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Erica Bornstein, "A Revolution of Rules: The Regulatory Reform of India's Nonprofit Sector" (Stanford UP, 2025)
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Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Hello. This is Lily Gorn with the New Books Network. Today I'm joined by my friend and former neighbor Erica Borenstein, who's going to talk to us about her new book, A Revolution of Rules, the Regulatory Reform of India's Nonprofit Sector. This book was published in 2025 by Stanford University Press. And it's a really interesting exploration of the way that laws and rules and regulations shape how particularly nonprofit organizations and civil society organizations sort of shift and change. But I'm going to let Erica tell us all about that. I'd like to welcome Erica Borenstein to the New Books in Political Science podcast and ask her to tell us a little bit about herself and how she came to this project. Hello, Erica.
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Hello, Lily. Thanks so much for inviting me here. I'm very happy to be here. I, well, I'm a cultural anthropologist and I study institutions. My, most of my books have been about institutions in some way or another. My focus on this book is really about nonprofits, but I, I started looking at transnational non profits in my earlier work when I was studying faith based organizations that worked in Zimbabwe. My second book was about giving and humanitarianism that existed outside of the nonprofit form. And that's when I really started thinking about the role of nonprofits. And my work studying philanthropy that was not regulated really pointed me to this issue of regulation. How, how does one study regulation? What does regulation do? And what relationship does regulation have to philanthropy and the work of nonprofits? That sort of was where I started when I began this profit project.
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B
And, and your particular focus here is, is a little bit transnational, but mostly focusing on the country of India and various shifts and changes with regard to the regulation of the nonprofit sector. Can you explain a little bit why India became your focus for this, this particular project?
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Well, I had been doing research in India before for my earlier book, Disquieting Gifts, where I was studying giving and humanitarianism. And it's really local understanding the rootedness of concepts of giving and humanitarianism. And so I, I've been studying India as an ethnographer and been doing research in India for 20 years. And this is sort of just the latest iteration of that. But what's happened in India is actually part of a global, global trend of increased regulation on civil society groups. And the book looks at a decade of regulatory reform, really 2010-2020. And I was tracking the increased rulemaking and restriction of civil society and groups that were trying to advocate for civil society itself. And India has a very vibrant civil Society sector. It's been really active in social reform since the colonial era. And many of the laws that regulate nonprofits are actually still on the books in our colonial laws, as well as laws that appeared post independence and which are being amended at a rapid rate. So I was studying this process of emendation and rulemaking through the worlds of nonprofits who are advocating for the civil society itself, for the nonprofit sector itself. And usually people think of nonprofits as advocating for particular causes, not for civil society more generally. When I started the project, I was very interested in a very dynamic relationship that existed in India at the time it began in 201112 between the government and civil society organizations. They were partnering and writing laws for the civil society sector. And then the stage started shrinking in terms of capacity for these organizations to have input in regulation. So I started looking at regulation as a social process, as an ethnographer. And where do you go to study regulation? Like what. What do you do? I mean, we think of ethnography like, I'm going to go to a group of people and live with them and see their rules and see their norm, social norms, and understand their behavior. But how do you do that with an institution or a group of institutions? And I began thinking, I'll just park myself in one institution that's doing this kind of advocacy work, writing reports, holding workshops, trying to communicate with the state and the government to create a more enabling environment for NGOs. And I realized that it was such a dynamic, vibrant community in India's political capital that I had to extend beyond that. And I found myself really working with and alongside a group of advocacy NGOs.
