Introduction to Nonprofit Policy Forum Special Issue Dedicated to 2023 ARNOVA Asia: Embracing Diversity in Nonprofit Research and Scholarly Community in Asia

1 Introduction

“Asia is not one” (Acharya 2010). As this succinct, yet powerful sentence suggests, Asia, the world’s most populous continent made up of over 40 countries in five distinct regions – East Asia, Central Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and West Asia – embodies a remarkable heterogeneity in economic development, political regimes and legal systems, and sociocultural traditions. The distinct historical and institutional characteristics of different parts of Asia have had profound impacts on the nature and pattern of civil society, the nonprofit sector, and voluntary actions across countries of Asia (Hasan 2015). There is also an extraordinary range of ethnicities, over two thousand languages, and varied religions and philosophies. Asia is of these varied conceptions that have shaped the destinies of its states and peoples’ way of thinking and actions in meaningful ways but also become the sources of tensions and democratic backsliding. Many regions of Asia, especially South Asian countries, have undergone persistent political unrest and postcolonial conflicts between different religions and ethnic groups (Gould 2011). Furthermore, Asia is the most disaster-prone continent in the world (UN.ESCAP 2023) and has endured numerous crises, including catastrophic natural disasters and public health crises like the SARS and COVID-19 pandemic (Cai et al. 2021). Taken all these together, as the contributions in this special issue on mainland China (Mao and Nishide 2025; Sidel 2025), Hong Kong (Han and Gou 2025), Nepal (Dipendra 2025), Japan (Shimizu et al. 2025) and South Korea (Claassen et al. 2025) demonstrate, substantial conceptual and institutional heterogeneity across Asia has created region- and country-variations in Asia nonprofit research while there is some knowledge integration with Western-community of nonprofit research (LePere-Schloop and Nesbit 2023; Ma and Konrath 2018).

In this introductory article for the ARNOVA Asia 2023 special issue, we illuminate these remarkable variations in a wide range of aspects affecting the nature and patterns of civil society, nonprofit and voluntary actions, and giving traditions across Asia, which in turn shape distinct research activities and topics across Asia. Studies by the contributors representing five different countries – though mostly from East Asia, except Nepal – shed light on invaluable local insights from the authentic voices, as many authors are from these countries and some still reside there. As An and his co-authors (2022) astutely point out, reliance on knowledge solely from English-language journal articles, many of which were authored by scholars based in the West, may not present a complete picture of what is really happening in civil society and the nonprofit sector locally, in Asia particularly. Of course, we do not mean to discount the significant contributions from English-language Asia nonprofit studies (Onishi et al., forthcoming) – all these contributions to this special issue are English-language scholarly publications, after all. Instead, what we mean is that we appreciate this special issue is offered by the Nonprofit Policy Forum (NPF) editors as a space in which scholars can share local insights and knowledge with scholars in the West. We hope that this special issue empowers all of us, in and outside Asia, to understand local insights and learn from each other to advance the field of nonprofit studies collectively.

In the following, we first provide an overview of diversity and varied institutional contexts that shape the nonprofit sector and civil society across Asia, followed by discussing how these diverse contexts lead to distinct themes and activities of Asia nonprofit research. We then highlight key programs and accomplishments of the ARNOVA Asia 2023 conference, thereby underscoring diversity in the conference participants’ geographic backgrounds and presentation topics. We conclude this article by providing a more detailed and in-depth illustration of each contribution to this special issue.

2 Diverse Nature and Institutional Contexts of Nonprofits and Civil Society in Asia

Past research has shed light on the trajectories of Asia, making it a unique context for nonprofit studies. Composed of over 40 countries, Asia embodies an extraordinary range of ethnicities, over two thousand of spoken languages, and diverse religions and philosophies. Such complexity in linguistic, religious, socio-cultural traditions, and historical legacy has created a distinct environment that fosters both formal nonprofit functioning and informal giving practices in many Asian countries. This makes a simple comparison to the Western counterparts difficult or even problematic (Campbell and Çarkoğlu 2019; Onishi 2025; Smith et al, 2018). At the same time, varied religions and philosophies, including Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, Confucianism, Zoroastrianism, Shinto, and Taoism, create unique giving practices in certain countries in Asia. Islam, for instance, is the largest religion in Asia (Pew Research Center, n.d., cited by Onishi and Yamauchi 2020), with Muslim-majority countries including Indonesia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Malaysia, and many Western Asia countries. In recent years, the religious profile in Asia has become highly diverse. Buddhism is still particularly influential in Thailand, but in many countries which may be known as traditionally Buddhism-influenced nations, such as Japan, an increasing number of individuals identify themselves as “unaffiliated” (Onishi and Yamauchi 2020). In South Korea, Protestant and Catholic churches and individuals became major actors in supporting both religious and secular causes (Kang et al. 2015).

