Our Common Commons: Policies for Sustaining Volunteer Energy

Brudney Jeffrey L. () and Meijs Lucas C.P.M. ()
Additional contact information
Brudney Jeffrey L.: Department of Public & International Affairs, University of North Carolina Wilmington, Wilmington, NC, USA
Meijs Lucas C.P.M.: Erasmus University of Rotterdam, Rotterdam, Netherlands

Nonprofit Policy Forum, 2013, vol. 4, issue 1, 29-45

Abstract: Brudney and Meijs (2009) conceive of volunteer energy as a social resource that constitutes the basis for (organizationally based) volunteering. They show that volunteer energy can be compared to a human-made, renewable resource that can be grown and recycled – but likewise one that is subject to misuse and misappropriation that can imperil the vitality of the resource. They explain that to a certain extent, volunteer energy is a common pool resource with free access for all volunteer-involving organizations, especially given the trend that people are less committed to one organization. As a consequence, volunteer-involving organizations must be collectively interested in making more volunteer energy available, now and in the future. As with other resources, sustaining the volunteer resource is becoming an issue. Thus, the need arises to develop an approach to the collective challenge of governing the volunteer energy commons. To this challenge we apply the design principles of Elinor Ostrom (1990) for robust governance of the common pool resource.

Keywords: volunteering; volunteerism; common pool resources; governance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1515/npf-2012-0004 (text/html)
For access to full text, subscription to the journal or payment for the individual article is required.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bpj:nonpfo:v:4:y:2013:i:1:p:29-45:n:3

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/npf/html

DOI: 10.1515/npf-2012-0004

Access Statistics for this article

Nonprofit Policy Forum is currently edited by Dennis Young

More articles in Nonprofit Policy Forum from De Gruyter
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().