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And so in. In doing that, in working alongside or, you know, sort of studying ethnography, ethnographically, NGOs, because again, you know, you and I are. Are both social scientists, but we're coming at this from slightly different perspectives because, you know, we're. I'm always looking at, like, right, regulation and what it did and what. What was the outcome and, you know, who had their hand in this. And part of what you're talking about is exactly that. But you're also talking about sort of shifts and. And reshaping. That I thought was really interesting. That was part of what you were learning about in. In sort of taking this on in an ethnographic way. And one of the points that you sort of make repeatedly in the book, that is how much of the economy and the workforce in India is involved in sort of the civil society organizations and the nonprofit organizations. Can you sort of Break that out from what we usually think about in terms of like private sector, public sector. This is a different sector, It's a
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different sector, but it's not an exclusively different sector. So nonprofits in India have, have been partnering the state for, for decades to do social welfare work. And so it's kind of illusion to think of these as. The nonprofits are sometimes called the third sector compared to the market in the state in academic literature. But nonprofits often are doing the welfare work of states and that's why they receive tax subsidies by states. So it's a kind of agreement that states give a particular type of organization, a non profit organization. And that's why the nonprofit forum is so important, because it's doing work on behalf of the public. And this is why nonprofits become particularly contested. Who, who speaks for the public? Who owns the public? Where does the public good lie? And one of the arguments I'm making in this book is the nonprofit forum is a space of democracy. It's a space of political content, attestation over the public good. So these organizations who were advocating for civil society, they were advocating for other NGOs who were advocating for particular groups who needed rights, children's rights, women's rights, labor rights, poverty rights, economic rights, and what does it mean to speak for a group? And over this period of my ethnography, which took about, I don't know, about 10 years to write this book, I saw that that's what these groups were doing. They were trying to speak on behalf of other groups, speaking on behalf of people. And this is where this idea of legitimacy starts to come up. Because the state, the government gains legitimacy by doing social welfare work. But nonprofits, so they do this work and they gain legitimacy with the state and with the public, but they also critique the state for not providing for citizens. And that's where they start to become a threat. And this is a, this, what we're talking about here in India is part of what I said, a global trend of, some have called it philanthropic protectionism, restrictions of philanthropic resources across national borders. And that's, you know, this book is in India. But some of the laws that I was studying, like the Foreign Contributions Regulation act, which was enacted in the Emergency in 1976, but amended in 2010 when I started doing this research. And then again in 2015, there were lots of cancellations of organizations because they weren't complying with governmental regulations. We're changing very fast again in 2020, and it's being amended again now in 2026. We'll see where that goes. But this, this rapid revolution of rules is that rapid legislative change to laws affecting the nonprofit sector. And in India, it's a cluster of laws. It's not just one laws. It's the Companies act, which has a 2% corporate social responsibility provision for companies to do this kind of social welfare work. It's the Society's Registration act, the Trusts Act, Income Tax act, and they were all being modified and reformed in this decade, which affected civil society more broadly. These rules affected what organizations were allowed to do. And in India, the civil servants write the rules of law and they are in dialogue with the stakeholders. So it's a space of negotiation. This lawmaking practice is a space of negotiation. It doesn't exist in the courts only. It doesn't exist, you know, as an abstraction. People are dynamically engaged with, trying to shape law. That's, that's the social process. I was studying as an ethnographer. How do you study a moving target that doesn't exist in one place? And that's why I did this thing called institutional ethnography. And, and really something that a lot of ethnographers, not a lot, but specialized group of ethnographers are now calling meeting ethnography. So how do you study a social process in meetings that don't always have the same people in them but are trying to work towards the same objectives? And I call policy work riding the horizon line. And so that's what these work these nonprofit workers were doing in this labor sector called the nonprofit sector. They were all trying to do this kind of work.
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So I'm going to ask you there to explain what you mean by, by writing the horizon line, because this is a terminology that you use throughout the book that frames the research and is super important to understanding to some degree the moving target that you are talking about.
