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Scholars studying postwar settings are often highly critical of the work of NGOs in peacebuilding. In this chapter, I argue that many of the limitations of the NGO model are the result of the structure of funding. Using ethnographic and archival data from donors and NGOs engaging in peacebuilding in Croatia, this chapter examines the incentives build into the dominant donor–NGO model of funding. I find that the incentives for both donors and NGOs built into funding for peacebuilding lead to dysfunctional behavior by both donors and NGOs, and ultimately to ineffective and sometimes counterproductive peacebuilding projects. I find that donors actively shape the agenda of NGOs and push NGOs to see projects as the unit of peacebuilding. Donor funding is novelty seeking, rewarding NGOs for coming up with new project ideas and working in new locations. It also favors quantifiable events and activities for the purposes of reporting. In practice, these systematic preferences lead to the abandonment of successful projects, difficulty in securing long-term funding for work in troubled communities, and the favoring of countable events over development of the interpersonal relationships that are at the heart of successful peacebuilding.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the financial challenges experienced by non-profit organisations (NPOs) when implementing corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives in South Africa. These challenges have a negative impact on NPOs because they impede the successful implementation of CSR projects.

A qualitative research method and a purposive sampling strategy were used in this study. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 13 employees from three NPOs in South Africa from the education, enterprise development and health and social development sectors. Content analysis was used to examine the data.

The findings revealed that NPOs in South Africa experience serious financial resource challenges, notably, overreliance on donor funding; difficulty in obtaining donor funding; limited donor funding available; intense competition from other non NPOs to secure donor funding; donors unwilling to fund operational costs and prescribing exactly how funds should be used; and donors signing non-binding contracts on the provision of funding.

The sample size of the study was small, namely, three NPOs from Gauteng Province (Johannesburg) in South Africa. Therefore, this study covered only one geographic area of South Africa and the findings cannot be generalised across other provinces of the country.

The results of this study could have implications for donors and NPO employees involved in CSR activities in South Africa.

This study bridges a gap in literature by revealing the key financial challenges experienced by South African NPOs in implementing CSR initiatives and the impact of those challenges on their CSR efforts.

This paper aims to investigate funding and performance monitoring practices in Zambia’s health sector from an institutional and stratified ontology perspective. Such an approach was deemed appropriate in view of pluralistic institutional environments characterising most African economies that are also considered to be highly stratified.

Blended with insights from stratified ontology, the paper draws on institutional pluralism as a theoretical lens to understand the institutional structures, mechanisms, events and experiences encountered by actors operating at different levels of Zambia’s health sector. The study adopted an interpretive approach that helped to investigate the multifaceted and subjective nature of social phenomena and practices being studied. Data were collected from both archival sources and interviews with key stakeholders operating within Zambia’s health sector.

The study’s findings indicate the high levels of stratification within Zambia’s health sector as evidenced by the three sector levels that possessed different characteristics in terms of actor responses to donor influence. This study equally demonstrates the capacity of agents operating under highly fragmented institutional environments to engage in enabling and constraining responses depending on the understanding of their empirical world.

Through blending insights from stratified ontology with institutional pluralism, the study contributes to the literature by demonstrating the enabling and constraining reflexive capacity of agents to exercise choices under highly fragmented institutional environments while responding to multiple demands and expectations to sustain the co-existence of diverse stakeholders. Accordingly, the study advances thinking on the application of institutional theory to critical accounting research in line with recent ontological and epistemological shifts in institutional theory.

This study examines the determinants of medical crowdfunding performance. Drawing on signaling theory, the authors investigate how funding-related signals (funding goal and duration), story-related signals (text length, text sentiment, and use of first-person pronouns), and donor-related signals (donor identity disclosure) affect medical crowdfunding performance.

This study analyzed the data of 754 medical crowdfunding projects collected from the Qingsongchou platform in China to test the proposed model.

The empirical findings reveal that both funding goal and funding duration exhibit a U-shaped relationship with crowdfunding performance. Additionally, the authors find evidence that story text length and donor identity disclosure are positively related to crowdfunding performance, whereas the use of first-person pronouns is negatively related to crowdfunding performance.

This study extends the understanding of the determinants of medical crowdfunding performance through the signaling theory. Specifically, this study provides new insights into the roles of funding goal and funding duration in predicting medical crowdfunding performance and identifies several new predictors of crowdfunding performance, including the use of first-person pronouns in project story text and donor identity disclosure.

In the era of the knowledge economy, universities are expected to contribute to the economic development of their countries. Therefore, their research agendas must be relevant to the local context and geared, though not uncritically, to the national educational agenda. To do this diligently requires research autonomy. However, due to the low government investment in research on the African continent, universities have had to rely on other sources of funding, which usually come with strings attached. Our study investigates the case of Ghana, in particular, the University of Ghana, the leading research university in the country. We drew on resource dependence theory, which suggests that, despite external pressures on universities, they can enhance their autonomy through the implementation of strategic measures. Primarily, we analyzed documents such as research reports, journal articles and speeches in the light of Clark’s (1998) model of the “entrepreneurial university,” which, if adapted with care and in a localized form in Ghana, may contribute to the research autonomy of its universities. We found that, although research autonomy in Ghanaian universities is limited due to their over-reliance on external donor funding, it is likely to be strengthened if the government of Ghana follows through on plans to increase research funding and universities continue with measures to diversify their funding sources.

