Government support for socially oriented NPOs: Foreign experience

The article analyses a set of measures of government support to socially oriented nonprofit organizations (SO NPOs) which were enacted in 2009-2013 in Russia. The analysis is aimed at assessing this Russian regulatory framework designed to channel government support to SO NPOs by comparing it with the tools of government, employed to facilitate cross-sector partnership in the delivery of social services in the selected foreign countries. For a theoretical framework of the investigation of interaction between government and SO NPOs we rely on the demand / supply model and in particular on the theory of market and government "failure". The employed empirical material includes full-text versions of the relevant Russian Federal norms and regulations, selected matching documents of foreign countries as well as data of sociological surveys of Russian NPOs conducted by HSE. Firstly, principles used by Russian law-makers to define legally the subsector of SO NPOs are investigated. Analysis of the tools of the government support, introduced by the enacted norms and regulations, is then arranged by the major form of support: financial, transfer of property rights, tax incentives etc. The data are featured on the scope of the government support to SO NOPs at the federal level of government and in part at the level of regions. International comparisons follow. Overall the set of measures discussed constitutes a serious positive innovation in the Russian government practices vis--vis SO NPOs. It shows the substantial similarity with the government tool kits, employed to support NPOs elsewhere in the world. This relates to the criteria of legal eligibility for support and to the composition of the tool kit, which includes government subsidies / grants, tax incentives etc. There remains room for expansion of the Russian tool kit. In implementing new legal norms attention must be paid to keeping administrative barriers to access to the government support reasonably low, in particular to small NPOs constituting a majority in the Russian nonprofit sector.