Efficiency measurement of civil society organizations: evidence from Turkey

In this study civil society organizations, of which importance and impacts are getting higher, are employed from the efficiency viewpoint, were tried to measure the efficiencies. There are also some suggestions on locating more efficient scale for the inefficient civil society organizations.Up to now, studies about the civil society organizations generally are on behalf of describing the concepts and the importance, kinds of forms within the historically development process, inspecting the relationships with other concepts like democracy and negotiating the current problems of civil society organizations. In the literature there could not be found significant amount of study about the civil society organizations.Efficiency analyses were applied to the 85 of civil society organizations, which are selected from the population by means of sampling methods, from both national and local facilitators. In the efficiency analysis process, some of the civil society organizations like fund organizations, solidarity organizations, labor union and trade associations are discarded from our interest group whereas they can be regarded as civil society groups.As a research method, this study utilizes the data envelopment analysis with maximization of outputs under the assumption of constant return to scale and variable return to scale (i.e., output oriented model of both CCR and BCC). 15 different models were built with regarding to structure and type of service properties of civil society organizations, and input-output mixtures.This study is especially for civil society leading group, voluntaries and members who are focused on efficiency of activities and services and for researchers of non-profit organizations as a starting point. It can be regarded as a reference for latter studies.