Filip Wijkström

The objective of this chapter is to deepen and broaden the reader’s understanding of nonprofit governance. The objective is pursued in three ways. First, the chapter offers a primer on the history and principles of nonprofit governance scholarship, for students and established researchers. This is achieved through attention to governance definitions; governance practices - boards, accountability and transparency, governance codes and collaborative governance - as they occur within organization type, stakeholder relationship and nonprofit regime contexts; and theoretical perspectives. Second, the work of contributors to the Research Handbook on Nonprofit Governance is contextualized within this governance ‘story’. The interplay means the chapter both serves as a standalone guide to the nonprofit governance concept and points to the scholars whose contributions are contemporary and authoritative. Third, the chapter critiques the limitations of the nonprofit governance literature and points to some of the lacunae - the gaps, the missing parts in the narrative. © Editors and Contributors Severally 2021.

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.

This article focuses on how civil society organizations contribute to a more resilient society. Studying the Church of Sweden, the authors compare COVID-19 with the 2015 refugee crisis and find that organizational learning and organizational slack are two important factors for bouncing back. The distinctiveness of the civil society sector in being more holistic and long-term is highlighted as a critical issue behind its ability to be resilient.

Co-operatives are constitutional hybrids where the hybridity is laid down in structural components such as rules and regulations and is visible in ownership arrangements and organizational mission. We seek to advance the current scholarly debate on organizational governance by applying a structural and processual analytical framework on empirical data consisting of interviews with members and elected officials in a sizeable Swedish forestry co-operative.We argue that market imperatives of economies of scale in the agricultural industry have led to increasingly larger farms and also to increasingly larger and more centralized agricultural businesses. This has in turn diminished the number of members which are to govern the businesses in these co-operatives, and also increased the size and complexity of the governance task. We will thus argue that this development indicates an ongoing re-balancing of the hybrid character of the co-operative studied, with clear governance implications.