There is a line that keeps coming back to me when I think about how think tanks are funded: the money is never clean.
Not because it necessarily comes from crime or outright corruption, but because money is produced in complex economies, political systems and global supply chains that leave fingerprints everywhere: on workers’ wages, on carbon emissions, on housing bubbles, on the price of food in a market like Lima or Ohio.
So when we say a think tank should only accept “good money”, what on earth do we mean?
And, more importantly, what do we do with the “bad money”?
The new transparency regime – and its limits
Over the past decade, transparency has become the mainstay in many discussions about think tank funding. Transparify and others pushed a very simple question about 10 years ago: Can the public see who funds you?
Their early ratings developed by Transparify showed that fewer than a quarter of the world’s major think tanks in the US, the UK and Western Europe were fully transparent about their funding. When I applied their method to think tanks supported by the Think Tank Initiative in Latin America, Africa and Asia, I found similar results.
Even now, a recent survey from the Quincy Institute found that US institutions – arguably the most influential think tanks – are among the least transparent.
On Think Tanks has hosted a long conversation about this. Hans Gutbrod, Till Bruckner, Orazio Bellettini, Estefanía Terán and others – and yes, some of my own pieces – have argued that transparency is no longer a “nice to have” but a core condition for credibility. We have praised organisations that publish detailed donor lists and criticised those that hide behind vague categories like “foundations” and “corporate supporters”.
Our Open Think Tank Directory is partly predicated on the idea that more transparency is better.
Quincy Institute’s Think Tank Funding Tracker goes a step further. It doesn’t just ask “who funds you” but how much, and for what? Their analysis of leading US foreign policy think tanks found roughly 110 million USD from foreign governments, 1.5 billion USD from the US government, and 35 million USD from Pentagon contractors over five years.
And they found that 18 of the top 50 US think tanks disclose no information on their funders at all, and that most of the rest are only partially transparent.
So, we know much more than we did ten years ago. We can, increasingly, trace the flows from foreign ministries, sovereign wealth funds, defence contractors, tech companies, oil and gas firms, and billionaire philanthropists into our favourite “independent” research centres.
Transparency efforts are doing their job in promoting disclosure.
But transparency is also showing us that the money is messy.
Now comes the harder question: what do we do with that knowledge?
What counts as “bad money” anyway?
When people say “bad money” in the think tank world, they usually mean something like this:
- Corporations whose business models have caused obvious harm – ultra-processed food and drink companies in the obesity crisis; fossil fuel majors and their role in climate change; platforms accused of undermining labour rights or privacy; fast fashion companies, etc.
- Sovereign wealth funds are often from countries with poor human rights records or aggressive foreign policies.
- Governments – including those in “respectable” Western democracies – use think tanks as an extension of their public diplomacy or domestic political agenda.
- Philanthropists whose fortunes come from speculative finance, tax arbitrage, monopolistic practices, aggressive union-busting or investments in any of the above – the kind of strategies that leave a trail of social dislocation behind them.
But if you follow the money closely enough, almost any large donor will fail some ethical test. This is one of the elephants in the room that the think tank transparency debate has only partially addressed.
It is easy to say: “We do not take money from X.” Tobacco companies, for instance, are now widely blacklisted by universities and many NGOs. Some will extend that to arms manufacturers, fossil fuels, or authoritarian governments. It feels good. The moral lines are clear.
But the same organisations that proudly reject oil money may happily accept funding from big tech, fast fashion, a hedge-fund billionaire, or the foundation of a family or corporation whose trade helped trigger a crisis somewhere else. We could spend hours constructing the hierarchy of taint: tobacco worse than soda; soda worse than fast fashion; fast fashion worse than cloud servers; cloud servers worse than whoever owns the data centre.
Plus, the intricate web of corporate ownership means it is almost impossible to know exactly whose money it is.
At some point, the exercise becomes absurd. In a global capitalist economy, almost all big fortunes sit on complicated moral ground.
So perhaps the question is not: Is this money pure?
Perhaps the question is: Can this money be put to use without capturing us?
Jim Jarmusch’s bargain
The filmmaker Jim Jarmusch has been quoted as saying, more or less, that he knows studio money is “bad money”, but he takes it so he can make films on his own terms. He uses the system’s resources to do something the system would not do on its own.
The bargain is clear: he keeps his independence of mind and art; the studios get whatever prestige, content or revenue they can from his work. He doesn’t pretend they are saints. They don’t pretend he is their obedient servant.
Can think tanks strike a similar bargain?
Imagine a think tank that takes funding from a major fossil fuel company, but uses it to finance a multi-year programme on the political economy of decarbonisation, publishes all its data, and openly criticises that company’s lobbying and investments.
Or a think tank that accepts money from a sovereign wealth fund in the Gulf, and uses it to support independent research on labour rights, transparency and governance in that same region – including recommendations that might make its funder uncomfortable.
Or a think tank funded by a hedge-fund philanthropist who built their fortune on speculative bets, and uses that money to strengthen social safety nets, tax reform debates, or consumer protection – in ways that might constrain similar fortunes in the future.
Is that acceptable? Is that, in some weird way, a form of restitution? Or is it just sophisticated reputational laundering with footnotes and regression models?
