How did you come to choose your research topic — the institutionalisation of philanthropy in the United Arab Emirates (UAE)?

Throughout my research journey, whenever I shared the topic of my PhD, people rarely asked about my findings or analytical framework. Instead, the question was almost always why: Why this topic? Why this geography? I always found that reaction particularly interesting and revealing in itself, as people’s perspective on the topic varied. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately for my interlocutors, there is no clear-cut answer as the path that brought me to this topic was not linear.

Academically, I had long been interested in understanding how societies organise care for others, and in what acts of giving can tell us about the societies in which they take place. Giving is never only about the transfer between a donor and a recipient. It is also shaped by ideas of responsibility (religiously informed or not), wealth, social order and the relationship between private initiative and public authority. Philanthropy makes these questions especially interesting because benevolence often sits alongside inequality. The capacity to give on a large scale usually depends on the accumulation of wealth, and that same accumulation may be connected to the disparities philanthropy seeks, to a certain extent, to address.

My professional experience reinforced that curiosity. Early in my career, I worked in philanthropic advisory and saw how much strategy sits behind decisions about how and where to give.

The UAE brought these interests together. It is a country that has undergone profound transformation over a relatively short period, while practices of generosity have much deeper roots. I became interested in what happens when older traditions of giving move into foundations and other contemporary institutional forms. I also wanted to study philanthropy from a setting that did not simply reproduce the historical experience of Europe or the United States. In that sense, the project became an attempt to decentre the history of philanthropy and ask what becomes visible when we begin somewhere else.

Can you describe your research questions?

The thesis examines the institutionalisation of philanthropy in the UAE from the 1950s to the mid-2020s. An overarching premise informed the development of the research questions guiding my work: what happens to our understanding of philanthropy when some of the assumptions built into the concept do not quite hold?

Much of the literature on modern philanthropy takes for granted a distinction between the public and private spheres, with philanthropy belonging to the latter. It also often describes philanthropy and state welfare as moving in relation to one another: when welfare expands, philanthropy retreats; when the state withdraws, philanthropy fills the gaps. In the UAE, neither proposition works neatly. Rulers and ruling families are central philanthropic actors, and the boundary between public authority and private initiative is often difficult to draw. Welfare and philanthropy also operate alongside one another in ways that depend greatly on who the intended recipient is.

I therefore asked how philanthropy became institutionalised in this particular political and social context, how present-day practices relate to older forms of generosity and rule, and what role philanthropy plays within the broader architecture of governance.

What was your methodology for exploring these questions? 

Methodologically, the research had to be hybrid. I used archival material where it was available, but access was uneven and the documentary record is limited. I therefore combined archival work with interviews, grey literature and a mapping of organisations and initiatives. This was partly a pragmatic response to the sources, but it also came to reflect the field itself, which is institutionally fluid and not always easy to categorise.

Being explicit about what I could and could not know was important throughout the project. The field was changing while I was researching it. My work relied primarily on English-language sources, which shaped what I could access, and questions around funding were often difficult to document with confidence. Rather than forcing certainty where the evidence did not allow it, I tried to build arguments through triangulation and to keep the limits of those arguments as visible as possible. Allow me here to thank my supervisor, Professor Davide Rodogno, for constantly reminding me of the importance of being respectful towards both myself and the reader by being open about where my research could and could not go. This is a lesson that transcends academia.

What are your major findings?

One of the first findings was that the ambiguity surrounding the word “philanthropy” in the UAE should not be treated simply as a conceptual weakness. Acknowledging that there is no single agreed definition of the term and that the boundaries between charity and philanthropy are often porous globally, in the case of the UAE I came to see that looseness as productive. It allows institutions to speak differently to different audiences and to move between Islamic traditions of giving and the vocabulary of contemporary global philanthropy. The language may shift according to context without one form necessarily replacing the other. Ambiguity, in that sense, becomes a resource.

