Volume 9, Issue 4 -

This paper employs Oliver Williamson’s transaction cost approach to assess contracting. We find that donor contracting with global non-profit chains is conducive to NPO opportunism due to the asset specificity of the contracts, infrequent contracting, and the uncertainty of outcomes. These risks are further exacerbated by the weak enforcement mechanisms available in many developing countries. Williamson’s framework predicts that these risks would tempt donors to resort to the muscular approach, where they would exercise maximum control over the non-profit chain. Although competition would be a safeguard against the muscular approach, the donor landscape suffers from collusion and is monopsonistic. Our analysis suggests that while the current contracting and oversight arrangements might serve the donor procedural objective to exercise control in a sector marked by information asymmetries, these arrangements can undermine the primary objective of donors, namely responsiveness to beneficiaries, and ultimately, improved beneficiary welfare. We illustrate our conceptual analysis with short case studies of three Ugandan NPOs.

Substantial public budget constraints across the United States have increased reliance on charities for some public service provision. This article builds a unique historical dataset and presents the first systematic look at the charities supporting U.S. national and state parks through the lens of coproduction along with other major theories of government-voluntary interaction and its consequences. The results suggest that parks-supporting charities are involved in a multi-dimensional pattern of coproduction with distinct and differentiated forms of involvement in public service provision at the state and federal levels. Their growth over time reflects theories of government failure and philanthropic insufficiency. And their permanency suggests the value of greater understanding of public service reliance on private philanthropy.

The last few decades have witnessed radical reform of charity regulation around the world. Australia has not been untouched and has developed several unique approaches. First, unlike many other federations (such as the US and Canada), Australia relies on a charities commission rather than its federal tax authority to act as the principal regulator, resulting in a very different scope of responsibility and the likelihood of greater interaction with state regulators. Second, unlike many other jurisdictions that have implemented a charities commission (such as England and Wales), the Australian commission is ultimately intended to apply to a broader pool of not-for-profits than just charities, which raises fundamental questions about the ways in which charities differ from the not-for-profit sector more broadly. This paper outlines the historical and political reasons for reform in Australia and the shape of that reform. As the reforms have now achieved broad political and sector support, the chief focus of this paper is on the out-workings of the reforms, with particular attention to the challenges and opportunities posed by Australia’s federal system of government and by the charity commission’s potential to regulate the broader not-for-profit sector.

Scholarship and practitioners interested in civil society organizations (CSOs) around the world have drawn attention to the growing set of laws—both restrictive and permissive—governing CSO activities. To date, however, there have been limited efforts to typologize these regulations which hinders the ability to analyze their emergence and effects. This article seeks to move scholarship toward a coherent framework by first, introducing a broad typology of governance, formation, operations , and resources provisions that allows for a systematic study of CSO laws and policies across contexts; and second, proposing four ideal-types of regulatory regimes, rigid-conservatism, bureaucratic-illiberalism, permissionless-association , and legitimized-pluralism . These regulatory regimes are political institutions that consist of multiple laws and constitutional protections that govern and protect civil society. The article theorizes the effect of each ideal-type regulatory regime on CSOs’ organizational ecology. To provide a concrete example, I apply the typology to the case of Kenya to show how its regulatory regime has changed incrementally over time. Methodologically, the article uses an iterative, inductive review and analysis of academic articles, book chapters, and practitioner reports contributing to our understanding of the laws and policies that regulate CSOs, or what I call CSO regulatory regimes .

In the US and increasingly internationally as well, considerable efforts have been made in recent years to introduce new legal forms, such as the benefit corporation, at the local level as an additional structural option for social entrepreneurs. These efforts have been met with considerable apprehension on the part of nonprofit sector advocates, who perceive these new organizational forms as potential competition. This paper investigates whether the benefit corporation is in fact a likely competitive threat to nonprofits. Presenting the findings of an early uptake study, it reviews the early experience with the state-level introduction of the benefit corporation in Maryland, the first state to adopt the new legal form.