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1 March 2012 The Size, Concentration and Growth of Biodiversity-Conservation Nonprofits
Paul R. Armsworth, Isla S. Fishburn, Zoe G. Davies, Jennifer Gilbert, Natasha Leaver, Kevin J. Gaston
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Abstract

Nonprofit organizations play a critical role in efforts to conserve biodiversity. Their success in this regard will be determined in part by how effectively individual nonprofits and the sector as a whole are structured. One of the most fundamental questions about an organization's structure is how large it should be, with the logical counterpart being how concentrated the whole sector should be. We review empirical patterns in the size, concentration, and growth of over 1700 biodiversity-conservation nonprofits registered for tax purposes in the United States within the context of relevant economic theory. Conservation-nonprofit sizes vary by six to seven orders of magnitude and are positively skewed. Larger nonprofits access more revenue streams and hold more of their assets in land and buildings than smaller or midsized nonprofits do. The size of conservation nonprofits varies with the ecological focus of the organization, but the growth rates of nonprofits do not.

© 2012 by American Institute of Biological Sciences. All rights reserved. Request permission to photocopy or reproduce article content at the University of California Press's Rights and Permissions Web site at www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp.
Paul R. Armsworth, Isla S. Fishburn, Zoe G. Davies, Jennifer Gilbert, Natasha Leaver, and Kevin J. Gaston "The Size, Concentration and Growth of Biodiversity-Conservation Nonprofits," BioScience 62(3), 271-281, (1 March 2012). https://doi.org/10.1525/bio.2012.62.3.8
Published: 1 March 2012
JOURNAL ARTICLE
11 PAGES

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KEYWORDS
conservation finance
conservation planning
firm size distribution
industrial organization
nongovernmental organization
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