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Well, policy is future thinking. It's trying to imagine a world in the future that certain rules and regulations will be able to support, to enable and to restrict. And it's. If you imagine driving in the desert, you see the horizon line ahead of you. It's a stable, it's a line, it's a point toward which you move, but it's constantly changing. And it's a kind of focal point. It's the destination, it's an orientation. And by writing policy, they, these advocacy nonprofit workers were trying to write what I call that rise in line. Because it's not. It's even any law that exists can always be changed. It's not static. There's nothing Static about law. It's all about negotiation and it's very democratic. But as, as these organizations were being threatened or dissent was being controlled. And as I was writing this book, it was a real ethnographic challenge because I wanted to. To obviously maintain the anonymity of my informants. So I created these categories of people that I was engaged with. I called them professional critics. Those are nonprofit leaders, activist donors. These were Indian philanthropists who are very active in trying to shape the whole ecosystem for philanthropy in India. I mean, there's a huge community of wealthy Indians who give to support social welfare activities in India. It's not just resources coming from outside the country. So and then what I call accountability guides. And these were accountants and lawyers, nonprofit, you know, people who are helping nonprofits abide by the law. And this is really the study of bureaucracy. These are not people on the street with blackguards screaming. People are trying to write the law, they're trying to negotiate with the state. They're trying to make all sorts of very fine distinctions between public and private, between charitable activities and charitable purpose. I have a whole chapter on this category of charitable purpose which is found in all these laws. And it appears in colonial era laws. And it's used differently and people have to engage with it differently. And that's part of the dynamic space of negotiation that I was trying to capture in this book.
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B
And so in sort of looking at, you know, because you say you're. You sort of spend about a decade exploring all of this, interviewing different communities and people within those communities. But for those of us who are slightly more linear in our thinking, which sometimes political scientists tend to be, that, that you came into it and you wanted to understand sort of some of the shifts that were going on that are not only in India, but sort of transnationally globally with regard to philanthropy. And I've interviewed a couple other people who have written books about philanthropy in the United States. And so it's. It's definitely top of mind in lots of ways and places. So I wonder if you can sketch out for the audience to some degree the components of who you're looking at in terms of what was moving and shifting and also particularly why.
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Sure. I mean, I can talk about the global context and then really about how this was situated in India. So some scholars have talked about the shift from the associational revolution to the associational counter revolution, global, globally, in terms of philanthropic regulation. We can think of the association revolution of the 1960s to the 1990s where civil rights were movements were really Strong human rights. We think of globalization. The 1990s to the early 2000s were an era of global associational revolution. And during this era, nonprofits carried ideas of freedom around the world. Freedom was liberation from poverty, access to education, resources and rights, liberty, liberation from suffering. And democracy was kind of a liberal export, at least globally. In this era, states and international institutions invested in NGOs, not the nonprofit sector globally, not other governments. So this in some ways kind of delegitimized other governments who are seen to be corrupt, inefficient, you know, not advocates for democracy and freedom. So this, this era, some people call the nonprofitization of the welfare state. And this is where really the welfare state really was taken over by nonprofit types of organizations. And in India, nonprofits worked very closely with the state. There's a whole category of organizations called government organized nonprofit organizations, or gongos. And so that's what I mean, that, that is, there's a kind of a porous border between, not that the nonprofit sector and the governmental sector in India that has a long history. After 2001, 9, 11, things began to change globally. The Financial Action Task Force was a global institutional form that scrutinized cross border payments and philanthropic donations. States began to crack down on these kinds of funds transfers. The global war on terrorists was happening at this time. And between 2004 and 2010, 50 countries considered or enacted restrictive laws on civil society organizations. By 2012, 90 laws restricting freedom of association or assembly were enacted globally. And we see this in lots of countries. Every time I give a talk, people say, well, this is happening where I'm doing my work as well. And so now we're in. People call the associational counter revolution. And this idea of philanthropic protectionism is kind of a hallmark of this. And where the third sector or the nonprofit sector comes to be seen as a threat. So we see increasing restrictions on international funding in the name of what's in India. It's called national interest. The Foreign Contributions Regulation act was revised to be much more stringent in 2010. It was the Congress Party really started this project. And it was to. Well, there were a lot of different reasons, but it was to regulate international philanthropy. Some people say it was because of, for politics, money laundering, but national security was part of it. But the concept of national security takes on a different tenor as we move toward today. Some scholars have called this process the judicialization of politics or the juridification of politics, kind of resurgence of the state and a space where law becomes a way to control, becomes a space of Law, what anthropologists have called lawfare, a space of culture war really. So the effects of the shift you can see in India, in Egypt, in Ethiopia and Hungary, Turkey and even I would say the US now, although I won't talk too much about us, but as I was writing this book, some of which I was writing during the pandemic, I was really thinking comparatively about what was happening in my own country and what was happening in India. The backlash is called this anti associational revolution.
