TAI Weekly

TAI Weekly | The Hope Gap and the Future We Cannot Yet See

By TAI (Role at TAI)
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TAI Weekly

June 23, 2026

Dear readers,

Lots to cover this week including the case for systemic tax reforms, representatives for hire, expanding fiscal sponsorship internationally, and the importance of hope for policy change.

But, we start this week with positioning on global governance. Amid wars and economic turbulence creating adverse ripple effects for all, but especially low income countries, the Chinese government is setting out its stall as the champion of “a more just and equitable global governance system.” Its new White Paper is scant on detail but extols the Global Governance Initiative that the State Council Information Office claims has received widespread support from 160 countries and international organizations. What the Initiative might deliver in practice deserves careful tracking.

Happy reading!

TAI team

What's New

A new paper from ex-TAIer Brendan Halloran for the Policy Practice, examines the governance of climate action with a focus on the political economy of country platforms – a useful read heading for ongoing London Climate Action Week.

Accountability Lab Pakistan has released a CSO Communications Toolkit built for small and medium-sized civil society organizations, NGOs, and grassroots groups, offering guidance on building communication systems, sharpening key messages, and choosing the right channels to communicate impact.

Local journalism matters. Analysis from the Social Market Foundation, drawing on 125,000 UK social media posts across Facebook, X, and Nextdoor, finds that areas without local journalism have three times the misinformation rate of areas with local news coverage.

The Sentry's new initiative, “Blood on the Ball”, focuses on sportswashing, specifically the United Arab Emirates' use of its NBA sponsorship to draw attention away from its support of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in Sudan. The RSF is a paramilitary group implicated in serious atrocities during the country's civil war.

Bolivia is one to watch for those following tax reform. Javier Mendoza reports in The Rio Times about how tax changes are shaping the new government's agenda.

With so much talk of the need to unleash private capital for development, it’s worth checking the latest state of play on private capital mobilization and tracking funding courtesy of Publish What You Fund.

Pointing to impunity, lack of electoral legitimacy, growing repression across the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) region, David Asante-Darko examines electoral autocrats and the crisis of governance in West Africa.

Data Cameroon estimates that more than 57,000 kilograms of gold disappeared fraudulently from Cameroon over eleven years, a loss of nearly $8 billion. At market value, this amount could have funded 179,000 classrooms, 90 regional hospitals, and electricity access for nearly 9 million households. Meanwhile, the established gold industry warns that illegal gold is fueling war and crime.

Nigeria's Africa International Human Rights Film Festival proves the role of storytelling in advancing human rights, accountability, and civic engagement. Ahead of its fifth edition, organizers reflect in Global Voices on the festival's impact and the challenge of turning cinematic storytelling into lasting change.

The Center for Economic and Social Rights has published its 2025 Annual Report, highlighting a year of work on the UN Tax Convention negotiations, the Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development, and advances in feminist and debt-related economic justice.

Collective Abundance has launched its first public fundraising campaign, “Rebuilding the Social Fabric”, which aims to raise €100,000 to resource grassroots climate justice coalitions in Spain, Poland, and Greece through a participatory grantmaking model.

Transparency International UK has been looking at the U.K. parliament, specifically the House of Lords, identifying 128 peers holding paid advisory roles. The perceptions of peers for hire risks further undermining trust with the electorate.

From Our Members

OPEN SOCIETY FOUNDATIONS: Pedro Abramovay, OSF's vice president of Programs, has co-authored a new book with Gabriela Lotta, “Democracy on a Tightrope”.

FORD FOUNDATION: A new feature tells the story of the Advancement Project, a multiracial civil rights organization that pairs legal strategy with community organizing. Interim executive director Carmen Daugherty describes how the group's work spans voter access, police accountability, and dismantling the school-to-prison pipeline in the U.S.

MACARTHUR FOUNDATION: Has made a $5 million impact investment in Zafiri, a permanent equity investment vehicle designed to mobilize additional capital toward energy access, with the vehicle expected to scale up to $1 billion over time.

HUMANITY UNITED: A new ten-year systems change study commissioned by HU and the Freedom Fund examines how and why durable reform emerged in the Thai seafood industry after revelations of widespread human trafficking and forced labor in the fishing and processing sectors.

TAI SECRETARIAT: Writing for Inter Press Service, Warren Krafchik and Paolo de Renzo argue that the next phase of fiscal reform needs to move beyond an institution-by-institution approach and toward something more systemic.

