A Cooperative Approach to Accountability: Manitoba's Family Violence Prevention Program

Abstract

Can government's need for nonprofit accountability be accomplished without diminishing nonprofit organizations’ ability to pursue their goals of responsiveness and flexibility? The conventional view argues that governments’ accountability objectives conflict with nonprofits’ objectives, implying that there must be some tradeoff. This article adopts the emerging alternative view in which the two parties’ objectives are jointly pursued through a cooperative process. The analysis of a provincial funding program in Manitoba, Canada, presented here, provides evidence that such an approach is not only possible but also efficient. The program analyzed rests on a sustained cooperative process in which government officials and nonprofit managers jointly define goals and establish constraints.

Notes

^aWith respect to the ultimate futility of government's trying to achieve accountability by imposing monitoring and controls, Bogart agrees with Fry: “Monitoring has one important problem as a solution: If I know so much about doing the job, why not do it myself? More generally, monitoring requires the expenditure of valuable resources by the principal and may actually have perverse effects on the incentives of the agent. That is, people may do a better job if they are not monitored closely because they may be inspired to work harder to prove that they deserve the trust” (p. 165).12

^bNo other Canadian province or territory has a program like the FVPP at the time of writing. However, family violence prevention is prioritized somewhere in each provincial or territorial government's structure. We attempted to interview at least one government worker in the area of family violence prevention from each province or territory. Just over half of the 13 jurisdictions responded to our inquiry. These inquiries do not provide sufficient information for a comparative analysis, but they corroborate our perception that the FVPP is possibly unique in Canada.

^cGovernment's insistence on making decisions about specific service parameters, such as the number of days women may seek shelter, hours of operation for a women's resource center, and so forth, has been a long-standing source of friction between women's organizations and their government funders, as described by Refs.5 22 Smith provides further examples of government dictating women's organizations’ administrative decisions and selection of clients23.

^dEven though the FVPP does not fully fund organizations, the organizations covered by the FVPP are in a completely different situation than organizations that depend primarily on short-term project funding, or that receive long-term funding through a noncooperative process. Executive directors of organizations in the FVPP spend most of their time focusing on service provision and management (as should be the case for all organizations), seem to face considerably less counterproductive stress, and are confident of the stability and sustainability of their service provision.