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New development: Resilience or risk rhetoric? The mirage of management control and performance measurement in the nonprofit sector
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DOI：10.1080/09540962.2026.2641193.png)
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Abstract
En 中文
This article advances contemporary debates on nonprofit governance by critically interrogating how resilience is mobilized, measured, and governed through management control and performance measurement systems. By demonstrating how resilience discourse can obscure accountability, displace transparency, and reinforce sector-wide fragilities, the study offers timely insights for policy-makers, regulators, funders, and nonprofit boards grappling with persistent uncertainty, funding precarity, and trust deficits. The article's reframing of resilience as an adaptive, relational, and justice-sensitive practice, rather than a compliance-oriented outcome, has direct implications for the design of funding regimes, regulatory oversight, and accountability frameworks in the nonprofit sector. In doing so, it contributes to more informed public management practice by highlighting the conditions under which resilience can support genuine learning and transformation, rather than serve as a rhetorical substitute for addressing the structural causes of organizational and sectoral vulnerability. Resilience has become a central concept in nonprofit governance, funding, and accountability discourse, often presented as a solution to uncertainty, financial precarity, and recurrent crises. This article critically examines how resilience is mobilized and operationalized in the nonprofit sector through management control and performance measurement systems. It argues that resilience is frequently repackaged through familiar risk management and control rituals, providing symbolic reassurance while obscuring deeper structural and institutional vulnerabilities. By distinguishing between organizational and sectoral levels of analysis, the article shows how resource constraints and governance weaknesses can accumulate into sector-wide fragilities, eroding public trust and financial sustainability. The analysis further highlights how resilience discourse may contribute to accountability drift when organizational survival is treated as a proxy for effective governance. Reframing resilience as an adaptive, relational, and justice-sensitive practice, the article calls for governance and funding arrangements that prioritize learning, anticipatory capacity, and collective resilience over compliance-oriented performance signalling.
Keywords:
Accountability
management control systems
nonprofit governance
public value
resilience
risk management
Journal
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IF:
2.1
Papers:
90
Citations:
0
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Cited Papers