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And so what was going on in India though, was the implementation, the passage and implementation of quite a few regulatory regimes to manage the civil society organizations and the nonprofits in ways that they hadn't quite been managed before. Is that correct?
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Well, this is the same thing. I mean, the nonprofit sector, the people that I was engaged with, they wanted better regulation too. It wasn't as if it was just a top down mode move by the government to control civil society. The civil society actors wanted a more enabling regulatory environment and they were writing draft laws, the national policy on the nonprofit sector. There were a couple of draft laws that I was involved with, organizations who were, they were kind of workshopping some of the language for the laws, trying to figure out if it would be an effective legal instrument for the diversity of, of civil society in India. Civil society isn't really a thing in itself. It's so incredibly large and so incredibly diverse that people didn't even think of themselves as part of the same sector until these regulations started becoming more restrictive. Then they came together and realized that they were part of a group and that part of the work was making themselves legible as a group to the state and to the public. Meanwhile, they were being demonized in the media and they were fighting that kind of portrayal. So there was a. We can really see the role of the category of the public in this whole story. Who gets to define it, how is it described, who speaks for the public, et cetera.
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And part of what you are sort of seeing as you're sort of interviewing people over this period of time, as you say, is like it's not the same actors, place by place, person or topic by topic, that there are different people who come into the meetings and different people and different meetings that happen. But also that it's. That the negotiations kind of keep shifting and changing.
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Yes and no. I mean that it was all my research was mostly done in, in India's political capital of New Delhi. And it was a core group of people who were doing, leading, they would lead, really leading a lot of these workshops and I, I began to think about nonprofits, as I'll call them actons. So we think that these institutions that had lives that people would engage with and laws too, they were actors, they were kind of non human actors. And so people would come together to discuss a new amendment to the Companies Act, a new amendment to the FCRA Foreign Contributions Act, a new bill that may have effect on the Income Tax Act. And though all those laws would affect the sector more broadly, there were new compliance restrictions. There were restrictions, small, small rules. It's really in the rules, you know, what is allowed to be done if you are this type of organization. And so what was interesting is that people were speaking for their, they would come to New Delhi and they would speak for their communities in, in all, you know, all over India they would come to the political capital to participate in these workshops in order to engage in this advocacy work for the kind of legislation that would support their work. Their ability to refund receive funds. That was a big part of it. Because one key component of nonprofits is that they are donor dependent. They're not corporations, they don't have shareholders, they don't make a profit. And so a way to control this whole sector is to control the way that resources can be obtained through philanthropy, regulation of philanthropy. So we're really talking about regulation of nonprofits, but also it's philanthropic regulation that's at the heart of it.
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And the tentacles go out though from the, from the capital, right from the center of political power, if you will, across the country. Because these nonprofits and civil society organizations exist all over the place and are doing different things in different regions of the country.
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They're very local. But some of the laws are actually what are called, they're state based regulatory instruments. So the Societies Acts and the Trust Acts, they're amended and even more specific in some states like state, as in the state of Oregon where I live. Right, that kind of state. So we can think about central. In India it's called centrally regulated versus state regulated. Or we, in the United States we would call it state based regulation or federal regulation. So some of this, these regulatory instruments that organization. So in the US it helps to do that comparison for, you know, people listening who understand the US context. So the 501C3 is a charitable organization and in the category of the 501s that there are, there are many, many different types of 501s, right. And 501c3 cannot do be involved in politics, but it can be involved in charitable work. Right? That's one of the hallmarks of that instrument, that legal instrument. 501C4, as we know, is a. It's a membership organization. It's also the category of a super pac. And it can do advocacy work, political work. This is the US context, right. Some 501C3s now have linked 501C4s. This is the kind of. These are the kinds of relationships I'm trying to understand. In India, you can register with the government as a society, a trust, or a charitable company if you're a nonprofit, a shared. If you register as a charitable company, you're regulated by the Companies act, which is a federally regulated law or centrally in India, it's central regulation. And so it has a. It has different requirements. It's harder to register, but it gives you more freedom to move around India to do your work. But it is registered. You're regulated by the central government. Now with this shift, this decade of reform, and the birth of the 2% corporate social responsibility component of the Companies act in 2013, organizations started shifting the registration from being societies or trusts to companies. And it was easier for the government to scrutinize these organizations, but it was better for some organizations because then they didn't feel like they would be scrutinized enough at the same way. So it's a. We see a kind of centralization of regulation too, where comp, you know, nonprofits fit into the framework of comp. Regulation of corporations. Some people call this the corporatization of the nonprofit sector.
