A Patchwork Quilt of Programs

1 Introduction

In spring 2020, German political leaders took action and agreed upon a coordinated approach to effectively limit the spread of the virus. At the end of 2020, there was a mixed picture with respect to the outcome of the fight against COVID-19: While the economy was doing fairly well, German society had to cope with many restrictions that were not very effective in keeping the pandemic in check.

Against this background, this article will address how the pandemic impacted Germany’s nonprofit sector, which is the organizational infrastructure of the country’s civil society; how the German government tried to support the sector; and how public programs with the aim of buffering the sector from negative effects of the pandemic were designed and implemented and might had helped far right groups gain more popularity in recent months.

Since the pandemic is still in full swing, it is far too early to assess the overall impact of the pandemic on the sector and to quantitively record the effect of COVID-19. Instead, a first and preliminary assessment of how the sector is affected by the crisis will be provided based on results of a limited number of empirical studies (Gross 2020; Kausmann et al. 2019; Krimmer 2020; Krimmer and Tahmaz 2020). Programs of the Federal and the regional German governments will be outlined based on internet-based desk-top research.

The article is structured in five sections. We will refer to the country’s political governance, its civil society and the structure of its nonprofit-sector in section two. Against this background, section three will thematize the impact of the pandemic on civil society and the sector. As there is not yet reliable data available to quantitatively assess the impact of the pandemic on the organizations, in section four we will focus on the programs issued by the German Federal and Länder Governments to counteract the negative effects of the crisis.^[1] Key programs will be highlighted and distinctive policies of selected regional governments analyzed. The conclusion in section five will address the questions of how the sector and civil society will further develop and whether the pandemic might increase government awareness that serious crises such as COVID-19 require the joint and coordinated action of government and the nonprofit sector.

2 Federalized Germany, Its Civil Society and Nonprofit Sector

Germany is a federalized country composed of 16 regions – Länder in German – that differ significantly with respect to size, economic strength and party composition of parliaments and governments (Weichlein 2019). Currently, at the federal as well as at the regional levels, coalition governments are exclusively in power. The German regional governments, by law, have to co-operate closely with the federal level of government. Only a few policy areas are subject to the exclusive control of the Länder, in particular the policy fields of education, research and culture that encompasses the arts as well as sports and any other leisure activities.

Germany’s civil society looks back upon a long tradition, in which political activism based on social movements has always played a distinctive role (Bermann 1997; Roth and Rucht 2008). Still today, there are social movements on both sides of the political spectrum representing either a more liberal and leftist or a more conservative and sometimes nationalist faction of the German society (Grande 2018). The sector used to reflect, at least to a certain extent, major political cleavages of the German society. Today the majority of nonprofit organizations are no longer affiliated with a certain political or normative direction. However, the sector is still quite diverse with respect to the legal forms of its organizations, their size, areas of activity, modes of financing, and finally as regards to the degree to which its organizations are co-operating with government (Table 1).

By far, the majority of German nonprofits – more than 620,000 – are legally registered “voluntary associations” (Vereine) based on membership (Krimmer 2019: 5). Predominately small or middle-sized organizations, German Vereine operate at the local level primarily in the areas of recreation, sports and amateur cultural activities. Their prime source of financing are membership-dues and, to a certain extent, donations and sponsorships. At the local level, there is a long tradition of co-operation between governments and Vereine, albeit limited to infrastructural support and small-size grants. Vereine manage their operations primarily with volunteers at the management and shop-floor level. However, the professionalization of German voluntary associations is on its way, particularly in the area of sports, where the clubs have diversified their services and are increasingly working with a limited number of employees. Despite this trend, local Vereine are still the main domain for volunteering. With about 40% of the German population engaged on a regular basis (Kausmann et al. 2019: 56; Simonson et al. 2017: 22), volunteering has been on a steady increase in the last decades.

