How Nonprofit Organizations Respond to Change

As Lee (201) points out, nonprofits and NGOs have experienced uneven growth around the world, depending on factors like pre-existing political and economic integration with the global marketplace. Both economic and economic factors, at both the national and global levels, impact the growth and development of nonprofit organizations. Greenpeace provides a perfect example of how a nonprofit organization adapts to contextual changes, shifting their target audience, fundraising methods, and strategies based on prevailing and emerging challenges. The challenges faced by Greenpeace have included political, economic, historical/temporal, cultural, and institutional conditions.
Greenpeace began in 1971, not as an environmentalist group as they are now, but as an antiwar and anti-nuclear weapons organization (Greenpeace, 2017). The organization started in Vancouver, Canada, with few cultural barriers to its initial growth. By the time Greenpeace expanded into a multinational NGO with a focus on environmental issues, awareness about the issues that Greenpeace promoted through its outreach, public awareness, and advocacy programs was growing within North America. As Zelko (2017) puts it, “Greenpeace's influence largely stemmed from its engagement with...world civic politics,” which blended the rise of globalization with the rise of a sense of mutual and transnational responsibility for environmental stewardship.
From a relatively small organization with a tiny footprint, Greenpeace is now the world’s largest environmental NGO with offices in over 40 countries (Zelko, 2017). Because Greenpeace has effectively adapted to cultural, historical, economic, and political changes, the organization has withstood some of the turmoil that affected other NGOs. Remaining tied to sources of wealth and power in Western Europe and North America has ensured Greenpeace remains insulated from volatile economic and political situations in developing countries. At the same time, Greenpeace effectively “influences behavior at multiple scales, from individuals, to governments, to multilateral organizations,” (Zelko, 2017, p. 1). Greenpeace has gained a seat at the tables of government and the private sector, influencing policy because of the organization’s adaptability. Using Lee’s (2010) model, Greenpeace embodies the success of the “top down” perspective of growth, focusing on how pre-existing integration into the global market economy and systems of power ensures ongoing success.
The targets of Greenpeace’s activism include local, regional, national, and multinational organizations as well as governments. By diversifying its portfolio without diluting its core goals, Greenpeace has retained a strong brand identity as the premier global environmentalist NGO that has sufficient influence and power to wield in different sectors. Therefore, environmental racism and injustice can be targeted through the methods used by Greenpeace even when Greenpeace does not operate specifically in a target area or country. Greenpeace focuses a great deal of its attention also on curbing the enthusiasm of heavy industries including the oil and gas sector, offering an effective counterpoint to weakening regulatory environments in wealthy capitalist countries. Responding to external factors like deregulation, Greenpeace anticipates political problems and responds by drawing funding from sectors dedicated to promoting environmentalism either as a marketing tool or as a means of fulfilling organizational goals. Therefore, the best practices of business and management can be applied just as well to the nonprofit sector. The nonprofit sector benefits from ongoing SWOT analyses that reveal internal and external threats and opportunities. Responding to challenges requires a willingness to change both organizational culture and policies, enabling the nonprofit to continue growing and to remain relevant over time.






References

Greenpeace (2017). About Us. Retrieved online: http://www.greenpeace.org/canada/en/About-us/History/
Lee, T. (2010). The rise of international nongovernmental organizations: A top-down or bottom-up explanation? Voluntas: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations, 21(3), 393–416.
Zelko, F. (2017). Scaling Greenpeace: From local activism to global governance. Historical Social Research 42(2): 318-342.