Americans have long formed nonprofits to voluntarily coproduce public services. However, demand perspectives on the development of the nonprofit sector and supply perspectives on the activation of civic engagement suggest potentially contradictory explanations of collective coproduction. Using the case of nonprofit support for public k-12 education, the authors explore the community- and school-level determinants of nonprofit coproduction of public education. Their findings suggest that nonprofit coproduction is influenced by unmet demand for public services and the supply of human and financial resources necessary to engage in collective action. Although the formation of a nonprofit to support a public school may be related to the demand generated by heterogeneous preferences of service beneficiaries and the human capital to self-organize, the ability to generate a significant level of financial resources to support coproduction is related to the resources of the service beneficiaries and their integration into the larger community.

The practice of policy advocacy by organizations has outpaced its theoretical development. Yet the importance of a theoretical grounding for advocacy campaigns has increased with the need for accountability and an understanding of advocates' contributions to policy development. This article synthesizes practitioner and academic literature on policy advocacy and proposes a conceptual framework of policy advocacy inputs, activities, and outcomes. Five distinct advocacy strategies are hypothesized: enhancing a democratic environment, applying public pressure, influencing decision makers, direct reform, and implementation change. This framework provides guidelines for organizations to strategically engage policy processes, while directing a research agenda on advocacy organizations.

Creating “community” has long been a goal of urban planners. Although such rhetoric abounds in planning circles, what it all means is unclear. In this article, the authors review the community psychology and urban planning literature, defining sense of community within the context of how the built environment might facilitate or impede it. They then present their research, which tests the effects of “main street” on sense of community in four San Francisco neighborhoods. Results indicate that respondents in neighborhoods exhibiting characteristics of a main street town (Bernal Heights and West Portal) have significantly higher sense of community than do respondents from a high-density neighborhood (Nob Hill) and from a more suburban-style city neighborhood (Sunset).

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Perhaps the most prevalent form of privatization, in terms of incidents of its use, is contracting out for services. This is especially true in state departments of transportation (DOTs), which have seen a rapidly growing reliance on contracted professional services in recent years. With this growth has come a variety of managerial issues that speak to the efficacy of this mode of service production. In this article we identify and analyze these issues by first reviewing the literature on managing contracted professional services, with a focus on the experiences of DOTs. We complement the review with an in-depth, multicase examination of the experiences of one state DOT over the span of a decade, to better understand their changing conditions, motives, and impacts of large-scale contracting out. We conclude that problems associated with contracting out could be avoided with planned changes in procedures, organizational structures, and human resource demands.

Policy advocacy is an increasingly important function for many nonprofit organizations, yet their advocacy activities have largely escaped theoretical grounding. The literature on nonprofits has described how they engage in policy advocacy, without linking them to theories of policy change. The policy studies literature, on the other hand, has explained how various forms of influence result in policy change, but has largely ignored organizational perspectives on those processes. These two literatures remain largely disconnected. Drawing upon interviews with a purposive sample of policy advocacy directors at 31 nonprofit organizations, this study applies Q‐methodology to identify and describe six distinct policy advocacy strategies employed by the organizations, and their resonant theoretical views of policy processes. These findings suggest strategic approaches for nonprofits seeking to influence policy processes. They also enhance the academic literature on policy processes by adding the advocates’ views and expectations. Implications for further research are also identified.

Contemporary wastewater management requires greater engagement of the public for reasons beneficial to both the public and wastewater managers. Such engagement, however, is contingent upon the public's requisite knowledge of the wastewater system, and significant factors work against the public's ability or willingness to understand the system.

Environmental justice is often viewed as an access point for disadvantaged communities to engage the policy process to prevent their exploitation by more established policy players. The mostly untested assumption of it, however, is that communities have accurate perceptions of the distribution of environmental harms. This study tests this assumption with data on San Francisco's wastewater system. Survey data from residents were coupled with operational data on various wastewater system problems. When compared, these data suggest that people's perceptions of the distribution of environmental harms do not match empirical measures of it. Instead, perceptions of neighborhoods' exposures were more associated with socio‐economic and physical characteristics of the neighborhoods than their actual exposures. In essence, perceptions of environmental justice resembled social equity issues more than environmental equity issues. These findings have implications for the changing roles of government agencies and the public in their efforts to achieve environmental justice and sustainable development. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.