The stronghold of nonprofit employment are nonprofits working in the areas of social service and health care provision. The majority of those are affiliated with the German Free Welfare Associations (Boeßenecker and Vilain 2013), which look back upon a long and very intensive co-operation with government (Zimmer 1999). Until the 1990s, nonprofit social service and health care providers affiliated with the Associations were legally protected from commercial competition in Germany. Today, there is hardly any difference between nonprofit and commercial providers of social services, health care or care for the elderly. Particularly with respect to financing, nonprofits operating in the social domain are treated on equal footing with for-profits. Accordingly, the majority of nonprofits operating in this domain have become more business-like in recent years. Organized legally as tax-exempt limited corporations, they are working predominantly with paid staff. Nevertheless, nonprofits in the social domain are still attracting volunteers who are integrated into day-to-day operations where they provide additional services such as running a café in a home for the elderly, the costs of which are not covered by the allowances of the social and health-care insurances.

With respect to financing nonprofits, the German Federal Government does not play a central role. Nonprofits operating in the social service and health area are predominately financed by allowances of the social and health insurances (Zimmer and Priller 2007). Nonprofits operating in the areas of culture, sports and leisure, which fall exclusively under the domain of the German regional governments, receive support from the regional and predominantly from the local governments. With respect to the modes of governance, Germany used to be characterized as a “semi-sovereign state” (Katzenstein 1987), in which nonprofits, particularly in the social domain but also in the area of sports, were thoroughly integrated into the policy process as partners of government with respect to both policy development and implementation. During the last decades, this neo-corporatist tradition of the country has diminished and is no longer strongly in place (Bode 2012).

3 The Impact of COVID-19

4 Governments Reactions

5 Summary and Concluding Remarks

Civil society and Germany’s nonprofit organizations are thoroughly affected by the crisis. Civil society appears to move in the direction where there is an increasing divide between a pro-democratic and a nationalist faction of German civil society. Both sides are very active and tend to increasingly take to the streets.

The impact of COVID-19 on the nonprofit sector depends on the size and type of the organization and on the field of activity. There are some indicators that the typical German nonprofit organization, the membership-based voluntary association that works primarily with volunteers, might face difficult times in the future. Even before the crises, the notion of membership had significantly changed. Instead of becoming a member, an affiliation with an association was increasingly perceived more as a contract-like relationship in which you pay dues for services. This general trend might be accelerated through the crisis. The outcome might be a new wave of mergers of nonprofits that no longer work primarily with volunteers but with hired staff.

But the further push towards professionalization of nonprofits might be counteracted by another trend that became visible during the crisis: civic engagement and volunteering tend to become less formalized, more spontaneous and also increasingly neighborhood-based. The trend towards more informal and ad-hoc modes of volunteering is also not a new development, it started long before COVID-19 hit the country. These two trends might become even more influential in the future: nonprofit organizations increasingly integrate into the country’s service economy, while simultaneously volunteering will continue to grow, however, outside the confines of nonprofit organizations.

With respect to the acknowledgment of the sector as a valuable partner in the policy process, particularly in difficult times, the programs of the Federal government are disappointing. The specificity of the sector is only partially taken into account. With one exception, nonprofits are treated as a proxy of commercial enterprises. The programs aim at keeping the economy going and the unemployment rates low were developed in a top-down approach without giving civil society the possibility of making its voice heard.

This is not thoroughly the case with respect to the programs of the German regional governments that were and are indeed very active in supporting the sector. However, the diversity of government programs is remarkable; the different measures are not easy to access; and the application and monitoring procedures involve a fair amount of bureaucracy and are not easy to comply with, particularly for small and non-professionalized nonprofit organizations. Moreover, with just one exception, the programs of the regional governments were also not developed in partnership with the sector. Instead, similar to the federal level of governance, the majority of the Prime Ministers of the German Länder grasped the opportunity to show-off and to portray themselves as the most competent leaders.

Charismatic leadership as a top-down approach to politics has become very popular since the beginning of the covid-crisis. However, the notion of “charismatic leadership” stands very much against a policy style favored by civil society that puts a high emphasis on democratic participation and deliberation. Mirrored through this lens, COVID-19 poses a threat to civil society in Germany because it heavily impacts the political culture of the country, and indeed there is a growing number of skeptical voices who try to allude to this thread (Klein 2020; Strachwitz 2020).