Volume 8, Issue 4 -

Introductory essay to the special issue on: Civil Society and nonprofits in the age of new public governance: Current trends and their implications for theory and practice.

This paper offers an empirically-based overview of changes and challenges for UK civil society in the first years of the twenty-first century. It draws together recent published research findings about volunteering and smaller civil society organizations, discerning themes in published studies by the author and other researchers. It concludes with a discussion about the inter-relationship between changes in civil society and changes in public policy, including new public governance and the marketization of the welfare state.

We discuss the implications of the new public governance and its impact on the social and economic outcomes of those experiencing poverty. As members of civil society, religious congregations are actively engaged in supporting people living in poverty with short-term responses. Addressing the societal focus on economic justice and the theological traditions of four world religions, this paper seeks to encourage religious congregations into innovative, actionable responses that help to offer long-term responses that align with poverty alleviation. We propose two approaches—community development and financial development— that serve as models for religious congregations interested in alleviating poverty.

Policy advocacy is an eminent feature of the activities of non-profit human service organizations (NPHSOs), allowing them to represent their constituencies, in addition to their core activity as providers of social services in welfare states. The article presents findings on the advocacy tactics of 47 NPHSOs in Israel, focusing on the ways in which partnership policies in the age of New Public Governance affect their activities. The findings reveal that the shift towards increased governmental funding and contracting-out to nonprofits, as part of the NPG scheme, increases opportunities for the NPHSOs to influence public policy, using a wide variety of both insider cooperative tactics and more confrontational outsider tactics. NPHSOs are firstly concerned with establishing their insider status, using cooperative tactics. After achieving this goal, they feel confident enough to turn to more aggressive outsider tactics, utilizing their relative power as major providers of social services.

New Public Governance urges public services to collaborate with other relevant organizations in order to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of provided services. A relevant venue for such collaborations are co-located nonprofit centers, facilities that offer affordable, shared space workplaces for nonprofits and other social-benefit organizations. Many of these centers actively encourage collaboration among their tenants, especially in facilities organized to house related service-providers. They also provide comfortable space for meetings with public sector agencies and other funders. Such centers have been growing in the twenty-first century; nearly 400 have been identified in the United States and Canada (Nonprofit Centers Network 2015a), and they now house hundreds of various nonprofits organizations. This article describes these centers’ goals, history, and trends that encouraged their development, and aspects of their architecture and design. Examples of co-located nonprofit centers that provide an array of social services are presented, from the U.S. and Canada. In sum, these centers help advance the quality of life for clienteles and communities; and the collaborations and networks that they establish promote a key goal of New Public Governance.

New Public Governance’s approach to public management seeks to both decrease costs and to increase the overall efficiency and effectiveness of publicly-funded services. It further emphasizes effective, efficient collaborations among service providers, and well-functioning networks of service-providers connected with government funders. One conceivable vehicle to promote collaborations among nonprofits providing contracted services is to establish co-located nonprofit centers. In such a multi-tenant building, its owner or master lease-holder, which is usually a nonprofit, would recruit other nonprofits to rent space and use shared resources and/or services in its shared-space workplace. Typically, these workplaces are more affordable, stable, efficient, and of higher quality than their current offices. Also, nonprofit centers often enthusiastically promote cooperation and collaboration among their tenants. Several hundred such centers already exist in the United States and Canada. Two profiles of two nonprofit centers where co-located organizations collaboratively provide social services, as well as some survey results, are presented to illustrate that nonprofit center sites are indeed operational and could be a vehicle to help support collaborative goals of New Public Governance.