How does a state govern civil society organizations (CSOs) under the framework of a developmental state? This article theorizes state-CSO relations by examining control and autonomy strategies employed by both the state and civil society actors within the framework of the developmental state. The article examines the case of a specific collaborative project that involves both state and non-state actors in the Amhara region, North Shewa zone of Ethiopia. Findings suggest that the state agencies apply cross-purpose strategies simultaneously repressing and/or co-opting organizations. The nature and applicability of the developmental state generate their own dilemma on the part of CSOs and induce them to develop autonomy strategies that are used in sustaining their interaction with state agencies.

In Germany, like in other countries, the notions of volunteering and civic action altogether describe a wide diversity of activities. Often, this wide spectre is put together under ‘civic engagement’, reaching from civic action that is sometimes overtly ‘political’ over to engagement as volunteering in areas like sports or culture. Yet in academic contributions that use such a wide concept, nothing much can be found about a convincing differentiation of the diverse forms of engagement that figure under such a wide cover. Is there a clear line separating voluntary and civic action? In line with the introduction to this special issue, the paper takes up these questions by proposing that a proper understanding of differentiations in the wide field of civic engagement calls for a historical approach that gives a key role to discourses and politics. Looking from such a perspective at historical constellations in German history, four decisive historical concepts get sketched. It shows that kinds of differentiation between voluntary and civic action are very much dependent on discourses and politics and not only the repercussions of socio-economic and cultural changes and megatrends. The kind of approach chosen shows as well that older concepts, notions and attitudes do not simply melt away in the light of new ones. The label ‘civic engagement’ appears as an umbrella notion in front of a diversity of forms and understandings of engagement. Understanding this diversity calls for tracing the historical roots, notably the ordering imaginaries and strategies wherein these forms and understandings took shape and function today.

This article presents an ethnographic study of the case of Ende Gelände (EG), a German civil disobedience network undertaking action for climate justice. We reveal how a politics of legitimacy in civil society organizations such as EG are structured and constructed through different styles of civic action. Specifically, in our case study, a dominant pattern of “civil anarchizing” (CA) emerged, in which legitimacy was continuously negotiated in relation to both external and internal stakeholders. This CA style was also accompanied by a more individual-centered style that we call personalized politics. We compare both styles and describe the tensions that result from their co-occurrence. In addition, we argue that the CA style might be more viable for politicization due to its emphasis on a collective strategy. Finally, we describe how this CA style shaped the participants’ politics of legitimacy by functioning as a negotiated hybrid of civil and uncivil expectations.

Governments face the challenge of fostering the social economy in a context of economic crisis and austerity policies. Despite the high levels of institutional recognition for the considerable social and economic value added by the social economy (SE), government policies following this approach have been scarce during the latest economic recession. This article analyses the case of Spain, a country that has endured deep austerity policies and has a strong SE sector. Building on the SE approach that combines quantitative and qualitative data, this study examines the policies that promoted the SE during two periods: before and during the economic crisis. As a novel contribution, the study compares the political discourse with the policies implemented. The findings highlight a gap between the discourse and the policies implemented during the crisis, showing that the SE has not been prioritized by policymakers, and link that gap with the recent EU economic policy.

The rise of conservative religion in the West threatens the enduring positive contribution of religion to civil society, if conservative churches, as often assumed, indeed generate more bonding than bridging social capital. Against this background, this study explores the civic engagement of evangelicals in the Netherlands. Two research questions are addressed: (1) To what extent are Dutch evangelicals more involved in religious than non-religious volunteering as compared to mainline Christians and non-church members? and (2) Which decisive factors determine the religious and non-religious volunteering of Dutch evangelicals as compared to mainline Christians and non-church members? Results show that these orthodox Christians are more involved in religious than in non-religious volunteering. Their religious volunteering is determined by their church attendance, Bible reading and social embeddedness in their congregation, while their non-religious volunteering is impeded by their mono-religious orientation and social embeddedness in their congregation and by the volunteering of their parents.

First under the Millennium Development Goals and now under the Sustainable Development Goals, partnerships for development, especially between state and NGOs, remain a valued goal. Partnerships are argued to improve provision of basic social services to the poor: the state is viewed as providing scale, with NGOs ensuring good governance. Close study of three leading partnership arrangements in Pakistan (privatization of basic health units, an ‘adopt a school’ program, and low-cost sanitation) shows how state–NGO collaborations can indeed improve service delivery; however, few of these collaborations are capable of evolving into embedded partnerships that can bring about positive changes in government working practices on a sustainable basis. In most cases, public servants tolerate, rather than welcome, NGO interventions, due to political or donor pressure. Embedded partnerships require ideal-type commitment on the part of the NGO leadership, which most donor-funded NGOs fail to demonstrate. For effective planning, it is important to differentiate the benefits and limitations of routine co-production arrangements from those of embedded partnerships.

