Comparing Third Sector Expansions¹

Keywords:

• nonprofit
• third sector
• path dependency

Introduction

Since the final decades of the twentieth century, there has been an exponential growth in the activities and influence of nongovernment, nonprofit, mission-driven organizations in almost every country in the world (Salamon 1994; Colás 2002; Salamon and Sokolowski 2010; Casey 2016). The legal structures for such organizations vary among polities, but worldwide they occupy a third space, or sector, between the state and market, and they have become more dominant in the delivery of quasi-public services, the promotion of civic action, and in policymaking.

As the articles in this Special Issue demonstrate, the nomenclature used for these organizations also varies. In the USA, they are most commonly referred to as nonprofit organizations, but elsewhere descriptors such as third sector, civil society, nongovernmental, philanthropic, social, community, or voluntary are also used. While there are nuances in the meanings of these terms, and there may be legal definitions that distinguish between them in some jurisdictions, the preference in any polity may be as much a result of linguistic fashion or tradition as any strict conceptual definition.¹

In addition to being more numerous and influential, modern third sector organizations (perhaps better portrayed as “late modern” or even “post-modern”) are markedly more secular and nonpartisan in their affiliations, more universalist in their service delivery and policymaking aspirations, and more professionalized and commercialized in their operations than earlier iterations rooted in religious charity, political movements, or grassroots collective and voluntary action. In industrialized democratic countries with a longer history of independent associational life, the third sector has expanded and become an integral element in the development and delivery of public goods and services. In developing countries and those with authoritarian or single-party regimes, a nascent sector has more openly been pushing against previous constraints and opening up spaces of civic participation, often in concert with authorities that previously had spurned them and may continue to constrain them to a limited repertoire of approved activities.

The Expansion of the Third Sector

The expansion of the third sector is partly a spontaneous phenomenon – the bottom-up growth in social action, activism, and civic participation. At the same time, it is also the consequence of deliberate, top-down, developmental policies by governments that see them as instruments for achieving their own objectives, by the for-profit business sector seeking to demonstrate its adherence to corporate social responsibilities, and by the growing third sector itself that seeks to perpetuate and expand its activities.

No single ideology has dominated the discussions in favor of expanding the third sector. Conservatives consider them a key source of nongovernmental initiatives for counterbalancing state power and introducing market forces into the delivery of public services. Progressives see them as the embodiment of grassroots activism that more effectively delivers services to the most needy. Third sector organizations give organizational form to sentiments such as the distrust of governmental institutions and the yearning for arenas for independent action, which neither the political right nor the left necessarily monopolize.

The third sector is immensely heterogeneous. Some organizations are large mainstream health, education, and cultural institutions that function similarly to for-profit firms and have close relations to governments and corporations. Most are smaller, hardscrabble organizations providing shoestring services or pushing for systemic change from the fringe. Definitive global figures on the growth of the third sector are not available as there is no single international repository of comprehensive statistics, but many studies document the increases in numbers and salience within countries. The growth is not constant – in any country there are spurts and contractions that reflect the short-term impacts of political transitions, economic cycles, and changing legislation or regulations – but the significant upward trend is the norm around the world.

The expansion of the third sector has not been universally welcomed or embraced in all polities. Critiques of the “nonprofit industrial complex” abound (see Buffett 2013), and there are many instances of pushback against organizations that seek to operate outside the boundaries of the state-sanctioned expansion of the sector. Emerging countries and those moving towards more authoritarian and illiberal regimes have witnessed growth in a wide range of nonprofits, but they are also the epicenters of an “associational counterrevolution” (Rutzen 2015) and of “closing civic space” (USAID 2017) as their governments tighten restrictions on foreign funding and seek to constrain any domestic operations perceived as threats.

The Challenges of Comparing National Nonprofit Sectors

The origins, functions, and modes of operation of the third sector in each country reflect its unique social, economic, and political history. Historical path dependency is a well-established concept in social sciences, and in third sector studies Anheier and Salamon (1998) speak of “social origins” and “nonprofit regimes” while Anheier and Kendall (2001) identify “national scripts”.

Although in the last decades there has been an increasingly common global discourse about the growth of the sector, the recent growth in the third sector is grafted onto very different national rootstocks. The focus of the articles in this Special Issue is primarily on comparing contemporary third sectors, but path dependency and social origins approaches are based on understanding how the history of each polity has conditioned current dynamics.

In industrialized countries, guilds and fraternal societies that once dominated associative sectors have become shadows of their former selves; mutual financial institutions such as local savings and loans societies have amalgamated and de-mutualized; and trade unions, mainstream religions, and political parties have all seen membership plummet. In developing countries, traditional associative structures based on ethnicities, religions, kinship, localities, or trades are being swept away as “modernization”, “development”, and “globalization” (all highly contested concepts) take hold. Political transitions transform former clandestine opposition networks into new legal organizations, or simply foster new spaces of independent, non-state action.

