Nonprofit engagement in interlocal agreements
Expanding the scope of nonprofit-government relations theory: A longitudinal examination of interlocal collaborations
2020
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Nonprofit studies continue to deeply examine the scope and nature of interlocal governmental arrangements with third sector organizations. Past research highlights the prevalence, strength, performance, and drivers of these collaborations, yet these studies are limited by sample sizes, years of data, and the service areas analyzed. This research paper aims to address this gap by examining the engagement of nonprofit organizations in interlocal agreements using a longitudinal analysis that includes over 30 service areas and examine trends and variations within and across service areas, as well as within and across partner types (city, county, state, special district, etc.).
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Bridging Theoretical Perspectives from Nonprofit Studies and Urban Governance: Toward a Unified Approach to Studying the Role of Nonprofits in Public Service Delivery
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Both public and nonprofit management and urban governance scholars have studied the dynamics of nonprofit-government collaboration. Some of the theories utilized to examine this relationship are similar but some are unique to each tradition. More importantly, both traditions have heavily relied on qualitative and relatively small size cross-sectional datasets to draw conclusions about various aspects – such as drivers, processes and outcomes - of this collaboration. This practice has not only created theoretical gaps but has also prompted hinderance in fully understanding the role of nonprofits in public service delivery. Through a literature review specific to each research tradition, we find that both sets of scholars have only looked at limited types of services that local governments and nonprofits collaborate for and have not yet paid attention to how this collaboration may change over time. This paper fills these gaps by using a longitudinal dataset to descriptively examine several different service types. The paper also identifies ways in which these research traditions can be unified by posing a number of propositions for future research.