Lester M. Salamon

Around the globe, people are forming private, nonprofit and voluntary organizations to pursue public purposes once considered the exclusive domain of the state. Economically, environmentally and socially, where the state has failed, nonprofit groups are taking advantage of revolutions in communications and bourgeois values to fill these gaps for themselves. This "associational revolution" may be permanently altering relations between states and citizens and prove as important to the latter twentieth century as the rise of the nation-state was to the nineteenth.