These funders are not naïve, after all. There must be something in it for them.
Quincy Institute’s work on foreign funding and influence in Washington shows just how easily the bargain can tilt. They document cases in which foreign governments pay for specific reports, insist on editorial input, or cultivate long-term relationships that subtly align think tank recommendations with their interests. In such situations, you no longer have “bad money used for good”; you have money buying, or at least bending, the analysis itself.
The difference between those two worlds is not the purity of the money. It is the strength of the think tank’s independence, governance and honesty with its audiences.
Three tests for “bad” money
I don’t have a neat answer, but I like moral dilemmas. They are uncomfortable.
Here are some “tests” to consider instead of simple blacklists.
- The transparency test
This is the fundamental Transparify question: can the public see who funds you – and in enough detail to understand the scale and type of influence that donor might have?
If a think tank is taking money from a controversial source, the minimum condition is to say so, clearly and proactively. No anonymous categories, no “strategic partner” euphemisms. Name, type of funding, amounts, and – ideally – what programmes it supports.
Scrutiny like the one proposed by Transparify is not hard. The point was not to shame, but to normalise the idea that serious institutions must be able to withstand that level of questioning.
If a think tank cannot tell the public where the money comes from, then it has already failed the first test – regardless of whether that money is “good” or “bad”.
- The intellectual autonomy test
The second question is: What are the terms of the relationship?
Does the donor choose the questions, the methods and the conclusions – or does the think tank?
The Quincy Institute’s data show that some foreign government donors not only finance think tanks, but also commission specific reports, define topics and reserve the right to review drafts. This is rather common in the world of think tanks in low and middle-income countries, where funding is greatly dependent on foreign funders – beggars can’t be choosers, after all. But at what point are we in consulting or lobbying territory, rather than independent analysis?
A stricter version of the intellectual autonomy test would ask, for each potentially controversial donor:
- Can we publicly criticise them or their interests, and have we ever actually done so?
- Does our board or leadership depend so heavily on this donor that we would panic and undermine our experts if they threatened to withdraw?
If the honest answer to those questions is “no, we could not criticise them” or “yes, we would panic”, then it does not matter how beautiful your transparency page looks. The money has captured you.
- The purpose test
Finally: What are we using this money for?
There is a world of difference between taking “bad money” to write gentle, donor-friendly policy briefs that smooth its public image… and taking it to strengthen work that explicitly confronts the harms that money has helped create or, even, working on whatever the organisation thinks is important.
This is where the Jarmusch analogy bites. If we are going to take contested money, we should be prepared to use it against the very practices that make it contested:
- Fossil fuel money funding radical, honest work on a just energy transition.
- Big tech money funding research on digital labour, platform governance and data rights – with no veto.
- Hedge-fund philanthropy is funding serious work on financial regulation, inequality and state capacity.
Will funders accept that? Some will. Some won’t. That in itself tells us something about their motives.
But will the public buy it? That is harder to answer.
Beyond purity politics
There is a danger in the way the transparency debate is sometimes framed – including by people like me. It can sound like a quest for moral purity: if only we ban the right categories of money, all will be well.
But purity politics is a luxury in a world where many think tanks are struggling to survive, especially in low and middle-income countries. For a small institute in Accra, Lima or Tbilisi, refusing corporate or government money on principle may mean shutting down.
Meanwhile, big, opaque outfits in Washington, London or Brussels continue to hoover up funding from all directions, shaping global debates on security, trade, climate and technology – often with far fewer constraints.
Transparency initiatives like Transparify and now the Think Tank Funding Tracker do an essential job in levelling the playing field. They expose the scale of foreign and corporate funding in the big leagues and remind us that opacity is itself a form of power.
But they cannot tell us, on their own, what to do with “bad money”. That remains a political, ethical and strategic choice for each think tank and its stakeholders.
A more honest conversation
So where does this leave us?
If I were to sketch the beginnings of a more honest conversation about money and think tanks, it would include at least these admissions:
- No major fortune or public fund is spotless. If we wait for perfectly “good money”, we will be waiting forever, or shrinking into irrelevance.
- Transparency is necessary but not sufficient. Publishing your donors may be the start of integrity, not the end of it – think tanks can do very “bad things” with “good money”.
- Independence lives in practice, not in slogans. The real test is whether you can, and do, speak uncomfortable truths about your funders – and about the systems that produce their wealth.
- Purpose matters. If we take money that has done harm, we carry a special responsibility to use it to reduce that harm, not to polish it.
And finally, we should admit that we will get this wrong, repeatedly. We will cross lines we didn’t recognise at the time. We will refuse money that, in retrospect, we could have taken; we will accept money that, in hindsight, we should have refused.
Rather than strict lines that must never be crossed, we advocate constant reflection. The Transparify Integrity Health Check offers a great way to make uncomfortable, necessary discussions more fun.
The point, perhaps, is not to build immaculate think tanks, but more self-aware ones. Institutions that can look their funders, their staff, and their publics in the eye and say:
Here is who pays us.
Here is what we do with it.
Here are the lines we will not cross.
And here is how you can hold us to account when we fail.
The money will never be fully clean.
The question is whether we can be clean enough – and brave enough – in what we do with it.