Geographies of philanthropy: The intricate, the critical, and the generative

Fuentenebro et al.'s (2024) intervention on geographies of philanthropy provides a welcome prompt for geographers to engage more extensively with philanthropy's undeniable socio-political significance. My commentary focuses on the authors’ proposition and disaggregation of ‘the philanthropic complex’. Useful as the proposition is, I argue we will be well advised to resist the urge to allow ‘the complex’ to sediment as a macro-concept. Geographical engagements with philanthropy will benefit from engaging with more fully relational thinking and an insistent focus on practice to understand how philanthropy's powers and capacities are assembled and, more generatively, to identify the potential to disassemble and even to redirect philanthropy's impacts.<p></p>