Icing on the Cake: How Governance Absorption and Accountability Promote the Durability of the Third Sector Organizations

Background: In China, the third sector organizations are playing an increasing role in social governance and the third distribution. In recent years, the Party and the state have introduced a series of policies and measures aimed at promoting the third sector organizations’ durability, which present two different ideas of "absorption" and "accountability". These two approaches have their own advantages and disadvantages for promoting organizations' durability. Therefore, this study integrates the network governance theory and the new institutionalism perspective, and tries to propose the conceptual framework of "accountable absorption" to analyze the approach to promoting organizations’ durability.

Method: Data were collected from 954 social work institutions nested in 57 cities from the 2019 China Social Work Longitudinal Study (CSWLS). These institutions had the civil affairs department as the competent authority in 77.46% of the cases, with an average establishment of 4.99 years, an average staff size of 27.92, and about 73.90% of the institutions functionally positioned as comprehensive services.

Due to the constraints of the institutional environment, the similarity of institutions in the same city was higher than those between different cities, so this study used a multilevel regression model to analyze the data. Factors that may affect the durability of the third sector organizations at both the institutional and city levels were controlled.

Results: The results showed that governance absorption (p<0.05) promoted organizations’ durability in general. Specifically in terms of the three dimensions of governance absorption, ideological absorption promoted public value (0.654^***), organizational reputation (0.770^***), and internal governance capacity (5.633^**) of organizations; Administrative absorption promoted organizational reputation (1.108^***), but reduced extra-governmental funding (-0.057⁺) of organizations; Strategic resource absorption promoted public value (1.278^***) and organizational reputation (0.574^*), but reduced extra-governmental funding (-0.127^***) of organizations. In addition, accountability could reinforce the facilitating effects of administrative absorption (0.808^*) and strategic resource absorption (9.440⁺) on organizations' durability, while mitigating the negative effects of strategic resource absorption (0.146^*).

Implications: The findings suggest that the conceptual framework of "accountable absorption" is consistent with the internal logic of the third sector organizations to improve durability in the Chinese context: absorption is the basis of accountability, and accountability is the reinforcement of absorption. This also provides policy implications: multi-dimensional absorption on the third sector organizations should be insisted on, especially the ideological absorption. At the same time, the accountability system should be improved to amplify the effect of governance absorption to promote the durability of the third sector organizations.