In Chapter 7, we expand on the working roles of dogs and classify current canine occupations. We introduce the theory of comparative advantage and note its important role in evolutionary science. We classify canine occupations in terms of two dimensions: the type of dog advantage (comparative, absolute, or unique) and whether the occupation requires a higher or lower level of training. These occupations include service (guide, hearing, disabled, and psychiatric assistance), emotional support, therapy, hunting, herding, racing, search & rescue, substance detection, police work, diabetic alerting, cancer detection, and seizure alerting. We explain the trade-offs between selection and training across occupations, both in terms of breeds and juvenile dogs within breeds. We examine two studies that employ cost-benefit analysis. First, we present an analysis of the social benefits of guide dogs. Second, we discuss the controversy surrounding the treatment of emotional support animals in air travel and the cost-benefit analysis the Department of Transportation used to support its rule that allowed airlines to treat emotional support animals as pets rather than as service animals.

The authors of this chapter conceptualize the “three-failures” perspective in nonprofit-sector theorizing. They then propose the sectoral advantage framework, which revises and generalizes the three-failures approach. The revised framework offers a set of questions and a way of thinking about and interpreting diverse puzzles in the field. The framework uses consistent definitions and criteria so that it can be applied to a broad range of institutions, cultures, and historical periods. The authors develop three themes within the framework: First, they add the family sector and consider its comparative advantages, failures, and activities. Second, they generalize government failure to make it more comprehensive and applicable outside Western democracies. Third, they suggest the capability approach should be incorporated in the determination of sectoral advantages.

Witesman provides an institutional theory of the nonprofit. The chapter considers the argument developed by the author in a 2016 Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly article. In it, she proposes an institutional theory of the nonprofit that defines its distinction from public and private institutions through (1) the voluntary (rather than coercive) assignment of roles and (2) the use of the good or service by non-payers. The voluntary and redistributive nature of such nonprofit-type institutions makes them primarily compatible with the distribution of goods that are non-subtractable and excludable (toll goods). This view is in contrast to legalistic or sector-based theories of the nonprofit.

Hansen and Witkowski introduce a new theory to understand how societal needs are met. The authors develop the cross-sectoral BIAS theory, an adaptation of the BIAS model, to assess factors that lead to persistent unmet needs among marginalized populations. Drawing on postcolonial theory, the authors indicate that the standard economic model of understanding the provision of services by market, government, and nonprofit sectors (three-failures theory) systematically fails to account for the underprivileged in society. The cross-sectoral BIAS theory explains that societal biases drive the persistent insufficient provision of goods to marginalized populations by all three sectors.

By following the Western mainstream theory on state–nonprofit relations, nonprofit research on developing countries usually overlooks the influence of political parties on nonprofits. However, political parties, particularly the ruling party, often decisively determine the development of the nonprofit sector in those societies. This article proposes a special model to analyze the state–nonprofit relations in the countries where a sole ruling party monopolizes the government. The model is applied in the one-party state of China to exemplify how the ruling Chinese Communist Party has fundamentally shaped the state–nonprofit relationship there in past decades. The article concludes with discussion about the model’s potentials and limitations.

Civil society has been lauded for its ability to act as a social glue that is critical to healthy and functioning democracies. Despite their centrality to US society, nonprofits have lacked legitimacy commensurate with the criticality of their civic purposes. Drawing upon the publicness debate in which government functions under a political authority and business operates within a market authority, Robichau and Fernandez propose a normative “Nonprofitness Framework” that accounts for the moral authority by which nonprofits operate, which is necessary for contributing to a vibrant democracy. A Nonprofitness Framework considers charitable and voluntary organizations in terms of degrees of moral authority and their expression of nonprofit ethos and missions in which some organizations move closer to public or private orientations. Understanding how nonprofits and their agents are conditioned by history and values in turn preserves and cultivates a thriving sector, generating the flexibility to enhance society and provide balance among a dominant private sector and an influential public sector.

In this concluding chapter, the editors take stock of the contributions, summarize overarching themes, and suggest new directions for research.

Education has become the principal pathway to good health, financial security, stable employment, and social success. Due to the fact that education is strongly associated with life expectancy, morbidity and health behaviours it is widely recognized that health and education are mutually influential. While the focus has primarily been on the impact of education on health, advancing health and wellbeing remains a critical pathway to achieve education and life-long learning. As such, a re-orientation of systemic thinking and practice that builds on health and wellbeing as central elements of achieving quality education during the life course is key to achieving SDG 4 quality education.

