Toward a Governance Framework for Government–Nonprofit Relations

Summary

The dominant sector-based approach to government–nonprofit relations—rooted in economic theories of voluntary, government, and contract failure—has generated important insights but has increasingly obscured the complex, boundary-blurring realities of how government agencies and nonprofit organizations actually engage with each other. This chapter proposes governance—defined as the relationships, interactions, conditions, and rules between government and nonprofit organizations that give rise to goal-setting, steering, and implementation of public issues—as a more analytically productive framework. Reviewing recent scholarship along three orientations (institutional conditions, individual motivations, and interorganizational relations), the authors show how a governance lens advances research on the four normative stakes most critical in the current period: fairness, effectiveness, accountability, and legitimacy.

Cite

@incollection{marwell2020toward,
  author = {Marwell, Nicole P. and Brown, Maoz},
  title = {Toward a Governance Framework for Government--Nonprofit Relations},
  booktitle = {The Nonprofit Sector: A Research Handbook},
  editor = {Powell, Walter W. and Bromley, Patricia},
  edition = {3rd},
  pages = {231--252},
  publisher = {Stanford University Press},
  year = {2020}
}