Band 3, Heft 2

This issue of Nonprofit Policy Forum is our first special issue and it is led by an editorial team of our partners in Sweden – Marta Reuter, Filip Wijkstrom and Johan von Essen. The issue analyzes a development of growing worldwide interest – the emergence and evolution of formal “compacts” between the nonprofit or voluntary sector and the government in a given country. As the authors here explain, the first compact was established in the United Kingdom in 1998 and has led to adoption and adaptation of compacts in many more countries since then. Moreover, the concept is being pursued not only at the national level, but also in local jurisdictions within federally structured countries as well. In addition, the compact idea has crossed over the boundaries of British commonwealth countries into countries with other policy and governance traditions, including Scandinavia, where the concept has taken on new directions and meanings.

Government-voluntary sector “compacts” have emerged in the recent years as an innovative nonprofit policy practice in many industrialized countries around the world. Originating in England in the late 1990s, the compact phenomenon has today spread to societies with relatively different tracks of inter-sectorial relations and different civil society regimes. This introductory article seeks to chart out the diverse functions that the compact solution seems to perform in different institutional surroundings, and it also opens up for a comparative discussion of the broader socio-political contexts in which this policy instrument has developed.

Since it was first agreed in the autumn of 1998, the English Compact has achieved international status, as a marker of – or vehicle for - a new and improved relationship between the state and the third sector. Over the twelve years or so since its first publication, it has been supplemented by local compacts across the country and has been ‘refreshed’ or renewed twice. As such it has proved remarkably durable across time and space. But the political context in which it operates has now changed. A government committed to partnership has been replaced by one with a strong ideological commitment to limiting the powers and role of the state. How will this affect its future role?

Following a dismal and antagonistic relationship that coincided with three years of deep and sustained cuts to the voluntary sector in the mid 1990s, voluntary sector-federal government relations in Canada finally began to thaw. A number of high level joint meetings between the federal government and voluntary sector leaders in 1999 led to the announcement in June, 2000 of a joint initiative to “renew and strengthen their long-standing relationship”. This five-year $94.6 million investment entitled the Voluntary Sector Initiative (VSI) included the signing of a Voluntary Sector Accord; personnel exchange programs; policy engagement projects; two major national surveys; a national volunteerism initiative; and numerous capacity building projects.The VSI program ended in 2005 with a change in the governing Liberal party leadership and the subsequent election of a minority Conservative government. Drawing on John Kingdon’s multiple streams framework, this article takes a broad analysis of problems, policies, and political processes across multiple provinces to examine if the VSI may have influenced a third wave of sub-national level policy initiatives. While contextual differences at a provincial level clearly influence the status, structure, and scope of sub-national voluntary sector-government relations, it appears the VSI did contribute in a number of ways to these sub-national initiatives.

The Australian Labor Party (ALP) formed government under Prime Minister Kevin Rudd in 2007 promising to consult with the not-for-profit sector on the development of a national compact. It was the government’s aim to forge a new settlement with the sector after eleven years of Liberal/National Coalition government during which contractual governance rather than relational governance was the norm. The provenance of the National Compact, launched in March 2010, can be traced back to similar framework documents for inter-sectoral cooperation in the United Kingdom (principally, The Compact) and Canada (the Accord). The National Compact) cannot be explained solely in terms of policy diffusion or the predilection of centre-right political parties for policy instruments of this sort. Rather, explanation requires a more nuanced contextual analysis of the political and policy environment within which these frameworks emerged. In this article we compare the range of factors contributing to the development of The Compact (UK), the Accord) (Canada) and the National Compact (Australia). We apply a similar analysis to policy frameworks in selected Australian states. We conclude that compacts arrive on the policy agenda via the opening of policy windows and through the actions of policy entrepreneurs. Policy windows and the attention of policy entrepreneurs might be both contextual and therefore, time-limited. We consider the range of factors that appear to have a bearing on the impact and durability of inter-sectoral policy frameworks in each jurisdiction in order to draw tentative conclusions about the prospects for the Australian National Compact.

England was one of the first countries to install a Compact to regulate the relationship between state and civil society and since then several other countries have followed and initiated national Agreements, Charters or Concordats. Despite a growing academic interest into such national Compact models we have insufficient knowledge of how such ideas ‘from abroad’ are adapted and molded to fit with ‘domestic’ legacies, institutions and power disparities. The purpose of this article is to analyze the translation of the English Compact into a Swedish context and above all how domestic Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) acted to adjust such an international model to a national context. The article draws upon studies of written documents and interviews with key actors (politicians and CSO representatives) and two main conclusions are being presented. First, the article demonstrates that CSOs played an important role as translation agents as they identified the Compact idea long before key decision makers did, yet that the complete translation of the Compact model into a Swedish context was dependent upon the political will and ownership of central decision-makers. Second, the article demonstrates that the translation process was not as ordered as sometimes depicted within the translation literature and instead chains of translation processes was detected. These findings address a need to open up the translation perspective for the analysis of multiple types of translation agents and to understand translation as a nested process, in which one translation process might very well be interrelated with other parallel translation processes.

The vision was to form an agreement between the government, idea-based organizations in the social sphere, and the Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions. One of the aims was to clarify the role of the idea-based organizations in the social sector, making it possible for them operate and compete on equal terms with the public and private actors. I was to lead a small group of people working in the ministries of Integration and Gender Equality and Ministry of Health and Social Affairs. The working group would report to Christer Hallerby and his colleague Karin Johansson.

As the articles in this special issue demonstrate, the emergence of government-voluntary sector compacts around the world is intimately linked to comprehensive transformations the welfare state is undergoing in many countries. The fact that the first compact was developed in England is significant; since the early 20th century, the development of the welfare state in many societies has been significantly influenced by the ideas coming from policymakers, scholars and advocates in the United Kingdom.