Nonprofit Governance and Effectiveness: Beyond the Organizational Perspective.

The nonprofit sector comprises a wide and heterogeneous range of objectives strived for by various organizations. Within or across organizations, multiple goals are aimed at, sometimes re-enforcing each other, but frequently traded off as resources are scarce. Within this context, substantial challenges exist to assess the organizational effectiveness, as the impact of a single organization is difficult to quantify and judgments are often subjective.
As a result, when evaluating and comparing effectiveness of nonprofit organizations, we tend to look at the governance practices applied by organizations – of which we assume that they are creating effectiveness – rather than remain speculative on how the organizational outputs have a concrete societal impact. The seven chapters in this dissertation aim to make a contribution within the broad body of literature that already exists on what proper governance practices are and how they contribute to effective output of (groups of) organizations. In general, while most of the previous contributions investigate nonprofit governance and effectiveness based on organizational characteristics, this dissertation aims at looking beyond these characteristics and clarifying relevant individual and inter-organizational dynamics within and across organizations.