Although under the name “Asia,” economic impacts are subject to remarkable cross-region and country dynamism. There are the world’s economic powers, often measured by the country’s Gross domestic product (GDP), concentrated primarily in East Asia, including China, Japan, and South Korea, yet increasingly from other regions of Asia, such as India in South Asia, Indonesia in Southeast Asia, and Turkey in West Asia (World Bank 2025). Meanwhile, the United Nations (2024) reported some Asian countries as ‘least developed countries’, including Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Nepal in South Asia, and Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar in Southeast Asia.

Such cross-country dynamism across different parts of Asia certainly not only shapes unique practices but also creates different patterns in the main research topics, methodology, theory applications, and practical implications. The strong economy in East Asia, as well as countries like Singapore and Thailand, fueled philanthropy, especially corporate and high-net-worth individual giving, thereby expanding the field of nonprofits, philanthropy, and foundations (Onishi and Yamauchi 2020), as Han and Gou’s study (2025) in this special issue suggests regarding community foundations in Hong Kong. The early 2000s saw another exponential growth in Asia’s nonprofit sectors under the influence of growing professionalism in the public and nonprofit sectors. Nonprofits shifted focus to service provision and efficiency to achieve their economic independence from the government in not only democratic countries, such as Japan (Okada et al, 2017), but also authoritarian regimes, such as China (Yu et al, 2021). Meanwhile, the rapid economic growth in South Asia, a region traditionally with the world’s second-worst poverty levels (Islam et al, 2021), has intensified income inequality. This unintended consequence of economic growth, however, inspired civil society actors and NGOs to rise for social innovations, often by supporting women. We witness many world-famous initiatives, including the Nobel Prize-winning Grameen Bank, which pioneered the microfinance movement, and BRAC, the world’s largest NGO, both in Bangladesh.

Furthermore, the unique nature and pattern of the nonprofit sector and civil society in many Asian countries originate from the complex “webs” of, and interactive effects from, diverse and distinct institutional factors and historical origins – historical trajectory and socio-cultural traditions, as well as economic and political systems – embedded in each country. While the state of the economy may play an impetus in promoting the growth of the nonprofit sector and the amount of charitable giving (Salamon and Anheier 1998), the relationship is not always linear, especially if other institutional and cultural arrangements in Asia are taken into consideration.

This complexity is seen in the relationship with, and the role of, the government across Asia. Themes about political regimes and government policies, especially state-nonprofit relationships, have been extensively studied as the major factors affecting the nature of civil society and democracy, nonprofit sectors, and volunteering and giving (Moldavanova et al, 2023; Okuyama et al, 2010; Salamon and Anheier 1998; Toepler et al, 2023). Reflecting on growing, yet “hidden” issues of a “shrinking space” for civil society, in which state–nonprofit sector relationships have deteriorated, Anheier and Toepler (2019) call for greater attention to understand the complex nature of the government-nonprofit relationship. For instance, in one way, new nonprofit-favoring government policies certainly helped advance the nonprofit sectors, social enterprises and other new “hybrid” entities, and nonprofit management and operation in many Asian countries, as Claassen and his co-authors’ contribution to this special issue (2025) inform us the impacts from the Social Enterprise Promotion Act of 2006 and social cooperatives through the 2012 Framework Act on Cooperatives in South Korea. But many other countries and regions in Asia, including Central Asia (Smith et al. 2018), suffer from institutional instability or even voids created by weak economies and democratic decline. Eroding democracy and political and economic instability, however, prompted innovative initiatives and resiliency demonstrated by nonprofits and civil society actors, as Dipendra’s (2025) study about NGOs in Nepal in this special issue highlights.

