TY - JOUR
T1 - Nonprofit Sector Size and the Breadth of Local Government Climate Actions
T2 - Exploring the Moderating Role of Collaboration
AU - Cheng, Yuan
AU - Park, Angela
AU - Krause, Rachel
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2023.
PY - 2023/8
Y1 - 2023/8
N2 - Existing studies often use the association between sector sizes to test the supplementary and complementary models of government–nonprofit relations, assuming that one mode of government–nonprofit relations dominates a policy subsector. We challenge this assumption and propose that the relationship between nonprofit sector size and the breadth of local government policy actions depends on their level of collaboration. Situated in the context of urban climate governance and drawing information from a national survey of U.S. local government climate actions, we test this modified model and find a statistically significant moderation effect of collaboration. However, contrary to our proposed hypotheses, our findings suggest that a positive association between the number of environmental nonprofits and governmental climate actions exists when the level of government–nonprofit collaboration is low to moderate. We posit that the adversarial lens of government–nonprofit relations and the cost of collaboration are key to understanding these surprising findings.
AB - Existing studies often use the association between sector sizes to test the supplementary and complementary models of government–nonprofit relations, assuming that one mode of government–nonprofit relations dominates a policy subsector. We challenge this assumption and propose that the relationship between nonprofit sector size and the breadth of local government policy actions depends on their level of collaboration. Situated in the context of urban climate governance and drawing information from a national survey of U.S. local government climate actions, we test this modified model and find a statistically significant moderation effect of collaboration. However, contrary to our proposed hypotheses, our findings suggest that a positive association between the number of environmental nonprofits and governmental climate actions exists when the level of government–nonprofit collaboration is low to moderate. We posit that the adversarial lens of government–nonprofit relations and the cost of collaboration are key to understanding these surprising findings.
KW - climate change
KW - collaboration
KW - environmental nonprofits
KW - government–nonprofit relations
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85149943626&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85149943626&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1177/08997640221146967
DO - 10.1177/08997640221146967
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85149943626
SN - 0899-7640
VL - 52
SP - 892
EP - 916
JO - Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly
JF - Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly
IS - 4
ER -