ERNOP 2025 Heidelberg
This session asked how we actually know philanthropy—through accounting, sector mapping, theory cartographies, and long-run evidence—via four complementary takes from Gina Rossi (University of Udine), John Mohan (University of Birmingham), Dominik S. Meier (University of Basel), and René Bekkers (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam).
Accounting for Philanthropy — Gina Rossi (University of Udine)
Gina Rossi highlighted that accounting is never merely technical or neutral. Choices about for what, to whom, and how we disclose shape behavior and values in the field.
Conclusion (motto): If numbers are for the people, they must be legible by the people: design disclosure so communities can actually see themselves—and what matters to them—in the accounts. Rossi’s message was crisp: accounting is never just technical. It is technical (standards, categories, metrics), social (it shapes the behaviour of donors, grantees, and regulators), and moral (it encodes value choices about for what, to whom, and how we represent philanthropic activity).
In other words, ledgers are lenses: they don’t just reflect reality; they help construct it. Good accounting can enable organisations to flourish; bad accounting can contort practice around the wrong numbers.
Mapping the Nonprofit Sector — John Mohan (University of Birmingham)
John Mohan walked through the long, careful work of consolidating registries, resolving naming variants, and deduplicating records to build an open, navigable map of UK civil society—the UK Third Sector Database. The mapping’s value is civic as much as academic: it lets citizens, journalists, funders, and policymakers see the sector rather than infer it.
Conclusion (motto): A shared public map pushes knowledge out of silos and into public hands—evidence for the people that can increasingly be used by the people.
Reframing Theories and Methods — Dominik S. Meier (University of Basel)
Dominik S. Meier presented LLM-assisted bibliometric mapping (1970–2004) to extract and canonicalize the theories, methods, and geographies structuring nonprofit studies, then visualize co-occurrences.
The pipeline: ingest full texts, extract theories/methods/geographies, deduplicate and canonicalize labels, then build co-occurrence networks for visualization and analysis. Early results echo prior field mappings (e.g., Ma & Konrath, 2018): core theories remain stable across decades while peripheral theories cycle in and out.
Conclusion (motto): When the scaffolding of scholarship is visible, communities can question and co-author what counts as knowledge—research done with them, not only about them.
Why Is Household Giving Declining? — René Bekkers (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)
René Bekkers summarized a stark long-run trend: since 2000, household giving as a share of spending/income has dropped markedly in the Netherlands and the United States, while the UK picture is flatter (methods matter). Cohort replacement (less religiosity, fewer marriages) explains much of the Dutch decline; in the U.S., cohort dynamics plus declining home ownership stand out. (Published, country-level series and reports broadly reflect these patterns; detailed cross-national modeling is ongoing.)
Conclusion (motto): If social structures shift, philanthropy must meet people where their values and constraints now are—renewing generosity with people, not merely exhorting it at them.
Session Wrap-Up — Infrastructures for People-Centered Philanthropy
Across the four talks, infrastructure is the thread:
- Accounting frames what we deem real and important.
- Mapping makes the landscape public and navigable.
- Theory cartographies reveal which ideas we elevate or ignore.
- Long-run evidence keeps us honest beyond anecdotes.
Read through the ERNOP motto “For the People, By the People,” the task is clear: build knowledge systems ordinary stakeholders can read, question, and use. When disclosure illuminates, maps are open, theory is transparent, and trends inform practice, philanthropy becomes not only something done for people—but something understood and reshaped by them.
Diss-Tance 