Scandinavian Civil Society and Social Transformations by Bernard Enjolras & Kristin Strømsnes

Author:Bernard Enjolras & Kristin Strømsnes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

Nonprofit Welfare Services

The analysis in this chapter has so far mainly been based on data from the organization surveys which do not include data from the nonprofit welfare service providers. To complete the picture, this section is based on other data that cover this field, including the Johns Hopkins Nonprofit Sector Project with data from 1997 and 2004 (Sivesind 2007, 2008a, 2008b; Sivesind, Lorentzen, Selle, & Wollebæk, 2002; Sivesind et al. 2004) and the Satellite Account for Non-Profit Institutions (Statistics Norway, 2015) with data from 2006 to 2014.

In line with the trends in other European regions , the Scandinavian countries have implemented NPM tools to regulate relations between public contracting authorities and providers of welfare services. Local governments made an internal separation between contracting authorities and providers of services in the beginning of the 1990s in Sweden (Erlandsson, Storm, Strantz, Szebehely, & Trydegård, 2013, p. 27) and late in the 1990s in Denmark and Norway (Vabø, Christensen, Jacobsen, & Trætteberg, 2013, p. 171). Since then, many frame agreements between public purchasers and service providers that would almost automatically be renewed have been replaced by contract negotiations or competitive tendering.

Sweden has gone further in terms of introducing user choice and vouchers, reducing barriers to establishment of new service institutions and allowing distribution of profits. This has created a strong growth stimulus for the profit-oriented enterprises offering welfare services. It has also attracted international investor capital. Consequently, in Sweden since the year 2000, the share of for-profit service providers has increased from 9% to 19% of those employed in the welfare field, while the nonprofit sector remains very small at 3%. Norway and Denmark have by comparison a stronger element of nonprofit providers with, respectively, 8% and 14% of welfare employment (Sivesind, 2017, Table 3.1; Boje, 2017). At the time of writing, the public sector employment share is comparatively large and almost the same in all three Scandinavian countries, with between 78% and 79% of the welfare employment. However, in Sweden, the public sector employment has decreased in real numbers, and a decline has recently started in Denmark as well. In Norway, with no need for austerity measures because of the oil income, all three sectors are still growing in real numbers, although the public sector’s share is decreasing (Sivesind, 2017).

However, the nonprofit welfare shares in all Scandinavian countries are much smaller than in welfare partnership countries like Austria, Germany, and France with well-established, partly church-based welfare services and nonprofit welfare employment shares between 20% and 25%. As an example of a more liberal model, the UK has nonprofit welfare provision on the same high level, but the services are funded and organized in a different manner. In fact, the levels in Sweden and Norway are comparable only to Eastern-European countries that still are marked by the communist era when the nonprofit sector was kept at a minimum (Salamon & Sokolowski, 2016; Sivesind & Selle, 2009).

The voluntary sector in Norway has a long tradition as a provider of welfare services in collaboration with the public sector.

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