This paper examines, from a management accounting perspective, the efficacy of the dominant ‘restricted’ funding structure in the international development NGO sector in terms of overall sector effectiveness, and whether it is the most appropriate means of funding NGOs. The objective is to encourage theoretical debate around the tensions highlighted between external accountability for funding and overall value-for-money delivered by individual development NGOs and the wider international development sector. From unique access to three internationally recognised major NGOs, our case studies reveal management accounting as broadly homogenous, with some nuanced distinctions both within and between the cases; but the scope of management accounting emerges as relatively limited. This is despite the NGOs utilising complex accounting software, employing qualified accounting staff, and having a large annual income. Using the broad principles of systems theory to frame our approach, this paper suggests that due to the ‘restricted’ nature of funding awarded to NGOs by institutional donors, accounting is dominated by external accountability reporting to the detriment of management accounting. These relatively novel data on management accounting practices at international development NGOs help illustrate how, potentially, NGOs are missing opportunities to utilise, or even improve, value-for-money in terms of how various program themes, geographic areas or time periods are delivering better or worse discernible impact for the money spent.

This paper examines the effects of aggregate government payments to nonprofit organizations on aggregate private philanthropy. Four behavioral models of private philanthropic giving are proposed to formulate four hypotheses about those effects: no net effect (null hypothesis), crowding in (positive effect), crowding out (negative effect), and “philanthropic flight” or displacement (negative effect across different subsectors). These hypotheses were tested against the evidence from 40 countries collected as a part of a larger research project aimed to document the scale and finances of the nonprofit sector. The data show that, on the balance, government payments to nonprofit institutions (NPIs) have a positive effect on aggregate philanthropic donations to nonprofits, as stipulated by the crowding in hypothesis, but a field level analysis revealed evidence of “philanthropic flight” or displacement from “service” to “expressive” activities by government payments to “service” NPIs. Due to the limitations of the data, these results indicate empirical plausibility of the hypothesized effects rather than their incidence. The findings demonstrate the complexity of the relationship between government funding and philanthropic donations to nonprofits, which depends on the goals of the actors (donors and recipients) and institutional settings mediating the transaction costs of difference sources of nonprofit support.

Despite the prominence of voluntary organisations in public life and their high policy profile, there is a need for improved evidence regarding the funding base of individual voluntary organisations. This is relevant to theoretical debates about the role of such organisations in a mixed economy of welfare as well as to substantive questions about the balance between public and voluntary initiative. Using unique data for a sample of 7000 charities in England and Wales, for the first time we describe the distribution of charities according to the composition of their income. Importantly, the results illustrate the diversity of organisations with charitable status. They therefore serve to illustrate the different roles that charities play in a mixed economy. They also provide empirical context for substantive discussions relating to the identity of the charitable sector, including the notion of its “hybridity”—the extent to which an individual organisation draws upon a plurality of financial sources.

Many charities rely on donations to support their work addressing some of the world’s most pressing problems. We conducted a meta-review to determine what interventions work to increase charitable donations. We found 21 systematic reviews incorporating 1339 primary studies and over 2,139,938 participants. Our meta-meta-analysis estimated the average effect of an intervention on charitable donation size and incidence: r = 0.08 (95% CI [0.03, 0.12]). Due to limitations in the included systematic reviews, we are not certain this estimate reflects the true overall effect size. The most robust evidence found suggests charities could increase donations by (1) emphasising individual beneficiaries, (2) increasing the visibility of donations, (3) describing the impact of the donation, and (4) enacting or promoting tax-deductibility of the charity. We make recommendations for improving primary research and reviews about charitable donations, and how to apply the meta-review findings to increase charitable donations.

Islamic welfare organizations are currently going through processes of ‘NGOization’. Drawing on qualitative data from Pakistan, Norway and the UK (2012–2015), this article examines how two Islamic welfare organizations which are embedded in Islamic political movements, become ‘Muslim NGOs’. The NGOization of Islamic charity signifies not only a change in organizational structure and legal status, but also more profound changes in organizational discourse and practice, and in the ways the organizations make claims to legitimacy. To claim legitimacy as providers of aid in changing institutional environments, the organizations draw on both religious and professional sources of authority. By analysing the NGOization of Islamic charity, the paper brings out the importance of normative frameworks in shaping organizational legitimacy and sheds light on the continued significance of both moral and transcendental aspects of the discourses, practices and identities of Muslim NGOs.

In recent years, Chinese foundations have become increasingly involved in overseas charitable activities. This paper first describes the current status of Chinese foundations’ involvement in overseas charitable activities, including the development stage, the extent of participation, and the scale and scope of donations. Next, the paper analyzes the factors that impact Chinese foundations’ overseas donations. The study finds that fund size and the secretary general’s age and gender have no significant impact on overseas donations. However, factors such as the frequency of exchanges between foundations and foreign non-governmental organizations, the number of full-time employees in the foundations, and the number of years of education of the secretary general affect the amount of foundations’ overseas donations to various extents. Finally, policy recommendations are presented to promote Chinese foundations’ overseas charitable activities.