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Right. So it remains nonprofit, but it looks like a corporation.
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Well, I mean, the category of the trust in the history of institutional, you know, categories of nonprofit institutions predates the corporation in British law. And that's where some of this comes from. Right. So the trust is a very powerful kind of legal instrument. This year, this is really where this book lies. Is this. These categories of forms, nonprofit forms, it's kind of a structural analysis of these instruments of trusts and societies and charitable companies and how their meaning shifts. And people negotiate the rules of these laws in order to continue to do what they are set up to do, which is usually to assist. Assist groups of people. And the role of politics too, is excluded or included. Are people using this for politics or not? I mean, the nonprofit form isn't left or right leaning. It can be used by both sides of political contestation.
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And one of the points that you make sort of in an overarching way with regard to the regulation and the laws and the coming together to negotiate this and sort of understanding these different Entities and how they move around from being trusts or societies is that this space is one where essentially democracy is happening. And I would like for you to explain a little bit more about that.
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A
So what I'm arguing for in this book is that democracy is a place where different types, different groups, different approaches, different ways of being can coexist and advocate for themselves. The nonprofit form is a space. It creates a space of negotiation. It's an alternative to capitalism in many ways, because it is not oriented towards making profit. So its very existence is a counterpoint to dominant institutional forms and dominant processes. A lot of these, a lot of nonprofits, they do things that aren't seen to be effective, like writing reports. I have a whole chapter on report writing. And what I realized when I was working with some of these groups writing reports is that the report is actually an effect. It's the result of an incredible social process of negotiation within the group itself, where people are trying to say, who are we? What do we represent? Trying to become a single voice. And the workshops that were held to create these reports in the space of the workshop, this is something I write in the book. The workshop becomes to have its own voice. And so the workshop becomes a we. It starts out as dis. Dissenting groups, people arguing over ideas and paths forward. And then by the end of the workshop, there's a plan that's been made, and the workshop has a single voice. And it's the single voice that can speak to the state or speak on behalf of the public. And these workshops produce reports. And it's this dynamic space of deliberation which I think is the heart of democracy. So we, you know, what is the use of these workshops? What is these. Use of these useless white papers or reports? Those. Those are just the effects of this other important activity of. Of negotiation. Political negotiation. Social negotiation.
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Yeah. And. And that was what I found really interesting in part because one dimension that is eliminated is the profit motive. I mean, there is a need for resources, but the usual sort of demand of competitive capitalism is kind of a little bit pushed aside. So the competitiveness is about who we are in this particular group or in this workshop and what we want to do in terms of the social welfare of the individuals.
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That's. So the. The people. The groups that work for particular communities, like the elderly or unhoused in the United States. Right. They are speaking for those groups of people. Right. But how does. How do you do that when those groups of people have such diverse needs and are them. It. It's not actually a group until an advocacy organization comes together to advocate for the. That community as a community for certain rights, resources from the government, you know, pause, et cetera. It's this, it is a space of legal advocacy. I mean, this book is about a political and legal context of lawmaking.
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B
But one of the things that you note is that it's not necessarily the way we think about lawmaking in a very linear way that we have, you know, in the United States, you know, how a bill becomes a law and Supreme Court, you know, decides if it's constitutional or changes its mind about something. As we've sort of seen this week, that the sort of understanding of the law is part of what is being contested in these deliberative capacities.
