buying a hand-knitted luxury sweater made by skilled artisans in a Peruvian prison (Richey, 2024) or drinking a ‘cup of hope’ from Starbucks’ collaboration with the Eastern Congo Initiative (Budabin and Richey, 2021; Richey and Ponte, 2021) gesture to a world where the playfulness, beneficence and good intentions of the donors are given priority over the needs of recipients or the ideals of sustainable development. The masters of these ceremonies of illusion are corporations, like Bulgari, skilled in selling ideas as products and linking products to desire. The beneficiaries are the largest, most professionalized organizations, like Save the Children, whose media savviness and presentation of good-doing can appease consumers and their elite norm-setters. Perhaps the other beneficiary of the distraction of glitzy marketing of the business of helping is the Italian government that can continue to call funds for the policing of its borders and support for its businesses ‘development’.

This article has charted the institutional context for Italian helping and its neoliberal politics of aid, and offers the following conclusions. First, the interface for ‘helping’ between government legislation, state bodies, businesses, NGOs, the church and individuals is rapidly changing, unevenly distributed, and sometimes quite opaque. Italian transnational helping is of very limited interest to the Italian public, and the media, long controlled by the parties in power, has little to gain from covering the debates, conflicts, or paradoxes that separate, in theory, the state from the church from the market. Often, humanitarian helping for refugees abroad is confused with support (or not) for asylum seekers in Italy. It seems that the discursive understandings, public opinion and actual funding are commonly mixed between humanitarian support and a positive disposition toward refugees. This resonates with the expanding critical scholarship on how value is extracted from refugees themselves in the provision of Italian humanitarianism at home (see, for example, Giudici, 2021; Martin and Tazzioli, 2023). There is also conceptual slippage in the academic literature between ‘humanitarianism’, when used to refer to helping abroad in times of crisis, and helping Black and brown people within Italian borders.

Second, corporations have always been part of the Italian development cooperation system as providers of services, funders of charity foundations, and participants in increasingly popular ‘profit + non-profit’ partnerships. The relationships are growing in importance as more resources are needed both at home and abroad, yet public aid remains politically contentious, and the neoliberal priorities of aid serve well the post-neoliberal political order of increasing authoritarianism in Italy

Third, the roles played by individuals as consumers, citizens and/or business owners in financing humanitarian helping are multiple. Notably, Italy is unique for its two systems of personal allocation of tax monies to chosen religious organizations (overwhelmingly the Catholic Church) through otto per mille, or to the non-profits of their choice through cinque per mille (where top recipients are AIRC, a domestic cancer charity, and Emergency, a humanitarian organization). However, in 2024, ‘for the first time since its inception’, the amount of funding for the Catholic Church as Italians’ choice for their otto per mille contribution fell below the € 1 billion mark — just one indication of the increasing secularization and mistrust of the church in Italy today (Faggioli, 2024).

Finally, it is interesting that Italy requires non-profit organizations to be at least minimally privatized (receiving at least 5 per cent of their income from private sources) to be eligible to apply for public grants, tenders and collaborations. This institutional framework shapes the environment of how helping is perceived — essentially as a private matter. Thus, it is not surprising that most contemporary data suggest that, in Italy, non-profits and corporations are forming ‘hybrid’ organizations to tackle global challenges and to support vulnerable persons and marginalized communities at home and abroad (De Marchi and Martinez, 2020: 6). Businesses, expected to demonstrate their ‘purpose’, partner with non-profits that can provide them with useful causes. This overall context provides fertile ground for forms of commodifying compassion and brand aid-style partnerships like that between Bulgari and Save the Children.