The year 1947 saw the opening of Oxfam’s first permanent charity shop on Broad Street in Oxford. It was the prototype of what was soon to become a national franchise of Oxfam shops and it marked the genesis of widespread popular engagement with charity in the form of consumption. Donations and purchases of goods in this second-hand shop space were not simply a financial means to a humanitarian end, these shops offered active engagements with the charity; engagements that shaped donor and shopper knowledge of the organisation and that cemented a particular form of charity participation. This interdisciplinary analysis contributes to an emerging body of historical and geographical scholarship that is exploring the intersection between charitable action and consumption by beginning to fill a lacuna of research on the development of charity shopping as a key form of popular philanthropic action.

The dictator game has become a celebrated workhorse of experimental economics and social psychology. In the standard version of the game an individual is given a sum of money and must choose how to split this money between themselves and some other individual. In a variant of the game the individual must split the money between themselves and a charitable cause. This charity version of the dictator game has now been used in well over fifty studies and has provided critical insight on the motives behind giving. It also provides a simple tool that policy makers and practitioners can use to test the effect of interventions. In this paper we explain the different ways in which charity dictator games can and have been used. We also look at the external validity of charity dictator games and discuss the research questions that can be appropriately studied using them.

Public trust of nonprofits can augment social benefits of the nonprofit sector by enhancing engagement of the general population in the sector. This study analyzed cross sectional data collected from a random sample of Canadians (n = 3853) to test the effects of respondents’ perceptions of financial accountability, transparency, and familiarity of charitable nonprofits, along with the effects of trust in key institutions on their general trust in charitable nonprofits. Results show that each factor (except for trust in government institutions) has a significant effect on the level of trust respondents had in charitable nonprofits. The study helps advance our understanding of what contributes to trust in charitable nonprofits among Canadians and offers suggestions on how nonprofits can garner greater trust with the population.

We examine the impact of volunteering and charitable donations on subjective wellbeing. We further consider if the model of the volunteering work (formal vs. informal) and the geographical location of the charity organisation (local vs. international) people donate to has any impact on subjective wellbeing. Using UK’s Community Life Survey data, we find that volunteering and engagement in charity are positively associated with subjective wellbeing, measured by individual life satisfaction. We show that while there is a positive effect of volunteering and charity on life satisfaction, the level of utility gained depends on the type of charity or volunteering organisation engaged with (i.e. local or international). Specifically, donating to local (neighbourhood) charities as opposed to international/national charities is associated with higher wellbeing. Similarly, engaging in informal volunteering, compared to formal volunteering, is associated with higher wellbeing. To explain our results, we use the construal-level theory of psychological distance, which suggests that people think more concretely of actions and objects that they find spatially and socially close.

In the decades that followed the American Civil War, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists, and Episcopalians across the Northern United States embarked on a massive centrally coordinated church-building program. Just as capitalists and politicians poured resources into the American West and South to consolidate and cohere the newly reunited nation under a single economic and political order, these Northern Protestants also hoped to bind the republic’s sections with a homogenous faith by bankrolling a continental network of church edifices across the country.

This article explores the role of the postbellum Protestant church-building endeavor in the broader process of national consolidation. It argues that the movement was nationally consolidative in three ways. Firstly, by pooling and re-distributing capital from wealthier congregations to their needier counterparts, the church-building organizations themselves brought greater uniformity and unity to the process of Protestant expansion in the United States. Secondly, the movement was compelled by a powerful religio-political philosophy of church-building the author terms “republican ecclesiology,” which endowed the Protestant edifice with a key infrastructural role in national reunification as a stabilizing bastion of piety and patriotism, especially in the American West. Finally, church-building advocates believed that the cross-continental financial networks forged between benefactors and beneficiaries consolidated the nation spiritually by creating a more united body of Protestant believers all invested – emotionally as well as financially – in their compatriots’ salvations.

The papers in this special issue have highlighted new perspectives on food charity activities, as well as notions of food and ethics in contemporary Vietnam. As Vietnam is rapidly changing, food-related activities are dynamic phenomena that reflect the social, moral, and economic changes unfolding in society. However, ethnographic research on food culture in Vietnam published in English has been scarce. This epilogue provides a few exploratory insights into interesting social phenomena in recent years that exemplify the shifting landscape of cuisine and food ethics in modern Vietnam.

This study explores the preparation of food for charitable distribution by Buddhists in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) (Vietnam). Most of those involved in cooking for charity are women. This article shows that HCMC women perceive cooking for charity as an extension of household cooking. Food charity transforms the household duty of cooking into a charitable practice that benefits the wider society. Vietnamese media focuses on this feminine aspect of food charity, portraying it as an act of kindness that increases communal solidarity during adversities such as the Covid-19 pandemic, similar to women's kitchen work in sustaining their families.

We examine in the laboratory how having the opportunity to donate to a charity in the future affects the likelihood of engaging in dishonest behavior in the present. We also examine how charitable donations are affected by past ethical choices. First, subjects self-report their performance on a task, which provides them with an opportunity for undetected cheating. In the second stage they can donate some of the money earned in the first stage to a charity. Only subjects in the treatment group know about the opportunity to donate in the second stage. We find that more subjects cheat if they know they can donate some of the money to charity. We also find that subjects in treatment end up donating less to charity and that both honest and dishonest subjects donate less in treatment. We propose a new hypothesis that explains these results: past violations of social norms numb one’s conscience, leading to more antisocial behavior.