The Third Sector and Climate Change: A Literature Review and Agenda for Future Research and Action

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.

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Nonprofit Sector Size and the Breadth of Local Government Climate Actions: Exploring the Moderating Role of Collaboration

Cheng

Park

Krause

2023

“…Nonprofit environmental organizations are widely seen as a key component responding to this unfolding climate crisis (Dolšak & Prakash, 2021;Pellow & Brulle, 2005). Nonprofits directly engage in climate mitigation and adaptation services (Kagan & Dodge, 2021). They promote attention to issues of both climate and social justice in government policy creation, implementation, and enforcement (if often to stilted effect; see Harrison, 2019).…”

Section: Climate Change Social Justice and Environmental Nonprofitsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Characteristics of Large Environmental Nonprofits That Identify Climate Change and Social Justice as Focal Concerns

Johnson

Coma

Castonguay

2023

This article examines the uptake of social justice and climate change as focal issues among the largest U.S. environmental nonprofits. We use 2016 Internal Revenue Service (IRS) filings to identify 5,413 large environmental nonprofits of which 8% attend to issues of climate and 10% to issues of social justice. Larger organizations are more likely to attend to issues of climate change and social justice, as are groups founded more recently. Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic modeling of organizational mission statements and descriptions of major activities is used to assign groups to six distinct issue categories. Results highlight the divide between wildlife groups that are decidedly unlikely to attend to issues of either climate or justice, and the rest of the national environmental movement. Energy and natural resource groups, while strongly vested in climate issues, rarely attend to social justice. These findings have clear implications for climate and justice advocates seeking change in the environmental advocacy sector.

“…These same communities are the very beneficiaries of the services that nonprofit organizations provide. Given the urgent need for immediate climate action and for finding sustainable climate solutions to avoid catastrophic ends (Gates, 2021), it is particularly important to study how climate change has impacted nonprofit organizations and how the voluntary sector is adapting due to various aspects of climate change (Gazley & Prakash, 2023;Kagan & Dodge, 2023).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Empirical Mapping of Environmental Protection and Conservation Nonprofit Discourse on Social Media

Ter-Mkrtchyan,

Taylor

2023

This article is a comprehensive empirical overview of environmental protection and conservation nonprofits’ discourse on social media. To what extent have these nonprofits framed climate change in their public discourse and how has it evolved over time? How do organizational characteristics and resources affect their social media behavior? To address our research questions, we use machine learning with texts—specifically topic modeling—to track the activity of 120 environmental nonprofits during a 14-year time span on X, formerly known as Twitter. Our analysis of more than 1.3 million tweets shows that climate change, although not closely aligned with the missions for more than half of the top tweeting organizations included in our sample, has consistently been a prevalent priority issue on their social media agendas for more than a decade. This heightened attention to climate change discourse by the environmental nonprofit sector denotes their uniform efforts to inspire government for climate action.