This article deals with the literature on the French nonprofit sector (NPS). A preliminary part is devoted to presenting and discussing the characteristics that shape the approaches to this sector in France. In the second part, the article outlines some landmarks in the history of the French NPS. This literature review also focuses on empirical studies of the sector, placing a particular emphasis on the more recent ones. This review ends with the analysis of the challenges that NPS faces in a context characterized by the increasing constraints on public funding, changes in the nature of such funding with a substitution of contracts for subsidies, an increased competition among NPOs as well as between NPOs and for-profit enterprises.

This is the first book to reveal the extent to which nonprofit organisations, despite their invisibility in official statistics, have become one of the clearest expression of social and cultural change in France. Edith Archambault argues that the nonprofit organisations have a unique ability to marry private initiative with public cocerns and therefore become the most flexible partners of modern social policies.

Chapter 6: Country profiles.

While most observers have equated privatization with a conservative assault on the welfare state, Claire F. Ullman demonstrates that such was not the case in France. There, delegation to nonprofits was motivated by the desire to increase the state's ability to achieve progressive social goals, including enabling welfare programs to reach more of the disadvantaged. Elites sought to recruit nonprofit organizations as partners not to roll back the state, but to bolster and extend its power. Ullman suggests that the western welfare state's new reliance on nonprofit organizations should be re-evaluated in light of the French case.

This text offers an overview of the size, scope, structure, historical development and current policy environment of the German nonprofit sector.