Analyses of the expansion of the third sector in industrialized democracies note the higher rate of nonprofit development in Protestant and Anglo-Saxon common law societies as a result of a political, religious, and social culture that encourages self-organization (Anheier 1990). In Catholic, continental European and civil law countries, the tendency is to a greater obedience to the authority of the state and religious hierarchies. Consequently, the social contract for the service dimension of the welfare state (as opposed to the cash transfer dimension) in Catholic-continental countries focuses on its funding and delivery by government institutions, while in Anglo-Saxon Protestant countries the voluntary sector has taken a larger role.

Other broad-brush portrayals of the differences between national sectors include the contrast between industrialized, democratic countries where the growing number of third sector organizations is seen as evidence of a hollowing out of government, whereas in developing and authoritarian countries, the growth is seen as a filling in of a formalized civil society.

There is no shortage of comparative studies of the third sector. Most notably, the Johns Hopkins University Comparative Nonprofit Sector project (Johns Hopkins 2019), CIVICUS (2019), International Center for Not-for-Profit Law (2019), and United States Agency for International Development (USAID) through its Civil Society Organization (CSO) Sustainability Index (USAID 2019) all regularly issue comparative reports on third sectors around the world. In addition, there is long list of more specific indexes generated by research centers and professional associations, including: Charities Aid Foundation, which publishes a World Giving Index (Charities Aid Foundation 2019); UN Volunteers office launched State of the World’s Volunteerism Report (UN Volunteers 2018); the UK’s Management Center publishes the Big Mac Philanthropy Index (The Management Centre 2013); and the Edelman Trust Barometer (The Edelman Trust 2019) measures the public’s trust in business, government, nongovernment organizations, and media.

These research projects combine a series of indicators on economic, political, and social contexts, as well as the regulatory and institutional environments and other socio-cultural norms. The sum total of this research has been used to postulate the existence of different national third sector patterns, models, or frames (Casey 2016).

This Special Issue

The four articles in this Special Issue provide an excellent overview of the current state of comparative policy research on the third sector.

Marta Rey-Garcia’s article demonstrates a framework indicative of the methodologies for comparing third sectors around the world. Her article focuses on one segment of the third sector, philanthropic foundations operating in Western Europe, but the framework is also commonly used as the basis for broader comparative analyses. The cornerstone of the comparisons are welfare regimes, such as those identified by Esping-Andersen (1990), and their relation to the size of the sector. Rey-Garcia uses a version of a welfare regime model developed by Anheier and Daly (2007) to identify four key models – Statist, Liberal, Social Democratic, and Corporatist – and then generates a multidimensional framework that identifies policy milestones, levers, and alternatives.

Susan App and Fabian Telch use a case study approach to examine the operations of small grassroots international nongovernment organizations (GINGOs) based in the USA and working in three low-income countries: South Sudan, Nepal, and Haiti. They compare the operating environments for GINGOS in those countries as well as the local relations of the USA organizations, mindsets of the principals of the organizations and meanings they attach to the private development work, and how they seek to distinguish themselves from larger international aid organizations.

Stefan Toepler, Ulla Paper, and Vladimir Benevolenski apply a comparative framework to analyze subnational patterns of government–nonprofit relations in Russia, based on variations along three key dimensions: regional prosperity, openness of sub-national political systems, and the strength of the regional nonprofit sectors.

Finally, Güneş Ertan’s article situates the policy advocacy activities of civil society organizations in Turkey in the broader international theorizing about policy systems and non-state collective action. She uses an Advocacy Coalition Framework and an analysis of network structures to explore how Turkish civil society organizations worked to repeal a child abuse bill.

All four articles make meaningful and significant contributions to our current understanding of the peculiarities of third sectors in different polities, and suggest pathways and methodologies for further comparative explorations.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

John Casey

John Casey is a Professor in the Marxe School of Public and International Affairs at Baruch College, City University of New York. From 1999 to 2007, he was a Senior Lecturer in management, leadership and governance at the Australian Graduate School of Policing, Charles Sturt University. Previous to his academic career, he held executive positions in public and nonprofit organizations in Australia, Spain and the USA. He is the author of numerous articles and books on the nonprofit sector, immigration and policing, including The Nonprofit World: Civil Society and the Rise of the Nonprofit Sector, published by Lynne Rienner Press in 2016.

Notes

1. This introductory article will primarily use the term third sector to refer to these organizations. Other terms will appear when quoting relevant research and the introductions to the Special Issue articles use the authors’ preferred terms.