From Spreadsheets to Societies: Why Policy Matters for Purpose-Driven Capital

I still remember the first time I heard the term “blended finance” in a classroom. It sounded so clean. Like someone had figured out the perfect ratio of public to private to philanthropic capital, two parts grant, one part investment, stir, and social impact appears. But the more I learn, the less neutral those spreadsheets feel. This spring, as part of a SIRI practicum team working on philanthropy policy environments in Japan and Indonesia, I am sitting squarely in the messiness behind that clean term. What does it actually take for capital to move toward social good? And why, in countries with immense private wealth, does it stay stuck?

Our project is deceptively simple: assess the regulatory and ecosystem-level barriers to philanthropic giving and catalytic capital in two vastly different Asian economies. But behind that scope is a question that genuinely compels me: Why do some societies make it easy to give money away, and others make it hard?

Japan has the third-largest economy in the world and a deeply embedded culture of private savings. Yet its philanthropic sector feels, by many accounts, frozen. During our first client meeting, we learned that upwards of 70% of public-interest foundations focus exclusively on scholarships and research grants, because the Cabinet Office, for decades, made that the path of least resistance. The result is a quiet crisis: foundations are aging, and younger generations don’t see philanthropy as a place for bold ideas.

That conversation shifted something for me. I had come into this project thinking about capital—how to mobilize it, how to de-risk it, how to blend it. But our client partner in Japan described a deeper problem: foundations don’t think they are allowed to be strategic. When regulation funnels all incentives toward one narrow activity, you don’t just lose diversity in grantmaking, you lose the muscle of imagination itself. 

Indonesia, by contrast, is almost the opposite story. Public companies have been legally required to allocate 5% of their budget to CSR. On paper, that should flood the social sector with resources. In practice the money sits in corporate silos because there’s no integrated bridge to capable nonprofits. The gap is coordination infrastructure. 

These two countries, side by side, are navigating the legacy of their own institutional choices. And that, to me, is exactly why comparative work matters.

Our team has just begun. We’ve established biweekly check-ins with our clients, mapped our research timelines. But what I’m most grateful for is the permission this project gives us to ask uncomfortable institutional questions, not just about efficiency, but about design. Who wrote these rules? What problem were they trying to solve? And what would it take to rewrite them for a generation that wants its giving to do something?

I don’t yet know what our final recommendations will look like. But I know I want them to be useful to someone inside Japan’s Cabinet Office. I want them to name the gap between mandatory CSR budgets and grassroots organizations in Indonesia. And I want them to remind readers that philanthropy policy is not a niche concern, it is a quiet determinant of whether societies can turn private conviction into public good.

This is what I came to SIPA to learn: not how to optimize a spreadsheet, but how to read the rules behind it.