Volume 15, Issue 4 - Special Issue on “Nonprofits, Public Policy and Climate Change,” guest edited by Jennifer Kagan and Patricia Bromley

The existential threat of climate change requires reimagining foundational aspects of society, including jobs, transportation, energy, the built environment, natural resources, health, and water and food supplies. We argue that to realize such broad scale change requires systems thinking. In this introduction to the special issue on Nonprofits and Climate Policy, we outline four systems-based views of global social change, organized by source of change and assumptions about the technical rationality of the system: engineering, evolutionary, social constructivist, and (critical) realist. By elaborating this framework, we shed light on the fundamental assumptions embedded in climate advocacy and policymaking. Along with describing key scholarship and practice-based examples for each approach, we align the articles in this special issue with the four views of global social change to inspire systems-based research and practice at the nonprofit and climate policy intersection. We hope that creating more explicit accounts of the key beliefs and expectations about how social change occurs at a global systemic level will help to advance research and practice in sustainability.

As weather disasters intensify under the impacts of climate change, an important public policy question is whether the kinds of organizations most likely to provide disaster relief are themselves planning for climate change. A statewide Indiana survey of the leaders of a wide variety of community “social safety net” organizations ( N  = 467) provides rich descriptive data to understand the realities of local disaster planning as it relates to climate change. Our findings support federal disaster policy in showing first that most of these charities have been or expect to be involved in local disaster relief, either as a primary or secondary mission focus. Charities identifying as primarily disaster responders are much more likely to belong to local emergency planning networks and slightly more likely to plan for emergencies. However, most charity leaders do not acknowledge climate change’s human origins and have not discussed climate change at the board level, with this position strongly related to their understanding of climate change’s potential impact on the communities they serve. And most have not taken some risk mitigation steps. We conclude that the Federal Emergency Management Authority’s national disaster response policy, which relies on the readiness of nonprofits to fill in service roles, does not account for the potential unpreparedness of nonprofits themselves. Policymakers should expand their “whole-community” (three-sector) approach to reinforce local network opportunities as forums for exchanging experience and knowledge, including an explicit linkage between the communication of the science of climate change and emergency planning.

Despite substantial progress on understanding the influence of nonprofits in the policy process, the role of nonprofits in local agenda setting remains under-examined. Policy for land conservation is a key plank in climate change mitigation strategies making the role of land trusts in agenda setting for land conservation votes an important topic. Prior studies demonstrate that temperature anomalies increase the likelihood that climate change policy appears on state political agendas. We propose that land trusts play a critical role in facilitating this connection at the local level. Temperature anomalies create a policy window which contributes to the likelihood that conservation measures make it onto the political agenda. Combining temperature, land trust presence, and local conservation vote data from U.S. counties from 2009 to 2019, we find that both temperature anomalies and the presence of land trusts increase the probability that a land conservation measure will appear on the local political agenda. Further, we find that the effect of temperature anomalies on the probability of a vote taking place is conditional on land trust presence within the county. The findings advance existing nonprofit theory on ways in which nonprofits engage in the policy process and hint towards promising avenues of future research. The findings also provide practical evidence for practitioners and hold implications for how local policymakers can leverage existing organizations to implement climate change policy.

Environmental nonprofit organizations (ENPOs) play a critical role in climate governance. Though ENPOs dedicate significant efforts to advocacy and providing public services, their interaction with public opinion on global warming has not been fully explored. Through multilevel regression analysis on county-level data in the U.S., this article examines the relationship between the presence of ENPOs and public perceptions of global warming, taking into account variations among ENPOs. The findings indicate that: (1) the overall presence of ENPOs is slightly, but not significantly, positively correlated with public perceptions of global warming, with advocacy-oriented ENPOs showing a more robust and statistically significant correlation; (2) there is an inverted-U relationship between the presence of ENPOs and public opinion on global warming, with advocacy-oriented ENPOs reaching tipping points earlier than service-oriented ENPOs; and (3) the partisanship of liberal counties influences this association. This study suggests a potential role for nonprofits in policymaking by interacting with public opinion.

In efforts to address the far-reaching effects of climate change and associated impacts in communities, research on environmental philanthropy suggests that more resources are being allocated to environmental societal challenges. However, understandings about which environmental nonprofits benefit from these funding flows is limited. This study integrates resource dependency theory with elitism and pluralism perspectives to analyze a network of environmental nonprofits and their funders in Texas. Resource dependency and a network-analytic approaches share underlying relationality principles, and we connect those dots by conceptualizing the funding dynamics in Texas as a network of funder-grantee relations. Drawing on statewide survey data ( n  = 114), we use a network analysis technique – exponential random graph modeling (ERGM) – to analyze funding allocations in Texas through the organizational attributes of environmental nonprofits, their funder-grantee relations, and their community context. We specifically observe elitism in funding allocations in Texas, which is evident in network effects (preferential attachment) and the focal areas of environmental work. However, we find limited evidence that age or resources of the nonprofit are predictive of funding and the most influential factor determining a funder-grantee relationship is the natural hazard risk of the community served by the nonprofit. Our findings suggest interconnected funding dynamics of pluralism and elitism in the Texas environmental philanthropy landscape, prompting further discussion about the potential synergies of these patterns and the implications for environmental funding practices.