State funding is being reduced for higher education institutes (HEIs) is linked to several checks such as performance-based incentives (Hagood, 2019). This forces HEIs to look for other options for funding. Endowment funds are now becoming the main source of revenue for HEIs (Sörlin, 2007), largely provided by alumni. Thus, this study aims to examine the factors that lead to donor behavior in terms of university endowment funds.

Based on a sample of 627 participants in the survey from public universities in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) and 625 from public/private universities of the United States of America (USA), the authors conducted a cross-sectional survey-based analysis. Hypotheses were tested with regression analysis.

The results revealed that in the USA, donors with substantial prestige within the institution are more likely to contribute to the endowment fund; however, in the KSA, this relationship was insignificant. Additionally, this study found that participation, brand interpretation and satisfaction positively impact identification with an organization, leading to donor behavior.

This research has successfully identified psychological factors for endowment funding; however, mediating or moderating variables affecting donor behavior should also be considered. Further, this study considers only two countries, the KSA and the USA; therefore, a larger cross-cultural context warrants more investigation.

Overall results revealed several means through which the administrators and practitioners may efficiently manage and increase university endowment funds flow. This study's novelty is to conduct a cross-national investigation and identify the psychological factors of donation behavior toward university endowment funds, providing an opportunity for HEIs to understand the psychological factors in detail and motivate their alumni to be one of the important sources of funding even in developing countries.

Many psychological factors underlie alumni's engagement in volunteerism and donation activities, especially in cross-national settings. Following social identity theory, this study explored identity-based donor behavior in terms of supporting universities through endowment funding.

We consider the relationship between external aid and development in Mozambique from 1980–2004, identifying the specific mechanisms through which aid has influenced the developmental trajectory of the country. We undertake both a growth accounting analysis and review the intended and unintended effects of aid at the micro-level. Sustained aid flows to Mozambique, in conflict and post-conflict periods, have made an unambiguous, positive contribution to rapid growth since 1992. However, proliferation of donors and aid-supported interventions has burdened local administration, indicating a need for deeper domestic government accountability. To sustain growth, Mozambique must maximize benefits from natural resources while promoting constructive international market integration.

The study aims to explore language style and gender match as a key part of initial trust among potential donors and how this leads to funding success based on the similarity attraction and homophily theories. Empirical analyses of 160 respondents revealed that people are more concerned about “how it is written” (language style) than “who has written it” (gender).

Crowdfunding (CF) is an internet-based method of funding employed by project founders, allowing individuals to raise funds from the crowd to support their projects. It is important for project founders to attract the crowd’s interest as potential funders commonly have limited information about projects. One of the early cues about a project that can be picked up by the crowd in CF projects is the text description of the proposal. This text description is crucial for giving the crowd an understanding of the project and for promoting the crowd’s trust in the founder, encouraging them to fund the CF project. Based on the similarity attraction and homophily theories, this study sets out to explore language style and gender match as key elements of initial trust among potential donors and how they lead to funding success. A 2 × 2 factorial experimental design (e.g. subject, male and female, × male language style and female language style) was used for the study. To determine the sample size of the experiment, this study applied power and sample size estimations to measure how many respondents were needed for the experiment. Based on the power table of effect size, 128 respondents were considered to be a sufficient number for this experiment to ensure sufficient statistical power of 0.8 and a significance level of 0.05. This study fulfilled the requirement by recruiting 160 respondents, which corresponded to 40 subjects per group based on a 2 × 2 factorial design (the respondents’ gender, male and female, and text language style, male and female). The empirical analysis of 160 respondents revealed that people are more concerned about “how it is written” (language style) than “who has written it” (gender).

This paper contributes to project founders’ understanding and knowledge of the importance of linguistic style, which can determine the success of a CF project. One of the important results of this study is that the crowd can identify the author’s gender based on their writing style. Through an experiment applying factorial analysis (2 × 2), it was found that people are more concerned about “how it is written” (language style) than with “who it is written by” (gender). This means that the project founder, if they know who their audience is, should know how to write the project proposal so that it fits the audience’s preferences. More specifically, the success rate of CF projects can be increased by integrating suitable word dimensions in promotions of projects on CF platforms. Therefore, it can be argued that linguistic style is a powerful agent for building a connection with a target audience. The findings of this study can be used as theoretical guidance, and eventually, the potential antecedents of funding intention can be further explored.

