Nonprofit Organizations and Public Policy in Refugee and Other Migrant Crises: Concepts and Frameworks

This article introduces the special issue of Nonprofit Policy Forum exploring the relationship between nonprofit organizations, (conceptualized broadly to include NGOs, civil society actors, and other third sector actors), public policy actors, and migration crises. We have three overarching goals with our introductory article. One is to conceptualize migration crises vis-a-vis the third sector, better illuminating how the nonprofit sector intervenes in and interacts with migration crises. We consider this at the individual/family, community, and regional/national levels, and also attempt to distinguish between real (empirical) crises and manufactured (e.g. solely politically useful) “crises”. Our second goal is to present a framework categorizing third sector-state relationships in contexts of migration, with an eye toward broadening the field’s focus beyond the interactions we commonly observe in the global North. We do this by categorizing types of government-nonprofit relationships based on where they fall among two intersecting continua of state capacity and relationship quality. Finally, we present a framework of four ideal types of state-third sector interactions in migration crises, providing a case-based application in each category. Our hope is that scholars can move toward using this framework for assessing state capacity and third-sector relationships in migration crises. We illustrate our concepts and framework with examples from the articles in this special issue of Nonprofit Policy Forum as well as other extant research and practical examples. We tie each of our concepts and frameworks to real world scenarios, and ultimately hope to work toward practical applications that may be of use to future researchers, practitioners, and at some endpoint benefit the lives of migrants themselves.