In many countries in Asia, the state-nonprofit relationships are pronounced in an even more complex way. Unique sociocultural roots, religio-philosophical tradition, and historical and political legacy have blurred the line between the nonprofit sector and the government sector in many countries in Asia. For instance, in many East Asian countries, ideas central to efforts of giving and helping the underprivileged have evolved by combining the public and private spheres under the Confucianism’s notion of “benevolent and paternalistic government” (Onishi 2025; Tucker 1998). Some have also noted that the concepts of “public” and “civil” are relatively new or even foreign in modern Asian lexicons (Madsen 2002). Others, like Haddad (2011), rebut theoretical frameworks requiring a strict public–private distinction for democracy as “problematic” for many non-Western countries, including Japan. Haddad (2011), instead, suggests that the concept of “state-in-society” (Migdal 2001), which theorizes that states emerge from and are part of the societies in which they are situated, can more accurately capture the state-nonprofit relationship in Japan. This view rooted in Asia’s religion-philosophical and historical trajectories may highlight a contrast to other places, like the United States, where the nonprofit and state sectors are considered to be separate and distinctive spheres, whereby the state-nonprofit relationships can be theorized more clearly either as independent, interdependent, or antagonistic (Toepler et al. 2023).

Especially as we were just reminded by a powerful 7.7-magnitude earthquake that struck in Myanmar in 2025, Asia is the most natural disaster-prone continent (World Meteorological Organization 2024) and has endured catastrophic disasters in many places throughout its long history. Nevertheless, we again witnessed the power of citizens, who rose up, gathered, and mobilized to address government failure and human suffering. The disasters, such as the 1995 Kobe Earthquake, the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake, and the April 2015 Nepal Earthquake, catalyzed the unprecedented growth of voluntarism and donations, increased international aid and coordination, and influenced relevant public policies and legal reforms to encourage nonprofit and philanthropic activities (Shaw and Goda 2004). Most recently, the COVID-19 pandemic was a cascading crisis that did not follow previously observed patterns of natural disasters with a clear endpoint and a clear phase for civil society response.

3 The Growth of Asia Nonprofit Research

The extraordinary heterogeneity in social systems and distinct cultural traditions has shaped the unique nature and patterns of civil society, voluntary actions, nonprofit functioning, and giving traditions in Asia, thereby attracting growing scholarly interest and scholarly efforts to develop new nonprofit theories. As Lyons and Hasan (2002) argued, Asia will “prove a great laboratory for exploring a variety of third sector theories. Its role in that endeavor awaits the development of better knowledge of the sector, especially comparative knowledge” (p. 109).” Their claim certainly is validated. Buddhist Commons inspired Lohmann’s (1992) theory of commons, and Japan was included in Salamon and Anheier’s initial typology for social origins theory (1998).

A recent bibliometric and systematic analysis of Asia nonprofit scholarly research (Onishi et al., forthcoming) unveils the knowledge accumulated by over 2,000 scholarly articles in the last 60 years and underscores how economic, political, and traditional variations created the country and regional variations in research themes, methodology and available data, and theory application. Its cluster analysis also reveals unevenness in the research advancement between different parts of Asia. A nation’s economic development is correlated to a higher number of publications, whereas many Central Asia countries are characterized by both low GDPs and publication numbers (Onishi et al., forthcoming). This may be due to the data availability, because it is not easy for scholars in countries like Central Asia to gather data under the government’s heavy restrictions and the lack of research infrastructure. In contrast, the strong economy in East Asia has also generated new opportunities for giving research and data (e.g. Giving China, Giving Korea, Giving Japan). In particular, China, the world’s second-largest economy, is dominant in terms of the number of scholarly publications about nonprofit and philanthropic studies and the rigor of theoretical and methodological applications, all of which require valid data to examine Chinese nonprofit sector, corporate social responsibility and corporate philanthropy, and state-nonprofit relationships (Onishi et al., forthcoming). Nonetheless, an impetus of scholarly activities goes much beyond the strong economy. Since 2020, a substantial body of research has shed light on Asia’s nonprofit and civil society responses to COVID-19 and government-civil society interactions during the crisis and the long-term impact on CSOs’ roles and sustainability in many Asian countries, ranging from East Asia countries, such as China, Japan, and South Korea (Cai et al. 2021), to Israel (Schmid 2021), Turkey (ErhanDoğan and Genç 2021), and India (Tandon and Aravind 2021).

