The Nonprofit FAQ

Governmental Policies in Portugal

In Portugal there is no such thing as a policy for the whole third sector. We have a wide set of laws related with the sector, but it is disperse and not always coherent. I organized and published last year, with a colleague, a compilation of laws of the third sector to make it easy for the actors to understand the legal framework they are moving in. But a wide set of laws does not make a policy. More than that, we do not have a sense of identity of a third sector - the public generally does not recognise such word and the components or sub-sectors of the sector itself do not face themselves as parts of a whole. Speaking and writing about a third sector in Portugal, as I did as coordinator of the team that developed in Portugal the work for the Johns Hopkins NPO project, is speaking of something virtual. There is a very strong social sector (or welfare sector) which is responsible for slightly more than 50% of the labour force (paid and volunteers) of the third sector. And for the social sector there are policies (not A policy). (Thanks to Raquel Campos Franco, Faculdade de Economia e Gestão, Universidade Católica Portuguesa for providing this commentary in ISTR-L (a service of the International Society for Third-sector Research (http://www.istr.org).) Posted 11/13/07 -- PB