Climate Action is one of the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals. Yet, despite calls for action, global governments have broadly not taken consequential change to reduce carbon outputs and mitigate warming. Our chapter argues that a primary cause of this inaction is political conflict and policy capacity. Without strong economic incentives and facing constrained resources, governments may opt to proceed with the status quo. Here, health systems present a critical resource to engage nations in climate action. Health systems produce political leverage as major political stakeholders across nations, globally, for engaging in broader climate policy and a wealth of resources inherent to health systems – expertise, funding – to directly implement climate policy. The case study of the city of Toronto in Canada offers lessons for directly involving health systems in subnational climate action as policy stakeholders and implementors, and the co-benefits health system engagement brings to promote climate action intersectorally. Toronto provides an important case for high-latitude countries that will soon be facing climate hazards tropical nations have been grappling with for centuries. Engaging health systems in climate action policy processes may improve the likelihood of success for strengthening resilience and adaptivity to climate related hazards.

The goal of SDG 1 is to end poverty in all forms everywhere. Health systems are a significant determinant of the risk of impoverishment and financial hardship. We review methods for calculating catastrophic health spending and impoverishing spending, noting a distinction between those who are impoverished by out-of-pocket (OOP) health spending and those who are further impoverished by OOP health spending. Catastrophic health spending tends to be concentrated among poor households, but there is a high level of variability between countries. In particular, countries with higher public spending on health as a share of GDP have lower OOP spending, which in turn is associated with lower catastrophic health spending and impoverishment. Policymakers can also make progress on reducing the risk of impoverishment by making reforms to coverage policies. We conceptualise progress towards universal health coverage through an analysis of the coverage of people, services, and costs. Risk of financial hardship is minimised when the entire population is covered, the right services are covered to meet the population’s health needs, and costs are financed largely through pre-payment with risk pooling to avoid high user charges. The most successful systems use user charges sparingly, design user charges as fixed copayments rather than percentage-based coinsurance, and include income-based exemptions and OOP maximums.

Ressler introduces a sociological theory of transformative symbolic reality to illuminate a specific, but often overlooked, impact of the nonprofit sector that is directly tied to improving the quality of life for individuals and groups within society. Grounded in the sociology of communities and nonprofit theory, transformative symbolic reality states that society reproduces itself or changes through social reality, and that social reality can be purposefully manipulated to challenge the forces of inequity. Specifically, individuals or organizations can create both the physical and metaphysical spaces in which people manifest and manipulate social norms, expectations, and behaviors in an inter-relational way that generates transformative social capital. Through the lens of transformative symbolic reality, the chapter conceptualizes the nonprofit sector as a wellspring of this overlooked public good and argues that it is this transformative aspect of the nonprofit sector that undergirds connections between nonprofit organizations and any long-term social impact.

This chapter critically considers the historic and contemporary entanglements of the nonprofit sector with the state and the market, and the implications of such entanglements on nonprofits, marginalized communities, and the possibility of social change. Interrogating what happens to the structural institutional form of the nonprofit when intertwined with the state and the economy in what some call the nonprofit industrial complex, Rojas assesses the fallout that leads to exacerbated policing and incarceration of women and communities of color, among other deleterious impacts. The work of naming these concerns and critiques is necessary for nonprofits to potentially become avenues for social transformation. The chapter concludes with practical interventions toward building organizations capable of creating more just futures.

This introductory chapter makes the case for moving beyond the concept of Health in all Policies and towards a Health for all Policies approach. Health for All Policies is a framework emphasising co-benefits: the ways in which improved health or better health systems and policies can attain other goals. In terms of the SDGs, it captures the extent to which better health status, and use of health budgets, policies, and infrastructures, can contribute to all of the SDGs, whether fairly obvious ones (health enables education) to ones that require more thought (health care systems’ procurement and waste disposal systems affect life under the seas). The case for co-benefits is not just that it shows what health policy can do for other goals. It is not just that it shows what health policy should do for other goals such as sustainability or reducing gender and other inequalities. It also opens up new perspectives on coalitions, politics, and governance.