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Yes. And this happens here, too. It's just, you know, it's just people don't know about this kind of dynamic world of, of advocacy and, and reg. It's regular. So if you study regulation, are you studying, you're studying the law, not just the law as it exists, but you're studying. It's the law's capacity to be written. You're studying the law's capacity to. And the power of law is in its implementation and the implementation of laws in its rules. And so my title of my book, A Revolution of Rules, is about this, this strange and small world of completely quiet bureaucratic actors who are not on television, who are not strong bombs. Right. They're not in parliament, they're not in the government. They, they're on the sidelines. I call them the unsung heroes of democracy. They don't intend to be loud. They are working on the sidelines, representing communities, keeping spaces of dynamic negotiation alive. And I guess in the US context, advocacy is the easiest term to you,
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B
and in part because the rules that you're talking about are not necessarily the same kind of rules that we would necessarily focus on in the same way in the United States.
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Yes and no. I mean, how does a law get implemented in the United States? Think about, I mean, we're experiencing a similar pattern in higher education of a rapid, the rapid regulatory reform of higher education sector. Right. And the, the government will say, here we, here's a new law, and you have to abide by it. But then everybody has to rush around and figure out what that means. And you know, universities have legal count, offices of legal counsel that figure out what that's going to, what we're going to do, how we're going to address this. And it's, it's those people, it's the lawyers, it's the accountants. It's like, okay, we can do this now and that now. And, and they spend a lot of time trying to figure out how, how to, how to do that for say, a university, which is also a, you know, public university, is also a nonprofit.
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B
Nonprofits. Exactly, exactly.
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A
You know, in my own job, my day job, you know, I'm in this, I'm in this every day. And it's so specialized and people really depend on these experts to help understand what this means. And the cost for not following the rules is serious. You lose your status, you lose your registration status, you can no longer receive donations. You're in big trouble. So now you understand what the stakes are. It's high because if you can't receive donations as a nonprofit, you can't live it's life force. Like you have to close down.
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B
And you know, here, as you're talking about it in higher ed, strings attached to federal dollars for our students.
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Yes. And grants. I mean, think about new restrictions on grants. What can and can't be done in the name of a federal grant? This is, you know, suddenly, and it happens suddenly, and everybody's scrambling. And that's this, this is, this is the, this is the process that I was documenting in India, but as I said, it is happening elsewhere as well. And it's partly the speed, you know, the speed of regulatory reform that makes people feel very unsteady, institutionally unsteady.
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B
Well, it's hard to know what to do if everything is changing all the time.
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Exactly. Yes.
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B
My pal James Madison had something to say about the sort of repose of the citizen. And that's how you get good citizens if you don't change the laws all the time. So they actually aren't running around breaking the laws all the time because they don't know what they are.
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A
That's right. And you know, laws don't matter if people don't attend to them. And if they're not enforced. Right. There can be a law on the books and no one will care about it. No one will know about it. But it's also, it's the, it's the enforcement of these laws. It's the implementation of the rules. And that's when people start, people or institutions start to have to pay attention.
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B
Yeah. And the threat of punishment.
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Yes, the threat of punishment. And not. As an anthropologist, laws also become social norms. And that's how rapid changes of laws can really change society and the culture
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B
and an understanding of who we are
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A
and what we're doing in the name of public good for nonprofits, for example.
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B
So what are you working on now that you've completed this important study of how we think about rules and regulations?
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A
Well, I interested in doing a more comparative project. I'm starting to work on this, looking at how people are coping with this globally in different places and thinking about nonprofit reform in different contexts. Radically different contexts. So a larger comparative project is sort of on my. On my horizon. And. Yeah, that's just to be continued.
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B
Okay. Okay. Well, when it takes the form of a book, I hope you'll come talk to me again.
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A
Definitely. Thank you so much, Lily. Really enjoyed this conversation.
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B
Oh, it's my pleasure. I want to thank Erica Borenstein for joining me today to discuss a revolution of the regulatory reform of India's nonprofit sector. This can be found at Stanford University Press's website and any place else you buy books. Thank you so much for joining me today, Erica.
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A
Thanks again, Lily.