There have also been intentional and strategic initiatives to advance Asia nonprofit research, including early examples such as the Asia Pacific Philanthropy Consortium (APPC), which was launched in 1994 and was later acquired by Give2Asia in 2011. Foundations, such as Japan’s Nippon Foundation in the early days and South Korea’s Beautiful Foundations, have paved the way for increased cross-country nonprofit research in Asia (Lyons and Hasan 2002), burgeoning Asia-centered conferences and studies towards the end of the 1990s. Yet, it is the launch of the Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project (CNP) in 1991 that enhanced the visibility of Asia’s nonprofits outside Asia and accelerated the methodological and empirical progress of comparative nonprofit research in the 1990s and onward (Anheier et al. 2020). Johns Hopkins CNP included Japan in the first phase and seven other Asian countries (South Korea, Thailand, the Philippines, India, Pakistan, Israel, and Turkey) in the following stages, helping to develop local research communities in participating countries, including Asia. ISTR has been offering Asia Pacific biannual regional conferences since 1999 in Thailand, Japan, Indonesia, the Philippines, India, Taiwan, China, South Korea, and Malaysia, along with conference special issues of Voluntas, which boosted the number of authors and conference participants from the Asia–Pacific region. This initiative is continued by the ISTR Asia-Pacific Regional Network. ARNOVA also launched the ARNOVA-Asia conference series in 2017 and held conferences in Beijing, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Japan, besides a growing number of various common interest groups for Asia’s nonprofit scholars and research, including the Advancing Research on Civil Society and Philanthropy in Asia (ARCSPA) Group that the 2023 ARNOVA Asia’s keynote speakers, Chao Guo and Naoto Yamauchi cofounded, along with Tamaki Onishi and Helen Liu.

4 The Roles and Achievements of the 2023 ARNOVA Asia Conference

The 2023 ARNOVA-Asia Conference took place virtually from Japan on July 7-8, 2023, co-chaired by two of this article’s coauthors (Yu Ishida and Aya Okada). Under the conference theme “The Roles of Nonprofit Organizations for Sustainable Civil Society,” 55 papers were presented alongside 4 panel sessions. This was the first post-pandemic conference after the cancellation of the 2022 conference, originally planned to be held at Yonsei University in South Korea. Although the conference was decided to be held online, thanks to the 6 advisory board members, 15 academic committee members, eleven local host committee members, 10 graduate student staff members, and the ARNOVA Secretariat, ARNOVA Asia showed its resiliency as well as its “sustainability” (as posed in the conference theme) to resume.

The demography of participants was quite different from the past ARNOVA Asia conferences, which attracted scholars and practitioners mainly based in East Asian societies. The 2023 conference attracted 119 participants from 22 countries and regions. Besides those from different regions of Asia – East Asia (Japan, South Korea, mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macao), Southeast Asia (Singapore), South Asia (India), and West Asia (Iraq, Israel, and Yemen) –, ARNOVA Asia 2023 welcomed scholars from Oceania (Australia and New Zealand), Latin America (Brazil, Colombia, and Puerto Rico), North America (United States, Canada), and Europe (United Kingdom, Germany, Portugal), perhaps due to the advantage of holding the conference online. Figure 1 shows the extent to which the 2023 ARNOVA Asia conference was able to reach out not only to Asia but also all across the globe.

Figure 1:

Colored map of ARNOVA Asia 2023 participant locations.

The conference kicked off with a keynote speech by Chao Guo (University of Pennsylvania, United States), followed by an opening plenary titled “Building an Asian Nonprofit Research Community.” This plenary highlighted the diversity in civil society and nonprofit sectors across Asia with panelists specializing in different regions (e.g. East Asia, South Asia, and Central Asia) and expertise (scholars and practitioners): Chul Hee Kang (Yonsei University, South Korea), Katsuji Imata (CSO Network, Japan), Alisa Moldavanova (University of Delaware, United States), and Shariq Siddiqui (Indiana University, United States).

