This post shares reflections from a session at the OTT Conference 2026, drawing on work carried out by OTT in partnership with WINGS towards a forthcoming playbook of global case studies on the enabling environment for philanthropy. The examples are drawn from presenters’ and participants’ own contexts.
“Domestic resource mobilisation” is by no means a new concept. After first emerging as a theory in the aftermath of the post-World War II economic discourse, it saw early institutional usage by the World Bank in 1976. Subsequently, the 2002 Monterrey Consensus on Financing for Development and its explicit recognition as a Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) led to the mainstreaming of the term. The wisdom behind the concept has recently experienced a shot in the arm. As traditional donors and reliable sources of funding are swiftly retreating, the question of where think tanks and civil society organisations (CSOs) will find funding for the next decade is no longer academic. The retrenchment of bilateral aid, the narrowing of international philanthropy, and changing donor priorities have all pushed domestic resource mobilisation to the centre of the conversation again.
In the world of evidence-informed policy, domestic resource mobilisation does not mean the public-finance sense of governments raising more tax; rather, it means mobilising domestic public, private, philanthropic, and institutional resources to sustain the organisations that generate and use evidence at home.
This has been the focus of On Think Tanks’ call for greater domestic funding for think tanks for the last 15 years.+ And it was the focus of one of the parallel sessions at the OTT Conference 2026, which brought together more than 150 participants from more than 50 countries. This year’s conference centred on the concept of trust, and the session leaned into it directly: its central message was that enabling environments for domestic philanthropy are not built by regulation alone; they require trust and strong relationships between governments, civil society and philanthropy. This is especially relevant and timely as trust is rapidly waning in these relationships.
The session reflected on broader work being carried out by OTT in partnership with WINGS, a global philanthropy support network, to produce a playbook of global case studies on improving the enabling environment for philanthropy. Think tanks are pivotal in that ecosystem, building credibility, generating and communicating evidence, developing and advocating policy solutions, and convening stakeholders for sustained engagement.
You cannot mobilise domestic resources at scale without the legal, fiscal and political conditions that enable domestic giving, and think tanks are well-positioned to make a difference.
Why the enabling environment is the real lever
Rather than treating domestic resource mobilisation as an individual think tank fundraising problem focused on better pitches and new local donors, the session focused on the larger role of the prevailing enabling environment.
Whether domestic capital can be mobilised at all depends on context, and one group of participants made the point sharply by categorising context into two components: the institutional and legal frameworks that govern giving, and the political economy that shapes whether those frameworks are honoured in practice.
The two can pull in opposite directions. A country can have generous tax incentives for charitable giving on the books and still be a hostile place to raise domestic money if the politics turn against independent research and those supporting it. Conversely, a difficult legal framework can be navigated where the political will exists.
Hence, when we describe the enabling environment, we are describing a moving relationship between rules and power.
A second group in the session raised a sharper version of this tension: the trade-off between tax incentives and economic growth. Incentives that encourage domestic philanthropy, such as tax deductions, exemptions and matching schemes, cost the treasury revenue. In lower-income contexts where every point of fiscal space is contested, finance ministries will reasonably ask what the country gets in return. This is the argument think tanks have to be ready to make (either way), in fiscal terms, a finance ministry recognises, not only in the language of civic value.
Two case studies: how the law actually changed
The session grounded two case studies from the Playbook that were successful in advancing legislation and shifting public opinion in their respective countries.
Brazil: Guilherme Stylos of IDIS, a Brazilian think tank, described a campaign that began in 2011, when endowment funds were a largely unknown concept in the country. The turning point came with a tragedy: in September 2018, a fire destroyed Brazil’s National Museum in Rio and laid bare the cost of lacking long-term funding structures for public institutions. This opened a window for legislative action. Law 13800, regulating endowment funds, was passed in January 2019, though the government initially vetoed the tax incentives at its core.
A coalition of more than 120 signatories, sustained by a steady stream of published data and evidence, kept the pressure on until the vetoes were overturned in 2025. Today, Brazil has 121 endowment funds holding around US$25 billion in assets, nearly half of them created in the six years since the law passed.
Kenya: Evans Okinyi of the East Africa Philanthropy Network argued that, as foreign direct investment and official development assistance (ODA) to the Global South shrink, unlocking domestic capital has never been more urgent. Although Kenya has had the Public Benefit Organisations (PBO) Act since 2013, successive governments used delaying tactics and bureaucratic bottlenecks to avoid operationalising it for 11 years. The law was finally passed in 2024, and it has reset the relationship between civil society and the state from suspicion towards intentional partnership. The law allows PBOs to generate independent income, partner directly with the government, participate in state procurement, and rely on clear registration and dispute-resolution procedures. Getting there depended on philanthropic networks building trust across sectors, harmonising fragmented policies, and using political openings, including the fact that some politicians run their own foundations, to push the law over the line.
Both stories highlight the same lesson in very different contexts: the win may be legislative, but the work is relational and evidential, and more importantly, it does not end when the law passes.
The challenges: hostile framing and closed space
The case studies assume a setting in which engaging the state is at least possible. An audience member pushed back on exactly that point, and the discussion turned to the hardest part. The strategies above presuppose a relatively conducive environment; in many countries with closed civic spaces, governments actively attack civil society and treat it as an enemy.
