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Abstract: Few questions about the nonprofit sector are more fundamental, but also more difficult to answer, than the question of the impact this set of organizations has. Beliefs about this matter are plentiful, of course, and are often firmly held (Tandon and Naidoo, 1999). However, systematic evidence to support these beliefs has been difficult to assemble, leaving observers dependent on anecdotes whose generalizability is often difficult to assess. As a consequence, while the scope and structure of the nonprofit sector is beginning to come into clearer focus around the world (Salamon et. al. 1999),2 we remain very much in the dark about what difference these organizations actually make.3 The purpose of this paper is to review the preliminary results of work that is under way through the Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project to close this gap in knowledge, at least in part, by assessing the impact of the nonprofit sector in a systematic fashion in close to 40 countries throughout the world. The discussion begins by sketching the criteria that any such assessment should strive to meet. It then outlines the approach utilized here to meet these criteria, and then summarizes the results of this work to date. The central conclusion that emerges from this analysis is that the nonprofit sector does indeed seem to perform a distinctive set of roles in a wide assortment of countries throughout the world; but these roles nevertheless fall short of what many of the enthusiastic celebrations of this sector would lead us to believe. At the same time, the sector suffers from a number of drawbacks or limitations, though here as well the drawbacks are nowhere near as widespread as some critics seem to believe. Needless to say, even these conclusions are at best tentative. The question of the impact of the nonprofit sector is difficult to answer empirically, and we have no expectation of answering it definitively. For one thing, observers may vary in the weights they attach to different impacts. What is more, these impacts may vary among types of organizations and among countries. Generalizing across fields, or even across organizations in the same field, may therefore be extremely difficult. Beyond this, there are immense conceptual and terminological difficulties. The meaning, let alone the measurement, of some types of impacts is problematic. While we have attempted to cope with these challenges as best we could, we also realize the inherent limitations imposed by the nature of the task. While this task is extremely challenging, however, it is also too important to sidestep. In a sense, the answer to this “So what?” question is fundamental to the whole field of nonprofit studies. Researching the size, structure, history, and legal context of the nonprofit sector is of modest importance in and of itself. The really significant question is whether the presence or absence of nonprofit organizations makes a difference, and, if so, what kind and how much. It was this question that we sought to address in the impact portion of our project, and that we report on, preliminarily, in this paper...

Keywords: Nonprofit; analysis

Language: English

39 pages, 2000

Note: Available online at: http://www.jhu.edu/~ccss/publications/pdf/forwhat.pdf

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RePEc:hhh:senior:2000_008

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