The Atlas Network is a Washington, DC-based nonprofit established to “litter the world with free-market think-tanks” according to one former president.
Founded in 1981 by Anthony Fisher, it is an umbrella organisation that supports hundreds of neoliberal think tanks and allied organisations worldwide.
The Atlas Website currently boasts around 580 organisations in more than 100 countries, including several across Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. Atlas units are supported with a mix of small grants, mentoring, personnel exchange and access to the wider network of funding organisations and dark-money foundations.
Originally funded by oil and gas companies and heavy industry, Atlas entities have since greatly diversified and obscured their funding sources.
The Atlas Network’s founding affiliates and thinkers provided the intellectual rationalisation for the emergence of neoliberalism in the 1970s, first using Chile as a laboratory after the coup in 1973 and then taking credit for the rise of Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan in the US. The ideology – first formalised at a meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society in 1947 – demanded attacks on trade unions, environmental and social justice advocacy and a wave of privatisations, corporate tax cuts and industry deregulation.
Now headquartered in Washington DC, the Atlas Network and its affiliates have played a central role in global climate disinformation campaigns since the 1980s. In concert with attacks on national energy policy and global climate diplomacy, these organisations have successfully delayed the clean energy transition and created the climate emergency.
In 2021 the Atlas Network removed their list of formal affiliates from their website.
You can click here to see a list of Atlas partner organisations at that time.
Dr Robert Brulle of Brown University in the United States has mapped the funding relationships between donors and recipients making up what he refers to as the ‘Climate Change Counter Movement’ (CCCM) between 2003 and 2018. This research identifies funds rising from $357 million in 2003 to $808 million in 2018 from Foundations and Trusts flowing to hundreds of influence organisations, with an estimated average of 8% (or USD$36m annually) flowing to climate change obstruction efforts.
Three quarters of the funds were from completely unknown sources but most of the recipients are or have been affiliates of the Atlas Network.
The creation of these outwardly “independent and non-partisan” propaganda units has played a key role in shifting power around the world, including the election of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil (2018), Javier Milei in Argentina (2023), Christopher Luxon in New Zealand (2023) and Tony Abbott in Australia (2013).
In the US, former Atlas affiliate the Heritage Foundation has coordinated the policy platform and staffing roster for the second Trump Presidency, under the banner of ‘Project 2025.’ Heritage has performed this role for the Republican Party since the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, effectively outsourcing policy development to the oligarchs who fund the network.
Across the world, Atlas affiliates and their funders campaign against First Nations Land Rights, the rights of women, nonbinary and transgender people, public transport, public education, public housing, public health, public libraries, public broadcasting, and for the promotion of corporate tax cuts and protection of private interests. In recent years they have begun a coordinated campaign for increased penalties and increasingly punitive policing of climate and social justice campaigners.
