Government provision of social services through nonprofit organisations
Date
1990
Authors
Lipsky, Michael
Smith, Steven Rathgeb
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Volume Title
Publisher
Urban Research Program. Research School of Social Science. Australian National University.
Abstract
Historically, nonprofit organisations in the United States have played a critical
role in helping people in need by providing education, training, residential,
counselling and in-kind and cash support. Today, contrary to popular belief,
most nonprofit service organisations in the United States depend on government
for over half of their revenues. The paper by Lipsky and Smith considers the
implications of this relationship between government and nonprofit
organisations for our understanding of the welfare state in advanced industrial
countries. They argue that recently the American government has used
nonprofit agencies to expand the boundaries of the welfare state in a host of
service categories, from child abuse to domestic violence to homelessness . The
result is a welfare state that is more expansive than would be the case if
policymakers relied solely on the public sector. The paper also examines the
effe cts of this evolving relationship on the organisational norms of nonprofit
agencies. These agencies have an emphasis on particularistic responses to the
individual, while the government requires an equity-based focus in which all
clients are treated alike. The new funding arrangements mean increased
government intrusion into the affairs of nonprofit agencies, thereby altering the
character of social policy and the American welfare state.
In his paper, 'A Note on Contracting as a Regime', Michael Lipsky explores the
notion of a 'contracting regime' as a set of "principles, norms, rules, and
decision-making procedures around which actor expectations converge in a
given issue-area." Regimes, however, are not simply collections of equal and
independent entities, but instead are critically influenced by one of the
participating actors. Specifically, in the contracting regime , nonprofit service
organisations have changed. Nonprofit human service agencies may now be
more expansive than they were able to be in the past, but they are also more tied
to government and more reflective of public priorities than of the community
values they represented in the past.
Lipsky then poses a series of questions about the relationship of government and
nonprofit organisations in Australia. To what extent do government agencies
articulate separate purposes , priorities and standards? Alternatively, to what
extent to they endorse current activities of the voluntary agencies from which
the y purchase service? To what extent do government agencies have the capacity
to articulate the service needs in their sectors? To what extent can voluntary
agencies take actions outside the relationship defined by the contract to obtain
public funds and achieve their purposes? To what extent does government
possess the capacity to enforce contracts? He suggests that in Australia
policymakers have gone far to achieve the hegemony of government over
voluntary agencies in service delivery through contracting , but many believe that
in selected instances there is still considerable ground to be covered.
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Working/Technical Paper
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Open Access
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Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Australia (CC BY-NC 3.0 AU)
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