The Nonprofitized Welfare State: Examining the Relationship between Social Welfare Nonprofitization and Service Expansiveness in Canada and the United Kingdom

When governments reach out to nonprofit organizations to provide social welfare services, a common argument posits, service expansiveness is weakened: either contracting out is an explicit abdication of public duty or it creates incentives that undermine service expansiveness over time. And yet the evidence does not seem to support this simple explanation of welfare state nonprofitization. This dissertation presents a comparison of nonprofitized welfare in two countries – Canada and the United Kingdom – and two policy areas – homelessness and emergency management. It argues, first, that there is no necessary relationship between the level of nonprofitization and social welfare expansiveness. Nonprofitization occurs within a context where the public duty is being continuously renegotiated, meaning that the boundaries of the welfare state are always in flux. Two pathways to nonprofitization result from the different directions of these fluctuations: cost-cutting and co-optation. While the cost-cutting pathway is linked to service contraction, co-optation is linked to the expansion of public duty. Thus, there is no single overarching relationship between welfare nonprofitization and service expansiveness: nonprofitization operates in both directions. However, this dissertation also argues that the choices that governments make about how to institutionalize nonprofit social welfare can influence whether welfare expansiveness erodes over time or, indeed, actually increases. Service expansiveness is undermined when institutions of acquisition embed values of free-market competition, rather than collaboration or service stability. Service expansiveness is facilitated where the policy structure offers opportunities for nonprofit voice through advocacy, shaping the service, and piloting.Ph.D