In recent years, Chinese foundations have become increasingly involved in overseas charitable activities. This paper first describes the current status of Chinese foundations’ involvement in overseas charitable activities, including the development stage, the extent of participation, and the scale and scope of donations. Next, the paper analyzes the factors that impact Chinese foundations’ overseas donations. The study finds that fund size and the secretary general’s age and gender have no significant impact on overseas donations. However, factors such as the frequency of exchanges between foundations and foreign non-governmental organizations, the number of full-time employees in the foundations, and the number of years of education of the secretary general affect the amount of foundations’ overseas donations to various extents. Finally, policy recommendations are presented to promote Chinese foundations’ overseas charitable activities.

Two trends are gaining prevalence across China: (1) NGO needs for funding in order to survive and (2) the transformation of the government and private foundations into major NGO donors. This study explores grassroots NGOs’ experience with the government’s purchase-of-services contracting and private foundations’ grant schemes in Shanghai, Beijing and Sichuan. The research findings show that two opposite effects of the funding game are simultaneously felt: growing space for diversity and increasing isomorphic pressures. The two donor types have jointly created a result-driven and institutionalized environment in which NGOs easily lose sight of their missions and uniqueness. Nonetheless, despite finding their options extremely limited, NGOs adopt constantly evolving, multifaceted resource strategies.

To accomplish their goals, International Non-government Organizations (INGOs) manage a network of internal and external stakeholders across national boundaries while having limited authority under demanding circumstances. Consequently, INGOs often rely on normative management practices aimed at influencing discretionary behavior. Unfortunately, normative management can be difficult when INGO stakeholders perceive little common ground due to large functional, cultural, socioeconomic, and power differences. These dynamics raise an important question: How can INGOs manage internal and external stakeholders in a normative fashion when these stakeholders are remarkably diverse and may perceive little or no similarity among themselves? In response to this difficulty, we argue that effective diversity management is a key contributor of effective normative management, and we develop social cognitive theory aimed at managing the salience and meaning of social distinctions. We also provide initial guidance on adapting management practices when differences are large and when individual identities are exclusive.

Inspired by Foucault’s genealogical approach, this paper examines the historical discourses of popular engagement in the USA—specifically how volunteering and civic action have been treated in relation to politics and public opinion over time. The paper describes that throughout US history, the relationship between volunteering and civic action has evolved from being more or less blurred in distinction—and has had different meanings for different groups of people. With the election and policies of the current president, we may be entering a new era of increased and politicized volunteering and civic action.

This article examines the widely held assumption that Germany’s political foundations pursue distinctively partisan approaches that promise to be advantageous with regard to the furtherance of pluralist civil societies abroad. It reviews this assumption through a qualitative analysis of their partnerships in transitional Tunisia, following a comparison between the German foundations and other Western agencies. It exposes a common secular bias in Western civil society support and qualifies the assumption that the partisan approaches lead easily to pluralist civil society support. While the foundations partner with rather diverse organizations, they still favor organizations that follow Western lines, and their civil society support practices display interest in the furtherance of both pluralism and democratic stability promising corporatism.

Throughout the past three decades, changing governments in Denmark have been cultivating a more proactive role for civil society organizations by emphasizing the legitimacy of voluntary social work as part of the social service provision in a hard-pressed welfare state. At the same time, political and public actors praise the civic virtues and democratic skills that volunteers obtain when participating in any kind of voluntary organization. This notion of voluntary organizations as “schools for democracy” already lacks empirical grounding. Given the increased instrumentalization of voluntary social work, it becomes even more important to ask what the modes of participation look like among volunteers within the new organizational forms. In this article, we review key trends and changes at the institutional level and present data from a long-term ethnographic study that explores the mode of participation of volunteers within an organizational form that responds to the demands of the current civic landscape. We demonstrate that while the organizational form in question aptly and strategically navigates the competitive, welfare-oriented, institutional environment, the space for civic action among the volunteers is limited.

Disaster management research increasingly focuses on how to collaborate with emergent volunteers in order to support formal disaster agents in the nonprofit sector (Whittaker et al. in Int J Disaster Risk Reduct 13:358–368, 2015; Strandh and Eklund in J Conting Crisis Manag 26(3):1–9, 2017). In a disaster context, we regard emergent collaboration between these agents as an appropriate approach for structured self-organization (Simsa et al. in Nonprofit Volunt Sector Q, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1177/0899764018785472) and hence for providing sustainable disaster relief. Our research seeks to identify which factors facilitate such emerging collaborative efforts. Using survey data from Austrian refugee migration in 2015/2016, we examine how social capital components affect the collaborative efforts between nonprofit organizations (NPOs) and emerging volunteers on a team level. Data evaluation is based on regression analysis. We provide empirical evidence that social capital components like ‘avoidance of misunderstanding’ and ‘interaction frequency’ enhance the collaborative efforts between NPOs and emergent volunteers. Furthermore, the study highlights the roles of ‘emotional intensity’ and ‘intimacy’ in collaborative disaster relief performance.