The historical analysis also showed that the close relationship between philanthropy and the state is not a recent development, as some of the existing literature appears to indicate. Before the federation was formed in 1971, rulers’ generosity already formed part of the relationship between leadership and society. Oil dramatically expanded the resources available and transformed the scale of provision, but it did not create the underlying logic. Contemporary foundations and philanthropic initiatives can therefore be understood as new institutional expressions of older practices linking generosity to governance.

A further finding concerns the relationship between philanthropy and welfare. In the UAE, welfare provision is directed primarily towards citizens. Philanthropy does not simply step in wherever welfare stops. Instead, different forms of giving operate across a stratified social landscape and make different groups visible at different moments.

This led me to organise the analysis around the audience of philanthropic action rather than around the donor. I identify three broad tiers. The first includes charity-like giving, particularly visible around religious occasions and often directed towards lower-income non-citizens or recipients abroad. The second is philanthropy oriented primarily towards Emiratis and closely connected to national development. The third is cross-border philanthropy, where the distinction between philanthropic action and official aid is blurred.

Looking at philanthropy through its audiences helped me move away from the question of whether a particular organisation is truly public or private, a distinction that often produces little analytical clarity in the Emirati context. It also revealed how closely philanthropy sits beside welfare domestically and foreign aid internationally.

The argument I ultimately make is that Emirati philanthropy is, to a significant extent, both by the state and for the state. By this I do not mean that every philanthropic initiative is simply an arm of government. Rather, the sector operates within a political environment in which philanthropy can support national development, reinforce particular understandings of responsible leadership and contribute to the UAE’s international projection. The growth of foundations and philanthropic platforms is therefore more than a story of a sector becoming more professional. It is part of the way older practices of generosity are being reformulated through contemporary institutions.

What social and political lessons for our time could be drawn from your historical analysis?

One lesson is methodological. Categories that appear self-evident in one historical setting can become misleading when they are transferred elsewhere. The distinction between state and private philanthropy is a good example. If I had made that distinction the starting point of the thesis, I would have spent much of the research trying to decide which side of the line different actors belonged to. The more interesting question was what that blurred line itself made possible.

The history also shows that generosity and social hierarchy are not opposites. Giving can provide care and create opportunities, while at the same time reinforcing particular ideas about who belongs, who is entitled to support and who becomes visible. This is especially important in a country where citizenship structures access to welfare and where a large share of the population consists of non-citizen residents.

More broadly, the research made me wary of reading institutional modernisation as a simple movement away from tradition. In the UAE, the expansion of foundations and the adoption of global philanthropic language have not displaced older ideas of generosity. The two are continually being reworked together. That is why I use “continuity in transformation” in the title. The institutional forms change, but they remain connected to longer histories of giving and rule.

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On 24 February May 2026, Camilla Della Giovampaola defended her PhD thesis in International History and Politics, titled “Continuity in Transformation: Philanthropy in the United Arab Emirates”. The committee was presided by Professor Alessandro Monsutti and included Professor Davide Rodogno, Thesis Director, and Assistant Professor Seungah Sarah Lee, Management and Human Resources, HEC Paris.

Citation of the PhD thesis: 
Della Giovampaola, Camilla. “Continuity in Transformation: Philanthropy in the United Arab Emirates”. PhD thesis, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, 2026.

Access:
An abstract of the PhD thesis is available on this page of the Geneva Graduate Institute’s repository. As the thesis itself is embargoed until May 2029, please contact Dr Della Giovampaola for access.

Banner image taken by Camilla Della Giovampaola at the Ras Al Khaimah Art Festival (formerly the Ras Al Khaimah Fine Arts Festival) 2025 edition. The festival takes place at Al Jazeera Al Hamra Heritage Village, the UAE’s last remaining intact historical pearling village, and is organised by the Sheikh Saud bin Saqr Al Qasimi Foundation for Policy Research.
Interview by Nathalie Tanner, Research Office.