What do We Know about Nonprofit Collaboration? A Comprehensive Systematic Review of the Literature

This comprehensive review of prior research reports on the content of 354 English language research articles that address nonprofit collaborative activity within and across the sectors. The goal was a thorough review of the analytic methods, theories, and key findings generated from past empirical study of nonprofit organizational collaboration. We have identified six major themes that emerge through our analysis of the existing literature: 1) diverse and rich data on collaboration; 2) more knowledge on the antecedents and outcomes of collaboration, less on the processes; 3) insufficient attention the similarities and differences between forms (or types) of nonprofit collaboration; 4) organizational theories dominate; 5) research is improving in sophistication but still has far to go; and 6) the need to overcome the problem of survivorship bias. Our findings shed new light on future research and practice.