The hardest cases are not where the enabling environment is merely underdeveloped, but where it is actively contested. Participants offered two examples as live challenges. In Cameroon, think tanks are often perceived as being against the government, positioned as opposition rather than as contributors to public problem-solving, which makes domestic engagement, let alone efforts to raise domestic funding, almost treacherous. In El Salvador, the difficulty takes a different form; independent organisations risk being treated as foreign rather than national actors, a framing that undercuts their legitimacy as domestic institutions and exposes them to restrictions.
In both cases, think tanks are challenged as legitimate actors in the public space; so, how can they expect to gain any traction in reforming the philanthropic enabling environment?
These dynamics intensify in closed civic spaces. There, governments often target key organisations and cut off both foreign and domestic funding streams under multiple guises, while the real objective may be to make those organisations disappear altogether.
As a consequence, domestic donors grow wary of being associated with them, and the potential legal cost of accepting funds rises. This reflection argues in favour of being pragmatic and clear-eyed about the political economy of any effort to change the enabling environment for philanthropy, and for treating legitimacy, the right to be seen as a national institution acting in the public interest, as a precondition for playing a central role in delivering change.
The opportunities: windows, allies, networks and evidence
Restrictive environments can create their own openings. One group made the counterintuitive observation that more “tied” or “closed” environments can turn into opportunities. Scarcity and pressure can force the kind of coalition-building, prioritisation and local rootedness that can easily fall through the cracks when comfort is provided by abundant foreign funding.
Windows: Several of the clearest opportunities were about using policy windows strategically. Elections are possibly one of the strongest such examples. Elections create moments when policy frameworks are open to renegotiation and when the value of independent evidence is at a premium. Budget processes do the same: participants pointed to the EU’s budget negotiations as an opening to engage on the terms of civil society funding. And crises can be decisive; the National Museum fire that catalysed Brazil’s endowment law is one example, and the response to the 2023 earthquake in Türkiye was cited as another, a case where think tanks and CSOs demonstrated their value to local government in real time. The lesson is to identify the window in advance and arrive prepared, rather than reacting once it has opened.
Allies: Foreign funders can also serve as allies in securing domestic funding. Rather than framing international and domestic money as competitors or alternatives, the session reframed foreign funders as potential allies in building domestic enabling structures, underwriting the matching schemes, legal reform and ecosystem infrastructure that domestic giving needs to take root. This aspect has been explored here and here. The role of external funding, in this view, is to make itself less necessary over time, and therefore, may seem like a counterintuitive choice for foreign funders. However, this requires a strategic choice by foreign funders to see their role as long-term enablers rather than merely short-term funders.
Networks: A recurring theme was that the enabling environment improves through networks rather than isolated organisations, and, importantly, that networks are not the same as a loose collection of stakeholders. Brazil illustrates this beyond the endowment campaign: its enabling environment is reinforced by an organised philanthropic infrastructure, such as GIFE, the association of grantmakers and social investors, alongside local giving hubs and active private-sector engagement. These are the connective structures that let a domestic funding base hold together and speak with collective weight, and they are exactly what carried the Brazilian and Kenyan campaigns across the line. Networks in the think tanks space have been recognised for the functions of support and continuity they provide – even if they are hard to sustain. WINGS itself is a great example of a global philanthropy network.
Evidence: Across all cases and groups, we found consensus on the role of evidence. Evidence provides credibility and ensures that decision-making is dispassionate. This could be evidence to make the fiscal case for tax incentives, to demonstrate value during a crisis, and to defend legitimacy against the charge of being foreign or oppositional. A strong ecosystem is one that can generate this evidence continuously, not as a one-off study but as a standing capability.
What it takes to hold the gains
A key conclusion from the session is that achieving a robust domestic giving infrastructure rests on sustained coalitions and the continuous generation of evidence to safeguard legislative gains against political shifts.
Brazil’s six-year fight to overturn the vetoes on Law 13800, and Kenya’s eleven-year wait to switch on the PBO Act, both make the point: the risk in this work is not only failing to win reforms, but winning them and then losing them, or never having them implemented, when the political wind changes. A favourable tax framework or a recognised legal status is only as durable as the coalition prepared to defend it and the evidence base that justifies it.
For think tanks and their supporters, this means a domestic resource mobilisation campaign has no end date. It is the ongoing work of building and sustaining an environment in which domestic funding becomes possible, demonstrating value persistently enough that the case is hard to reverse, and doing so alongside others rather than alone.
What next?
Domestic resource mobilisation will not be solved by finding new donors at home but by shaping the conditions that make domestic giving viable, defending the legitimacy of think tanks as national institutions, and keeping the evidence flowing that sustains those gains.
The money follows the environment, and the environment is something the sector has more power to shape than it sometimes assumes.
Therefore, we hope OTT and WINGS can collaborate to convene two critical communities: current funders with the mission to change and sustain a new domestic philanthropic environment, and think tanks that can help develop the evidence and policy solutions to deliver it.
The role of think tanks in this process cannot be stressed enough. Get in touch to be a part of this conversation.