Alternative Models of Government-Nonprofit Sector Relations: Theoretical and International Perspectives

Economic theories of the nonprofit sector suggest several different ways of understanding the relationship between government and private, not-for-profit organizations. In particular, different strands of theory support the alternative views that nonprofits (a) operate independently as supplements to government, (b) work as complements to government in a partnership relationship, or (c) are engaged in an adversarial relationship of mutual accountability with government. A historical review of the United States revealed that all three views have validity and that government-nonprofit sector relations must be understood as a multilayered phenomenon. In this article, the foregoing analysis is extended internationally. The three theoretical perspectives are applied to four countries: the United States, the United Kingdom, Israel, and Japan, in an effort to illuminate nonprofit-government relations in those countries and to assess whether the multilayered approach provides a substantially richer understanding than any one theoretical perspective.