The conference ended with a closing plenary with Naoto Yamauchi (former Professor of Osaka University, Japan), keynote titled “Towards a New Comparative Civil Society Project in Asia.” As part of his major – and his last – objective to advance comparative nonprofit research (Yamauchi 2024), Yamauchi stressed the active role of civil society in making democracy work and proposed a new comparative civil society project in Asia examining the relationship between civil society and democracy using the V-Dem dataset. This is a dataset offering century-long longitudinal data for over a hundred countries on both the liberal democracy index (LDI) and civil society index (CSI). Helmut K. Anheir (Hertie School, Germany), Masaaki Higashijima (University of Tokyo, Japan), and Benjamin Gidron (Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Israel) provided insights into Yamauchi’s proposal, envisioning comparative nonprofit research in Asia.

Topics discussed in 55 papers and 4 panel sessions presented the breadth of discussions taking place in/on Asia and by Asian scholars. The most intriguing feature was the rich description of local contexts given in these presentations. The majority of topics discussed were those commonly seen in the main ARNOVA conference, such as fundraising, giving, regulation, volunteering, governance and management, social enterprises, and social movements, just to name a few. Yet, all papers positioned and discussed these topics with a specific Asian context. For example, participants had the opportunity to learn about studies on social enterprises in Cambodia during the COVID-19 pandemic, talent management in India, foreign-funded CSOs in Israel, use of digital technologies in Russia, corporate-led community foundations in China, as well as CSO-government collaborations in South Korea. The diversity and richness of local contexts observed in the 2023 ARNOVA-Asia Conference showcase not only the potential of studies on nonprofit and voluntary actions in Asia but also the resiliency of both scholars and practitioners to continue their work on civil society and nonprofit organizations amid uneasy crises.

5 Articles Included in this Special Issue

This Special Issue showcases six studies that focus on different countries – mainland China (Mao and Nishide 2025; Sidel, 2025), Hong Kong (Han and Gou 2025), Japan (Shimizu et al. 2025), Nepal (Dipendra 2025), and South Korea (Claassen et al. 2025), certainly reflecting on significant thematic, methodological, theoretical, practical, as well as regional variations, of studies presented at ARNOVA-Asia 2023. As we mentioned earlier in this article, these contributions offer unique local insights into the current state of the nonprofit sectors and civil society in those Asian countries, while their studies are integrated with knowledge of nonprofit and philanthropic studies that ARNOVA has been pursuing. By following the Shier and Handy typology (2014) of nonprofit research themes, we can see that Dipendra (2025) uses the Nepalese context to assess NGOs’ effectiveness, performance, and accountability. Along with Dipendra, Han and Gou (2025) and Claassen et al. (2025) also explore the theme of NGO-government relationships, while Sidel (2025) uncovers legal implications in China to address the legal theme. In the meantime, Shimizu et al. (2025) touch on important theme of human resource management by focusing on program officers, and Mao and Nishide (2025) examine the theme of organizational behavior by analyzing Chinese ENGOs’ public education as advocacy strategies.

To introduce the articles included in this Special Issue, we will start with two articles about COVID-19, which has had devastating impacts across the globe, but Asia is certainly among the first and most affected continents. Many countries, in particular, China, enforced strict policies to control the pandemic (Sidel and Ming 2021). In contrast, South Korea’s innovative model of government-civil society collaboration to mitigate the COVID-19 threats (Jeong and Kim 2021) has been widely praised.

The first is “Balancing Up, Down, and In: NGO Perspectives during Nepal’s COVID-19 Crisis” by Dipendra (2025), which documents the operational challenges that NGOs in Nepal faced during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using implications from stakeholder theory and institutional theory, the focus is on different forms of accountability pressures that NGOs were confronted with during the crisis. Through analysis of survey results from 274 NGOs, the article demonstrates “multiple accountabilities disorders” that Nepali NGOs experienced in a highly restricted environment compared to other countries in the world. Attention is paid to different levels and types of accountability relationships: upward and downward. In terms of upward accountability, the study finds the need to distinguish federal and local levels. While restrictions by the federal government largely affected NGOs’ organizational effectiveness, satisfaction with local government response (successful institutional collaboration) did not affect NGO operations. Looking at downward accountability, the article finds that NGOs with more concerns about the welfare of their beneficiaries faced greater operational challenges as NGOs stretched their capacity to meet their needs. Not only will readers learn about the local context of Nepal during the pandemic, but they will also be exposed to a framework to capture NGO accountability, organizational efficiency, and organizational resilience in a crisis.

