Local Nonprofit Welfare Provision: The United States and Russia

Abstract

Provision of antipoverty and other social services by nonstate organizations is growing in importance in both the United States and the Russian Federation. Th e history of such provision in the United States may off er insights for the emerging system of nonstate provision in Russia. To illuminate these points, we provide historical overviews of both contexts and then we examine data from two surveys of social service organizations in the United States: the Multi-City Survey of Social Service Providers and the Rural Survey of Social Service Providers.We fi nd that nonstate actors strengthen social capital in poor neighborhoods and oft en link poor persons to public agencies. Nonstate actors strengthen other local institutions through programmatic partnerships and collaboration. However, fi nancing arrangements of nonstate welfare provision may favor effi ciency over concerns about equity, sustainability, and predictability. In addition, the primacy of nonstate provision leads to a welfare state that is more varied geographically than might be anticipated otherwise. Such variability appears to disadvantage highpoverty and predominately minority communities the most. Finally, politically, nonstate welfare provision may occur with little public discussion, debate, or refl ection as it evolves over time. Th ese fi ndings invoke important questions for Russian policy-makers as they seek to develop an equitable and effi cient means of providing assistance to their population.

Institutional Logics and Diverging Organizational Forms: An Empirical Study in Russia

“…After the breakup of the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation began providing targeted and means tested social welfare at the regional level (Balachova, Bonner, & Levy, 2009;Evans, 2006;Ferge, 2001;Standing, 1996;Trygged, 2009;Zimakova, 1994). NGOs, both grassroots and international, then emerged in Russia to provide social services (Petukhov, 2008;Salmenniemi, 2010;Wathen & Allard, 2014). Social service NGOs became a majority share of the Russian civic organization sector (Cook & Vinogradova, 2006;Henderson, 2003;Tarasenko, 2018).…”

Putting Nonprofits on the Policy Agenda of Post-Soviet Russia: A Story of Convergence

“…In short, Kingdon’s MSF offers useful insights pinpointing why the possibility of integrating nonprofit providers into Russia’s human service delivery system never made it on to the active reform agenda during the first decade of post-Soviet policymaking. This is all the more striking in view of the social welfare crisis that the transition to a market economy triggered by eliminating a key component of the former regime’s social welfare system: the state-owned enterprises that actually provided many of the crucial social welfare services (Wathen & Allard, 2014). Nor did the more systematic plan for coping with this crisis that emerged from the so-called “Gref Center” at the turn of the century acknowledge a significant role for NPOs.…”

New Spaces in the Public Arena: Learnings From Gipuzkoa

“…It is important to add that in every country these schemes are organized in very diff erent ways, depending on the existing needs, the historical evolution and the ideological motivations. For example, regarding the third sector, while in some countries its involvement in welfare provision entails a new governance model (Kolin, 2009; Nałecz, Les & Pielin'ski, 2015; Wathen & Scott, 2014), for others, as occurs in Spain, it represents the status quo (Brandsen & Pestoff , 2006;Brandsen & Pape, 2015). Th is means that the participation of the third sector in the provision of services is nothing new for the great majority of European countries, but its role is increasingly prominent.…”

“…One of the issues that exemplifi es this trend is how the third sector's economic dependence on public administration has led it to become an 'extension' of the public sector and to adopt guidelines belonging to the bureaucratic culture of public administration, which has caused the contraction of its original purpose and function of channeling social demands and complaints (Izquieta, Callejo & Prieto, 2008). Additionally, Wathen and Scott (2014) point out that government funding can entice non state actors to service delivery areas or activities that may not fi t an organization's "original mission".…”