Abstract
Non-profit organisations (NPOs) are actors at the local, national and transnational level. Now more than ever, they play important roles in our societies. For the past several decades, issues of legitimacy and representativeness as well as matters of accountability and responsibility have come to the forefront, raising crucial questions about non-profits' internal governance as well as their external relations with government, for-profit corporations, and affected groups of stakeholders and constituencies. Members, donors, volunteers, employees, and clients have always had claims on how the organisations are run. With the rolling back of state and government solutions in many countries during the 1980s and 1990s, the non-profit sector has experienced a period of continuous economic growth in most western societies. At the same time, non-profit and voluntary organisations have also become exposed to new types and new levels of critique and scrutiny from internal as well as external sources and actors. For non-profit actors, governance has emerged as a multi-level phenomenon. It stretches from polycentric governance of highly complex economic systems (Ostrom 2010), multi-level governance running well beyond the nation-state (e.g. Bache and Chapman 2008; Ruzza 2004), and the role of non-profits within multi-level systems (see e.g. section 5 in Cornforth and Brown 2014), to co-governance (e.g. Bode 2006; Cheng 2018), governance exercised in networks (Provan and Kenis 2008; Sorensen and Torfing 2005), and organisational governance. While in this chapter we will focus on organisational governance for non-profit and voluntary organisations (i.e. non-profit governance), it is important to keep the wider picture in mind (cf. Reuter, Wijkström, and Meyer 2014), as many elements of non-profit governance are both empirically and theoretically influenced by what is happening at these other levels and inspired by developments in these other domains. The chapter is structured as follows. First, we provide an overview of the development of the governance concept and its applications to non-profits. Second, we examine the role of constituencies or stakeholders, i.e. different groups of actors whose interests in a NPO should be balanced and integrated in organisational decision-making, as discussed in academic literature. Third, we sketch out some of the most distinctive theoretical positions identified in non-profit governance. Fourth, we provide a brief outline of the various models of good organisational governance that have emerged in the field of non-profits. We end with a brief discussion and outlook of upcoming issues in non-profit governance.