This study is subject to several limitations. The result is limited to donation-based CF. As this study focuses on the language style of project founders when they describe their CF projects, donation-based CF was the most appropriate platform for this research. In donation-based CF, the style words are more emotion-based, compared to other CF platforms. The experiment, however, could also be replicated for other CF types such as reward-based CF. One important part of CF projects is persuading the crowd to fund them. It is worth mentioning that reward-based CF involves individuals pledging to a business in exchange for a reward. Yet, even though reward-based CF offers rewards, it is generally considered a subset of donation-based CF because there is no financial return to the backer. Therefore, it is suggested that future research should also consider case studies in reward-based CF. Second, from the persuading perspective, this study focusses on narrative language style only, as it facilitates the crowd’s understanding of a CF project. Future study can further focus on other information content such as videos in the project proposal. Prior research has found that providing a video in a CF project increases the crowd’s confidence in funding (Mitra, 2012). The study is also supported by previous studies that suggest producing a higher quality of video in the project proposal positively related to the success of CF projects (Mollick (2014)).

The result of this study empirically confirmed that the crowd’s willingness to fund a project proposal and their trust are dependent on the text description of the project proposal. The project founders need to know how to describe the content of a project so that it signals the quality of the project, especially in early start-ups. In other words, the way that a project is created and published through a CF platform will send a valuable signal to the potential donors about the project, and they will either find it acceptable or reject it. If the project appears to lack demand among potential donors, it is easier for project founders to quickly identify that the project will fail, without the need to invest additional capital.

The findings of this study have important social implications that provide guidelines for project founders on establishing a strategy to help the crowd understand their projects. At the same time, the findings can help the crowd to make their funding decisions. First, the text language used in the CF project by the project founder plays an important role in presenting the campaign and all the ideas need to be presented in a clear way so that the crowd understands the project. In CF projects, pitch is everything (Varsamis, 2018). The pitch refers to the text or video that is provided by the project founder to show their project proposal to the crowd. Compared with traditional funding channels (such as venture capital, i.e. banks), CF is more convenient for raising funds. This is because the project founders need to show their ideas in a creative way to the crowd online, rather than preparing a complex plan and racking their brains on how they can persuade investors to participate (Wang and Yang (2019)). This research intends to help project founders understand how they can influence the crowd by improving the text language used in their CF projects.

This paper fulfils an identified need to study how the linguistic style of the project founder would lead to the success rate of crowdfunding projects.

Many development interventions fail to report results that are important to local people (intended beneficiaries of the intervention) but not of strategic importance to the donors funding the work. Failure to report unexpected results, or those not linked to strategic goals, contributes to an overly negative view from external evaluations by donors and agencies. The causes of the mismatch between actual and demonstrated results failure were studied through stakeholder interests. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Nine project and programme managers of similar but unrelated projects were interviewed. From the interviews, previous studies and project publications, the challenges posed by differing interests and different perceptions in reporting stakeholder activities, outputs and outcomes, were identified. The complex environment of many development interventions was analysed and the work was contextualised with a peacebuilding project in Sri Lanka, which the author has previously studied. A stakeholder role and perception analysis was used to map the challenges at four times in the project cycle, producing a dynamic stakeholder analysis.

The failure to fully report intervention results was linked to the changing role of competing stakeholder interests as a project proceeds, the conflicting perceptions of stakeholders, the structural over-simplification of a complex environment and power differentials that allow donors to misappropriate the role of clients.

Current practice in designing and evaluating projects needs to improve reporting of beneficiary interests.

To the author’s knowledge there are no prior publications in this area of research (under-reporting of development intervention results); the paper is considered highly original.

In New Zealand, as in many other developed countries around the world, news is made not just by those many organizations with superb performance records, but also by the few whose achievements fall far short of donor expectations and public perceptions. One of the core competencies of NPOs should be the ability to build strong donor relationships (Lewis, 1998), to create a sustainable income model which allows the organization to focus on their operational efforts. Funding uncertainties affect the ability to operate, to motivate and to plan for the future. Research (Mueller et al., 2004) was undertaken to determine how the relationship between NPOs and donors can be improved. This work focused on the identification of areas where NPOs need support to improve their governance and management functions. Both donors and NPOs were investigated, and the results were used to speculate in which areas external support would be most helpful and where donor/NPO perceptions differ. NPOs and donors indicated that they are aware that NPOs require both governance and managerial support. Both the NPOs and the donors indicated that an objective evaluation system would be valuable to them as evidence of credibility. Such a system would also help to guide the internal assessment process. These findings led to the development of the Looking Glass Evaluation Tool (LGET) which measures an organization along the following dimensions: effective management, strategic planning, advocacy, legal framework, governance and fundraising. The dimensions were derived partly from the work of Lester Salamon from the Nathan Cummings Foundation, New York. The LGET questions an organization about its levels of understanding, planning and implementation of governance and managerial functions and provides a snapshot of the organization’s structural effectiveness. The tool does not test the outcomes of the organization’s work; but speculates that an organization with poor internal structure will be less likely to perform sustainably, especially in the area of creating strong donor relationships. The tool is completed through a guided self‐assessment process, which is then reviewed with the organization to assure a clear understanding of the review objectives. From this snapshot of performance in a wide range of areas, organizations can focus resources on specific parts of their work for improvement. The LGET has been trialled in its prototype form in a number of NPOs in New Zealand, including a Maori charitable trust and has been favorably received.