ESSENTIAL WATCHING:

A recent Open Government Partnership Europe Dialogue brought together the European Center for Not-for-Profit Law, the OECD, and the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights to discuss shrinking civic space, noting that the share of Europeans living in countries rated as having "open" or "narrowed" civic space fell from 58.3 percent in 2019 to just 26.5 percent in 2025. Proposed responses included cross-sector coalitions and national strategies in Ireland and Finland aimed at strengthening participation.

TOOLS AND TRENDS FOR FUNDERS

Published by the Center for Effective Philanthropy (CEP), this blog by TAI’s Paula Castells Carrión looks at the rise of fiscal hosting as civil society infrastructure amid shrinking civic space and tighter funding conditions. With examples from CivSource Africa and Interalia, it shows both its growing importance and the need for philanthropy to better fund and support this often under-resourced model.

Justin Milner, Jonny Dorsey, and Jon Baron discuss “Building an On-Ramp for Evidence a cross-sector,” a team spanning philanthropy, state government, and the evidence-building field, that examines a new partnership model in which an advanced philanthropic funding commitment serves as a catalyst for states to invest in evidence-based solutions.

This piece in the CEP argues that AI is not just changing how foundations work but changing the world that philanthropy is trying to change, and that 2026 demands that foundations treat AI as both a risk to manage and a leverage point for new strategy.

In an Alliance interview, Naina Batra and Shazia Amjad discuss the defining moment facing Asia's philanthropy sector, from the withdrawal of international aid to conflict-driven inflation, and make the case for a shift away from fragmented project funding toward long-term, systems-led capital mobilization. Read more on the recent Philanthropy Asia Summit  here.

ESSENTIAL READING:

For anyone inclined to think of tax as a neutral or even boring topic, Joseph Thorndike's review of “The Human Toll,” tracing how tax law helped protect slavery in the United States, is a worthwhile corrective, and a reminder of how tax systems around the globe have historically served those already holding power.

Focused Topic of the Week

Closing the Hope Gap: After Neoliberalism, who Controls What Replaces It?

The political and economic scaffolding that shaped the last four decades is under sustained scrutiny, and this week's readings converge around a shared concern:  the old consensus is gone, but what replaces it remains fiercely contested.

Writing in Foreign Policy, Branko Milanovic offers an autopsy of neoliberal globalization, arguing that the very features that ensured neoliberal globalization's success for decades produced its inevitable demise: a self-undermining dynamic that left behind fragmented publics and weakened state capacity precisely at the moment both are most needed.

Matías Bianchi extends this diagnosis into the digital domain, asking whether the sovereign vacuum that followed neoliberalism's retreat is being filled not by reinvented democratic institutions, but by the infrastructural power of large technology platforms.

Into that contest, the question of fiscal power is increasingly central. The International Centre for Tax and Development team offer reflections from the recent Global Partnerships Conference, making clear that domestic revenue mobilization (DRM) is no longer a technocratic sideshow but a defining political wager. With official development assistance suffering its largest contraction on record, hope is pinned on boosting DRM, but the conference's honest voices cautioned that revenue capacity alone is insufficient. Raising more revenue is not merely a technical challenge — it is also a deeply political one that depends on trust, long-term partnerships, and robust evidence. For example, tax expenditures cost governments around 3.7% of GDP and nearly a quarter of total tax revenues, yet they remain poorly governed and weakly scrutinized, defended by specific interests.

That gap between what is structurally possible and what people believe is achievable surfaces in a different register in BLIS Collective's piece for the Stanford Social Innovation Review. The Hope Gap, the measurable distance between support for a cause and belief in its feasibility, captures how people and organizations can formulate bold solutions to pressing problems while simultaneously doubting that any of those solutions will plausibly happen. This undermines them before they are even tried. Support is easily quantifiable and often predicts voting behavior, but hope, the belief that change is possible, must also be part of how we understand public engagement with an issue. Surely, part of the impetus for a change of Prime Minister in the U.K. is the desire for a leader who generates hope that things will change.

For those working at the intersection of advocacy, governance reform, and development finance, this is not an abstract psychological phenomenon. It is a structural obstacle: systems can be redesigned on paper, platforms can be regulated in principle, and tax regimes can be made more equitable in theory — but none of it moves without the political energy that only genuine collective belief in possibility can generate. Closing the hope gap may, ultimately, be the precondition for everything else.

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