A Collaborative Window Approach to Partnership Building among NSO and NPOs : A China Case Study

• In Event: Cross-Sector-Relations

Abstract

Contemporary challenges facing nonprofit organizations (NPOs) have called for partnership within or cross sector (Conner et al., 1999). The discussion about the partnership among NPOs has mainly focused on ‘practical organization (Zeng, 2012)’. Little attention has been paid to the interaction between nonprofit support organizations (NSO) and practical organizations (Smith, 2008; Klein-Collins, 2008; Mosley, 2014). In this study, the collaborative window (CW) approach will be employed to explore how NSOs build and sustain the partnership with NPOs in a rapidly changing external environment.
‘Collaborative windows’ is a new approach to explore collaboration from the temporal and spatial conditions. It draws on Kingdon’s (1984, 2011) and Gray’s (1989) work on ‘Policy Windows’. Lober (1997) and Takahashi and Smutny (2002) adapted the main idea, refining and developing a ‘Collaborative Windows’ approach to explore collaboration and partnership with four identified streams: problem stream, solution stream political/ social/ economic stream, organizational stream (Cornforth et al. 2014). These independent streams are seen as the window of opportunity for collaboration, and also a way to investigate how partnership is governed and developed. This paper will adapt CW’s perspective to explore and answer the research questions.
In China, the development of NPOs is at different stages of the organizational life cycle, which means organizational needs and capacities would be different among organizations (Li and Guo, 2015). On the other hand, the bureaucratic hurdles derived from government and low public trust (Kuhn and Zhang, 2014) may have some influences on NSO-NPO partnership. We assume, as a result, the particular background in China may lead to a different dynamic in NSO-NPO partnership.
Partnership will be used in this study for indicating all interorganizational relationships. Terms like collaboration, coordination, alliance and network are frequentl used interchangeably (Bydell, 2007). However, partnership is a more flexible arrangement where organizations have more autonomy without any formal agreements or contract to limit its responsibilities during the process (Sullivan and Skelcher, 2002; Rees et al. 2012).
The research adopts an embedded case study method using one urban area in southern China as an exploratory pilot study. The research questions addressed are as follows: (1). What are the potential conflicts or tensions in the NSO-NPO partnership? (2). How do NSO respond to the conflicts and in what way? (3). What influences does the external environment bring into NSO-NPO partnership? One NSO and different NPOs with current or previous involvement in a professional relationship with the selected NSO comprise the research sample.
This study findings suggest that NSOs need to be more sensitive to NPOs’ changing and active when dealing the interaction with NPO. NSOs may need to modify the particular type of interactive dynamic based on organizational needs and capacity immediately. Furthermore, NSOs also need to consider the influences that stem from the government when government is involved in the process.
The pilot study findings will be used to inform fuller scale research on the topic of NSO-NPO partnership, and also contribute to the development of CW perspectives and its practice on partnership within nonprofit sector.

Authors

• xunyu xiang, The University of Hong Kong

• Lucy P Jordan, University of Hong Kong