“To donors, it’s a program, but to us it’s a ministry”: the effects of donor funding on a community-based Catholic HIV/AIDS initiative in Kampala: Louise Mubanda Rasmussen

It is a well-established theme in discussions of civil society in Africa that channeling development funding towards “civil society organizations” may turn these organizations into implementers of donor policy and mere service providers, rather than being the autonomous promoters of social and political change assumed by the very same donors (e.g., Aubrey 1997; Hulme and Edwards 1997; Hearn 2001; Igoe and Kelsall 2005). Scholars have also begun to explore the effects that donor funding has on religious organizations (e.g., Christiansen 2010; Joshua 2010; Gifford 2009). This article brings a novel approach to these discussions by combining social movement theory with the concept of “transnational governmentality” (Ferguson 2006) to explore how becoming a professional player in this transnational field can redirect how religious actors in Africa conceptualize collective action.