Volunteerism Failure And Its Correction Of Government Responsibility

Voluntary service in modern society has played an important role not only in traditional charity and poverty alleviation but also in improving civil competence, cultivating social responsibility, promoting citizen participation, strengthening social governance and promoting the social civilization. It has run effectively the function of the correction in market failure and government failure. However, according to international experience, voluntary organization is also not a "perfect tool" of ensuring good governance in modern society. There is also "voluntary failure" phenomenon existed as market failure and government failure. Thus the important role of government is to take its own advantages and then correct the voluntary failure.Voluntary failure can be defined as function defect and efficiency dilemma of voluntary organizations in providing voluntary service and meeting the social needs. Salamon proposed that voluntary failure can be summarized as follows:inadequate capacity of charitable organization, the charity's particularity, the patriarchal nature and the amateur nature. The theory is constructed based on the study of western society's practice. However, based on different social circumstances, the mechanism and the appearance of voluntary failure in china has showed certain "Chinese characteristics". A lot of performance of "Chinese voluntary failure" is closely linked with the government.The various domestic regions have different progressive history of voluntary service. Those present a certain area "characteristic". But overall, during voluntary service's development process, the role of government should not be minimized. Compared with other regions, the voluntary service work in Beijing has not shown too obvious leading advantages before the Olympic bid. Olympic Games became the great opportunities of development of volunteer service in Beijing. Because of remarkable developing speed and scale, volunteer service of Beijing has become China's important symbol of voluntary service. Case study of Beijing voluntary failure not only can promote attention and discussion of bottleneck problem in Beijing voluntary service, but also has the universal significance around nationwide. Currently the modes of voluntary service in Beijing have been recognized as the combination of "dominant up-down execution" and "attached down-up execution". The government has proved its leading role of advancing the development of voluntary service in Beijing.The salient difficulty involved with volunteer failure in Beijing has included as insufficient funds, lack of human resources, operational irregularities and administrative tendency. Analysis from the deep reason, all the above factors are inextricably linked with government performance. Therefore the key factors to voluntary failure in China can be attributed to the lack of perfect institutional law system and standardized administrative modes of government.According to international experience, the government and voluntary organizations has joined a virtual "partnership". Upon the guarantee of their independence, volunteer organizations have shaped two models: "civilian-run model" and "official-assist model". It means that volunteer organizations can take full advantage of folk character, but at the same time, it needs government's assistance to support and supervise. Government's assistance can ensure the development of volunteer services toward the right direction. To correct voluntary failure, government should not only play the role of the planners and policy makers of social volunteer service, but also the role of the bankroller and service buyers of volunteer service. We should properly re-orient the relationship between the government and voluntary organizations. It can indentify government's responsibility in voluntary service and guide government's action in practice. The future direction of the relationship between government and voluntary groups should be emphasized on the cooperative balance. The cooperative balance can be defined as both the cooperation upon the diffusion and the mutual restraint within the cooperation. Whether cooperation or balances, there is a basic premise that the separate and equal status of both parties. This is the core characteristics different from traditional control subordinate relationship.To shape the relationship between cooperation and balance relationship, government needs to redefine its function in correcting voluntary failure and then clarify boundary of responsibility and action. In practice, the government needs to strengthen the function of institution supply, support, environment construction and supervision. Meanwhile, government should not put too much intervention on volunteer organizations as before, instead, adjust its leading advantage to achieve the ultimate goal of making the government return its original position. Policy methods of correcting voluntary failure may contain several aspects, such as improving the legal system related to voluntary service, strengthening the construction of relevant government agencies, enhancing the encouragement, promotion and instruction efforts on voluntary service, and finally constructing perfect the supervised system perfectly.