Government Funding to the NGOs: A Blessing or a Curse?

The impacts of the government funding on the NGOs in terms of advantages and disadvantages has received mixed response from the scholars. This study attempts to review the promises and perils of government funding on the NGOs and aims to gather the scattered knowledge from literature at one place. Literature review was carried out for the relevant studies. Using the inclusion/exclusion criteria established for this article, 31 studies were finally selected for review. Using thematic analysis approach, 5 main themes regarding government funding impacts on NGOs were extracted from the reviewed 31 studies. The themes are institutional theory and Isomorphism, accountability, loss of autonomy, mission drift and crowding out. Some scholars and studies linked these themes with underperformance while others linked them with stability of the NGOs. Definite results are hard to draw to determine the impacts of government funding on NGOs and in fact these impacts depend upon a number of factors such as, age, size, sector, demography, political, economic and social environments of an NG