ABSTRACT
According to widespread assumptions on the international variety of welfare regimes, Continental Europe exhibits a distinctive history of relations between the state and the nonprofi t sector (Katz & Sachße 1996; Lahusen 2006; Salamon & Anheier 1998). This history contains a long tradition of close intersectoral collaboration as well as dense network relations among the regime’s major stakeholders, including powerful, service-providing nonprofi t organizations. In spite of this long recognized pattern, the international debate that began in the late 1990s on the changing governance of the third sector in advanced Western societies has, somewhat surprisingly, stressed the innovative character and relative newness of boundaryspanning intersectoral linkages (Evers 2005; Kooïman 2003: 3, 113; Lewis 2005). In the terms employed by prominent conceptualizations of statenonprofi t relationships (Najam 2000; Young 2000), mere complementarity in the relation between governments and the nonprofi t sector is assumed to have been superseded by formalized co-operation or co-optation, even as more distant, if not adversarial, relations seem to turn into collaborative ones. However, this conjecture sits uncomfortably with the fact that mainland Europe (the Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, France, and Germany, to name but a few) witnessed network-based patterns of governance from very early on. What has been substantiated particularly well in the fi eld of social welfare provision, under closer inspection in this chapter, can also be extended to other domains such as cultural production and the social organization of leisure.