This study aims to examine the question around how small- and medium-scale hybrid social enterprises within the context of the Middle East and North Africa manage paradoxical tensions they face in their everyday decision-making. By placing a lens on the unique hybrid processes facing organizational members rooted in traditional social and economic rationales, we seek to better understand the breadth of strategies adopted and their relevance to the specific contextual considerations of the study. Through analyzing five in-depth case studies from the region, the study aims to add insights on the practice of managing organizational paradoxes to maintain social-economic hybridity. We also introduce practical implications for managers and supporters of small- and medium-scale social enterprises.

Research on the role of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in collective action predicts they will not interact with grassroots groups, citing partnerships with corporations and states, the apolitical delivery of social services and accountability towards donors as disconnecting professionalized actors from volunteer-based grassroots groups. Using interviews with core activists in the movement confronting Canadian resource extraction abroad, I depart from this approach by investigating the mechanisms, or threads, that bind organizations into coordinated action. I find that NGOs and grassroots groups coordinate as a result of: shared values and environmental justice frames; the allocation of resources; and engagement in complimentary forms of advocacy driven by a division of labour and a diversity of tactics. My research develops existing approaches to theorizing coordinated action and invites scholarship on NGOization to include the conceptual toolkit provided by social movement theories to better account for NGO–grassroots dynamics.

This contribution about the Netherlands to the special issue [or: section] on volunteering and civic action focuses on changes in public understanding and policy perspectives. Developments since the second half of the nineteenth century show shifting emphases on active membership (based on associational life and typical of the phenomenon of ‘pillarization’), active citizenship (based more on an individual sense of responsibility and more or less political in nature) and unpaid work (volunteering as a gift to society and other people). Government policy over the last two decades has focused heavily on ‘reponsibilization’ of citizens, both as regards providing help to others when they need it (unpaid work/informal care) and in terms of their relationship with the society in which they live (active citizenship). We expand further on the recent notion of the ‘do-democracy’ as a populist and anti-political way of doing things together on a small scale instead of engaging in democratic controversies and trying to get a grip on big issues.

Integrated hybrid organizations, for instance social enterprises that pursue both social and economic goals through a single activity, are seen by many as promising vehicles to create social value while remaining economically sustainable. At the same time, they are said to run the risk of mission drift—losing sight of their social mission while navigating market and political pressures. While organizational governance mechanisms that ensure the overall direction, control and accountability of the organization are considered key to avoiding mission drift, scholars have argued that traditional governance mechanisms may not work in the context of social enterprises. Drawing on the legacy of old institutional theory, this article proposes a proactive approach to governance in social enterprises. We complement and go beyond control and compliance approaches and introduce a governance approach focused on purpose, commitment and coordinating around small wins. We propose that these three interlocking governance mechanisms allow social enterprises to mitigate the risk of mission drift in a proactive rather than reactive manner.

Celebrity philanthropy is a recent but widespread phenomenon in China. Using social network analysis, this paper seeks to answer the following questions: Is a celebrity’s position within a social network related to that celebrity’s philanthropic engagement, and how? Does a celebrity’s network position interact with normative influence to affect philanthropic engagement? What implications the study has for the development of modern philanthropy in China? Hypotheses regarding the associations between philanthropic engagement and a celebrity’s social network were tested using a sample from the “Celebrity Relationship Database.” Findings suggest that philanthropic engagement was more common in the center of the social network; under normative influence, a celebrity was more likely to engage in philanthropic activities if other members within the social network were active in philanthropic engagement; and, the effect of normative influence was stronger for celebrities who were positioned at the center of a social network than those who were positioned at the periphery. Implications for the development of modern philanthropy in China are also discussed.

The article analyzes how civil society is constructed in two Danish civil society strategies from 2010 to 2017, the governmental programmes of the governments in question and the role civil society plays in the proposed upcoming reform of the Danish public sector, the Cohesion Reform. The article approaches civil society from a Foucauldian perspective meaning that it on the one hand analyzes civil society as a transactional reality, something which does not exist as such, but must be continually produced as a given thing with certain values. On the other hand, it means analyzing civil society as a central part of a governmental rationality, or governmentality, which represents the natural movements of society and which government must respect and govern according to. This means that the natural, vital and originary processes of civil society becomes a measurement for good and right government in contradistinction to the artificial, cold and bureaucratic state and thereby posited as the rescuer of welfare society.