Beyond the Partnership Paradigm: Toward an Extended Typology of Government/Nonprofit Relationship Patterns

Abstract

This article takes a fresh look at nonprofit/government relations in the context of both the partnership literature on collaboration and the closing space literature on repression. Following the Weberian ideal-type approach, we develop a heuristic tool for nuanced analyses of relations between the sectors in comparative research that is applicable in diverse political regime settings. We integrate foundational conceptions of Salamon, Young, and Najam to develop our framework, which we then illustrate with the cases of Russia and China. While repression is not necessarily the predominant characteristic of nonprofit–government relations in authoritarian regime settings, the reduction of intersectoral relations to collaboration strategies common in Western contexts also falls short of capturing the full complexity of the relationship. Rather than trying to establish national patterns, researchers need to remain sensitive to the coexistence of multiple government/nonprofit relationship types, affecting various parts of the nonprofit sector differently.

Exploring Collaborative Governance Processes Involving Nonprofits

“…The role of the nonprofit sector has then steadily shifted from being mainly a service provider to becoming a partner not only in service delivery (Brown et al, 2008) but also in policy formulation (Ansell & Gash, 2008; Bryson et al, 2006; Cornforth et al, 2015), developing a more collaborative and pluralistic welfare system (Buckingham, 2009). Although government–nonprofit relations have been theorized and explored by several studies (see, for example, Brinkerhoff, 2002; De Corte & Verschuere, 2014; McLaughlin & Osborne, 2003; Najam, 2000; Toepler et al, 2022; Young, 2000), scattered studies have examined the relation between government–nonprofit organizations specifically in the form of collaborative governance, instead focusing on other phases of policy development or service delivery (see, for example, Andrews & Entwistle, 2010; Gazley & Guo, 2015; Mazzei et al, 2020; Peng et al, 2020).…”

Civil society and democratization: The role of service‐providing organizations amid closing civic spaces

“…While supporting CSOs and enabling their service provision function is an important endeavor from a democracy building point of view, it has to be balanced with other considerations, especially the importance of core civil society functions such as advocacy and representation, as the articles contributed to this special issue on atrocity prevention in South Sudan by Appe and colleagues and gender and reproductive rights in Brazil by Segatto and associates, among others, illustrate. In fact, both democratic and authoritarian regimes can have collaborative, neutral or adversarial relations with civil society and adjust core relationship roles of financing public services, service delivery, regulation, and consultation and advocacy accordingly (Toepler et al., 2022). Service provision and advocacy are often complementary and CSOs can take advantage of emerging openings where even hostile governments make adjustments, as was the case, for example, with China's “embedded activism” in which the Chinese government sought collaboration with environmental NGOs to combat pollution (Dai & Spires, 2018; Ho, 2007).…”

“…An important discussion in the scholarship on service‐providing CSOs is the issue of cooptation that is more likely to occur in contexts with strong, albeit undemocratic, governments and weak civil society. Although cooptation is frequently inappropriately conceptualized (Toepler et al., 2022), nonprofit service providers can be coopted by domestic governments and used to advance their own non‐democratic goals, thus “helping” to strengthen authoritarian regimes (Brumberg, 2002; Herrold, 2016). In these types of contexts, service‐providing CSOs may be framed as partners of government and be effectively used to leverage both foreign funding and local private donations in support of the domestic regimes.…”

Unpacking ‘public silence’: Civil society activism under authoritarian rule in Ethiopia

“…Nevertheless, with the exception of Toepler et al. (2022), existing frameworks have not captured context specific factors in non‐democratic and non‐Western contexts. Moreover, as noted by Toepler et al.…”

“…However, civil society-state relations in non-democratic (and also democratic) settings have also been approached by a separate strand of literature, namely research exploring the non-profit (or third) sector broadly (Brinkerhoff, 2002;Coston, 1998;Najam, 2000;Young, 2000). Nevertheless, with the exception of Toepler et al (2022), existing frameworks have not captured context specific factors in non-democratic and non-Western contexts. Moreover, as noted by Toepler et al (2020), many of the existing models for civil society-state relations in third sector research are abstract and do not capture nuances in civil society-state relations.…”