Non-Governmental and Not-for-Profit Organizational Effectiveness: A Modern Synthesis

NGO/NPO effectiveness remains a prominent concern for scholars and practitioners, but the literature on this issue is increasingly
fragmented along disciplinary lines. We address this problem by presenting a comprehensive and interdisciplinary review of
the literature on NGO and NPO effectiveness using citation analysis. In order to uncover commonalities across disciplines
concerned with similar questions, we deploy a structured literature review using snowball sampling within citation networks.
This approach limits author biases, fosters an interdisciplinary perspective, and adds a different methodological approach
to conventional content-based literature reviews. Our review uncovers three trends: (1) there is broad scholarly consensus
that unidimensional measures of effectiveness are not useful—even though such measures are commonly used by NGO/NPO rating
agencies; (2) the scholarship on NGO/NPO effectiveness is dominated by conceptual works, while empirical studies remain rare;
(3) a consensus on how to operationalize effectiveness remains elusive. These results suggest that progress in our understanding
of NGO/NPO effectiveness requires enhanced efforts at crossing disciplinary divides, adding empirical analyses, and increasing
attention to develop shared categories and methodologies.