A theory proposing that although the for-profit, public and nonprofit sectors may act independently to provide goods or services, if one sector is unable or unwilling to fulfill societal needs, organizations or units from another sector will step up to address community demand. It explores market failure to provide public goods when there is limited or no profitability; government failure when, despite market failure, the political wherewithal does not exist to meet the needs of diverse communities; and nonprofit failure when organizations emerge to meet societal needs but often do not have the capacity to succeed. Through this sector failures lens an alternative option explores partnerships and collaborations that emerge to address societal needs that cannot be, or have not been, addressed by one single sector.
Published in Chapter:
The Role of Collaboration to Encourage Civic Engagement through the Arts: The Blurring of the Government and Nonprofit Sectors
Tina Dippert (Portland State University, USA), Erna Gelles (Portland State University, USA), and Meg Merrick (Portland State University, USA)
Copyright: © 2017
|Pages: 23
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-5225-1727-6.ch022
Abstract
Historically governments have used art's universal language to achieve various goals, including political engagement through cultural enrichment. Employing nonprofit/public sector relationships for the arts presents myriad governance challenges, but always with the promise of intrinsic and extrinsic benefits. This chapter presents two cases to illustrate such collaborative relationships. Applying various nonprofit theories, stakeholder discussions and Sherry R. Arnstein's still relevant community engagement work to explore relationships between sectors in arts funding, the first involves the passage of a local tax to provide funding for arts education and arts organizations. The second illustrates an instrumental relationship between a local government and nonprofit to provide art programs to promote tolerance in an increasingly diverse community. Both cases present imperfect policies, but represent the continuation of an ancient practice wherein the arts are being used for more than arts' sake, but to serve a multitude of non-arts instrumental societal functions.