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| Path: Main Street : Resources & Library : Research Articles : Feature Article |
The international rise of the nonprofit sector, a global "associational revolution"October 30, 1996; Canadian FundRaiser
The international rise of the nonprofit sector, a global "associational revolution" A striking upsurge is under way around the globe in organized voluntary activity and the creation of private, nonprofit or nongovernmental organizations. More than ever, people are forming associations, foundations and similar institutions to deliver human services, promote grassroots economic development, prevent environmental degradation, protect civil rights and pursue a thousand other objectives formerly left unattended or left to the state. Their growth reflects a distinct set of social and technological changes, as well as a long simmering crisis of confidence in the capability of the state.
How can we explain this phenomenon? Pressures to expand the voluntary sector seem to be coming from at least three different sources: from "beloved" in the form of spontaneous grassroots energies, from the "outside" through the actions of various public and private institutions, and from "above" in the form of government policies.
Activists working through grassroots organizations
The most basic force is that of ordinary people who decide to take matters into their own hands and organize to improve their conditions or to seek basic rights. This factor is most clearly at work in the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and the Third World, where activists are working to create a "civil society" through grassroots organizations that work with cooperatives, women's groups, craft and housing associations, mutual aid groups and a host of other local initiatives.There have also been a variety of outside pressures: from the church, Western private voluntary organizations and official aid agencies. The Catholic Church in Latin America has seen a marked growth in priests practicing liberation theology, a community-based approach to social justice. Beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, many North American and European charities also shifted their traditional emphasis on humanitarian relief to a new focus on empowerment. Finally, official aid agencies like the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development and even the World Bank have supplemented and subsidized these private initiatives and are showing an increased focus on "participatory development".
The third pressure point forging new nonprofits has come from above, from official government policy circles. The late '80s conservative governments of Reagan and Thatcher made support for the voluntary sector a central part of their strategies to reduce government spending. This shift, however, is also evident in the policies of more socialist governments like France and Norway.
Crises and changes have provoked the growth of the sector
Four crises and two revolutionary changes have converged both to diminish the hold of the state and to open the way for this increase in organized voluntary action. This first of these impulses is the perceived crisis of the modern welfare state. The politics of the welfare state regularly generated pressures for expanded government services that exceeded the willingness of the public to pay for them. Far from simply protecting individuals against unreasonable risk, the welfare state, many believed, was instead stifling initiative, absolving people of personal responsibility and encouraging dependence.Accompanying this crisis of the welfare state has been a crisis of development. The discouraging realities of falling per capita incomes in parts of Africa, Asia and Latin America, and the questionable success of major government to government aid programmes, have stimulated considerable rethinking about the requirements for economic progress. This rethinking has led to the new focus on "participatory development" or "assisted self-reliance", where the poor are active participants in development projects, circumventing what, in many places, are weak state institutions.
A global environmental crisis has also stimulated greater private initiative. The continuing poverty of developing countries has led the poor to degrade their immediate surroundings in order to survive. As the impact of this crisis has become apparent, citizens have grown increasingly frustrated with government and eager to organize their own initiatives.
The final crisis - that of socialism - has also contributed to the rise of the third sector. The failure of this model ushered in a search for new ways to satisfy unmet social and economic needs. While this search helped lead to the formation of market-oriented cooperative enterprises, it has also stimulated extensive experimentation with a host of nongovernmental organizations.
Communication and bourgeois revolutions facilitate change
Beyond the four crises, two further developments also explain the recent surge of third sector organizing. The first is the dramatic revolution in communication that has taken place since the 1970s. The widespread dissemination of the computer, fibre-optic cable, fax, television and satellites opened even the world's most remote locations to the expanded communications links required for mass organization and concerted action.The final factor critical to the growth of the third sector was the considerable global economic growth that occurred during the 1960s and early 1970s, and the bourgeois revolution that it brought with it. This growth not only allowed for material improvement and engendered a new set of popular expectations, but has also helped create in Latin America, Asia and Africa a sizable urban middle class whose leadership was critical to the emergence of private nonprofit organizations.
These broad historical changes and pressures from all sides have opened the way for alternative institutions that can respond more effectively to human needs. With their small scale, flexibility and capacity to engage grassroots energies, nonprofits are ideally suited to fill the gap left by government and the needs of the new environment.
Adapted from an article by Lester M. Salamon, Director of the Institute for Policy Studies at The Johns Hopkins University.
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