NVSQ Blog

Community-Based Initiatives and Public Services Delivery in a Fragile Context: The Case of Yemen

Moosa Elayah, Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, Qatar.

With increasing incidence of high-intensity armed conflict around the world, massive and subversive effects on governance systems have resulted, leading to escalated socio-economic vulnerability, food insecurity, commodity dependence, and lack of access to justice for members of civil society. When government authority and legitimacy rapidly decline in the midst of protracted crises, how can civilians access public services? My study (with Nesmah Al-Sameai, Hiba Khodr, andSamah Gamar) looks at how community-based initiatives (CBIs) in fragile states and conflict zones work to overcome state failure to deliver critical and urgent social and economic services through a self-organized, community-based collective. We base our study on the case of Yemen, where hostilities and civil strife collapsed the central government – leaving a huge a void in public service provision. We asked ourselves: ‘In situations of deteriorating government authority and exacerbated humanitarian catastrophe, how can civil society self-organize and play a role in providing essential services to the community?’

Resilience in recovery? Understanding the extent, structure, and operations of nonprofits addressing disaster survivors’ unmet needs

Michelle Meyer, Texas A&M University

It is February 16, 2021 and it is 3℉ in Dallas, Texas. It is June 25, 2022 and it is 118℉ in Portland, Oregon. Neither of these examples are isolated incidents, though, as these “extremely rare” weather events are now happening more frequently due to climate change.

I bet you have always wondered how nonprofits help after disasters or extreme weather events like these. If you are not in a disaster prone area, or researching disasters like us, you actually may not have thought about this. Well, it may be time to start.

Social Justice, Climate Change and Large Environmental Nonprofits in the U.S.

Erik, W. Johnson, Washington State University

I am a sociologist who has been interested in US environmental movements since my days as an undergraduate student in the early 1990s. Over the course of my career, case studies documenting local conflicts over the siting of hazardous facilities and the unequal distribution of environmental harms across racial and economic categories have been the dominant theme in sociological research on the US environmental movement. I took a different approach for my dissertation research, completed in 2004. I assembled information spanning 1960-2000 for a sample of roughly 1,000 national environmental organizations to assess what the population of environmental organizations does. This “population” based approach to research is common in studies of other social movements, but rare in the case of US environmentalism.

What struck me in my early professional research and what has continued to do so, is the strong disjuncture between sociological studies of the US environmental movement and what environmental organizations actually do.

When a microfinance institution deviates from its social mission, borrowers are the most harmed, but stakeholders are also affected.

Carlos Serrano-Cinca, Yolanda Fuertes-Callén & Beatriz Cuéllar-Fernández, University of Zaragoza, Spain.

Mission drift is a popular research topic with respect to non-profit organizations and, in particular, microfinance institutions (MFIs). The need for many microfinance institutions to generate profit often leads these institutions to lose sight of their social mission. The consequences of mission drift for borrowers and MFIs have been extensively studied. Mission drift usually reduces outreach, can be detrimental to the poorest borrowers, harmful to women, and disappointing to donors and social investors. However, the effects of mission drift on other stakeholders (employees, government, micro-savers, and banking creditors) have been insufficiently studied, a gap that our study seeks to address.