Charitable purposes and the shaping effects of money

Cowan, Dave ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9750-8262 and Hardy, Barbara 2023. Charitable purposes and the shaping effects of money. International Journal of Law in Context 19 (2) , pp. 161-176. 10.1017/S1744552322000313

PDF - Published Version Available under License Creative Commons Attribution. Download (594kB)

Abstract

We address a curious omission from both the literature on the law of charity and socio-legal studies – the effect of apparently extraneous factors, such as politics and ideology, as well as the searching for money on the charitable purposes and identities of the public who are to benefit from the charity. This is a curious omission because even the law accepts that the idea of public benefit in charity law is a sociological concept, albeit one that has developed a technical meaning. We argue that approaching charitable purposes and public benefit as sociological concepts enables us to appreciate the tensions that those external factors produce as they re-shape those purposes and refashion the public who are to benefit. We refer to these factors under the rubric of the shaping effects of money. We use a case-study of the Canal and River Trust (CRT) to develop this argument. The trust was set up by the government as a charity to manage and control 2,000 miles of inland waterways in England and Wales. We draw on interviews with households who live on boats and ‘continuously cruise’ those boats on the canals to illustrate how their interests have been marginalised as the CRT has re-shaped itself as a well-being charity.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Cardiff Law & Politics
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
ISSN:	1744-5523
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	10 May 2023
Last Modified:	11 May 2023 06:44
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/159273

Actions (repository staff only)

Edit Item