Han and Gou’s article (2025), “Leadership in a Dynamic Perspective: An Exploratory Study of Community Foundations in Hong Kong During the COVID-19 Pandemic,” sheds light on the role of community foundations as a key factor in times of crisis. Applying the community leadership model to three cases in Hong Kong, the study reveals different forms of leadership and shifting roles observed among three community foundations during the COVID-19 pandemic. That is, community foundations engaged in focused strategy by coordinating response efforts and providing assistance through grant-making, building knowledge and capacity, as well as convening and engaging in policies. Their analyses indeed are mindful of variations observed across the three cases, arguing that each foundation engaged in different aspects of leadership depending on its size, scope, and focus. Presenting a dynamic view of community leadership, the discussion provides theoretical insights into the interplay of leadership and stewardship. In addition, the article situates community foundations within the broad landscape of civil society in Hong Kong, from which the readers can gain rich knowledge of the context.

Next, we will introduce three policy-related studies. As discussed above, there are considerable variations in political regimes, legal and economic systems, and social-cultural traditions across Asia. The last two decades, in particular, have seen new policies implemented in different countries in Asia. What are the policy implications of nonprofits’ strategic responses to the challenges they have faced? What are recent policies and laws affecting the governance and behaviors of nonprofit organizations and social enterprises in Asia? How do these policies affect the ability of nonprofits and social enterprises to respond to the pandemic and other societal needs? It behooves us to investigate whether these policies produced desired consequences in society at large, and if so, how the policies affect the sustainability and advancement of society at large, civil society, nonprofit functioning, and giving practices.

The article by Claassen et al. (2025), “Intersecting Identities: Exploring Worker-Member Perspectives on Government-Certified Social Worker Cooperatives in South Korea” investigates regulative and policy changes in South Korea, including government-certified social enterprises through the Social Enterprise Promotion Act of 2006 and social cooperatives through the Framework Act on Cooperatives of 2012. These laws and policies were introduced to establish new hybrid organizational models, such as state-sanctioned worker-run social cooperatives managed by government-certified social enterprises. Claassen et al. (2025) illuminate how financial support, tax benefits, and other provisions, and the organizational identity emerging from the workers’ perceptions, shape the hybrid nature of South Korea’s social enterprises and cooperatives. These findings highlight the complex relationship between public sector policies and established cooperative principles.

Sidel’s policy brief (2025), “Steering a Restrictive Course: Rebooting China’s Charity Law,” meanwhile, examines the significant amendments to the Chinese Charity Law. As adopted in December 2023, the amendments are anticipated to impact the daily operations, oversight, and regulation of charitable activities within China. It adeptly utilizes existing literature to present the text of the law, the responses of local officials responsible for its enforcement, and the insights of researchers who have diligently studied the evolution of charity law in the region for numerous years. The discourse primarily addresses issues related to the recognition and regulation of fundraising, overseas charity initiatives, community charitable practices, emergency charitable contributions, and trends concerning political parties. Ultimately, the brief deliberates on potential and necessary legal revisions, including the expansion of tax incentives that Chinese society may consider in the future, while also underscoring the establishment of a coordinating group within the Communist Party focused on social policy, known as the Central Social Affairs Department.

While policy is not the central theme, Shimizu and her co-authors’ research note (2025), titled as “What are Program Officer’s Responsibilities and Competencies? An Exploratory Research on Human Resource Development Policy for Effective Grantmaking,” sheds light on the ripple effects of recent policy affecting institutional giving in Japan, Japan’s Act on Utilization of Funds Related to Dormant Deposits to Promote Public Interest Activities by the Private Sector, which was passed by the Japanese Diet in December 2016 and went into effect in 2018. This complex scheme entails multiple institutions to finally distribute funds for social and community initiatives (Onishi 2025). Namely, the Deposit Insurance Corporation of Japan provides dormant deposits received from financial institutions as grants to the Japan Network for Public Interest Activities (JANPIA), the designated utilization organization established in 2018. JANPIA then supervises “fund distribution organizations” (e.g. specified nonprofit corporations and other nonprofits such as public interest incorporated foundations) to allocate grants, loans, or investments using dormant deposits to recipient specified nonprofit corporations (SNCs) and other organizations promoting various social purposes, including support for children, people with disabilities, and community development.

To properly distribute a significant number of deposits in dormant bank accounts (e.g. roughly JPY120 billion ($1.08 billion) in the fiscal years of 2014–2016 according to Japan’s Cabinet Office (Cabinet Office cited by Onishi 2025), Shimizu et al. (2025) highlight the emerging need for greater professionalization in selecting recipient organizations for, and distributing grants from, deposits in dormant bank accounts in an accountable and transparent way. As such, their research note examines the role, backgrounds, and capacity of program officers (POs) as an emerging professional in Japan, where dormant bank accounts are becoming the major sources of funding to support nonprofit organizations. It specifically focuses on the roles of POs in capacity-building within the sector. The research utilized snowball sampling through the POs’ network for local, national, and international grant programs, as well as significant traditional charitable foundations, revealing that POs have higher education levels and diverse experience across various sectors. The study also highlights their years of experience and the competencies they consider important. Furthermore, it uncovers the limited training opportunities available to POs, stressing the necessity of creating an environment that fosters their skill and competency development. To address the current resource shortage in the nonprofit sector, it is essential to emphasize collaboration with the government and businesses to enhance capacity-building in the interim.

The remaining concerns are advocacy-related cases. Mao and Nishide’s article (2025), “The Role of Public Education in NGO Advocacy in the Authoritarian Context: A Case Study of Chinese ENGOs,” explores advocacy by environmental NGOs (“ENGOs”) in China. While many scholars examined advocacy efforts under the authoritarian regime of China from various perspectives, such as grassroots ENGOs’ advocacy influence over local government (Dai and Spires 2018), nonprofit policy advocacy (Li et al. 2017), and policy advocacy channels (Liu 2020), Mao and Nishide focus on the public education part” of advocacy and the use of social media as part of advocacy strategies. Taking a qualitative approach to analyzing social media content and interviews with nonprofit practitioners, the study makes three key findings. First, ENGOs in China do use social media to educate the public on environmental issues, but their use remains largely in raising awareness through conveying information, leaving room for further use of interactive features. Second, while ENGOs place importance on public education and see the potential of using social media, they face limited resources and see risks associated with censorship and massive dissemination of information. Based on insights from the context of China, the study highlights limitations to the extent to which Chinese ENGOs can use or rely on social media as part of their advocacy strategies in an authoritarian context.

6 Concluding Thoughts

By reflecting on the past progress in Asia’s nonprofit research community, we are hopeful that this progress continues, and we hope that the audience of this special issue and the participants of the ARNOVA Asia 2023 share the same optimism with us. There have been mounting challenges in many parts of the world, including Asia. But the history of civil society in Asia, as above discussed, and the rest of the world reminds us of the extraordinary power and resilience of civil society. Just within the field of nonprofit studies, there have been many thought leaders who dedicated themselves to advancing our field.

To conclude this introduction, we would particularly like to recognize the life work of one such leader, who has made significant contributions, with his incomparable vision, to Asia nonprofit research, Professor Naoto Yamauchi. Professor Yamauchi – Naoto – passed away on June 24, 2024, during his visit to Seoul for the ARNOVA Asia conference. Naoto mentored numerous students and scholars in the younger generation than his, including all the co-authors of this article, and we still feel his unstoppable drive for advancing nonprofit comparative research even now by writing about him. In fact, Naoto was part of the guest editorial team of this special issue and was expected to co-author this introduction. His passing is a tremendous loss for all of us on many levels.

This special issue includes a memorial essay on Naoto’s life and accomplishments – not only as a highly accomplished and respected scholar but also as a dedicated professor and a very generous individual – which is tributed and authored by a group of his former students. We hope that you, the audience of this special issue, will join us to honor this extraordinary individual and to carry the torch from him to continue to advance nonprofit studies in Asia and beyond.