Editorial: Navigating short-term funding and government election cycles to achieve sustainable, transformative social impact

This special issue explores the practical challenges and opportunities faced by social impact programs operating under short-term funding and government election cycles. A social impact program is an initiative or intervention designed to address a specific social cause, issue or challenge to create sustained, positive and measurable changes in society (Benjamin et al., 2022; Russell-Bennett and Reid, 2026). These programs often focus on improving the well-being of individuals and communities by addressing issues such as poverty, ill health, anti-social behaviour or educational inequality. Social impact programs can be implemented by various organisations, including non-profit and social enterprises, and they typically involve activities such as providing services, conducting advocacy campaigns, implementing behaviour change interventions or supporting community development (Nordin et al., 2022). The effectiveness of social impact programs is often assessed by their “social performance”, defined as their ability to achieve beneficial outcomes for the target population (Doan and Knight, 2020; Ebrahim, 2019).

When implemented well, social impact programs generate short-term outputs, commonly measured by work accomplished, such as the number of people fed or the number of hours of allied health support delivered (Ebrahim, 2019). However, it is the long-term outcomes that are transformative, as making real, sustained differences in people’s lives takes time, such as reducing rates of illiteracy or poverty (Ebrahim, 2019). Hence, the timeframes for sustainable, transformative social impact programs well exceed the usual one- to three-year funding timeframes. This short-term, outputs-centric funding means that program leaders, administrators and chief executive officers find themselves pursuing a series of consecutive short-term funding arrangements in an effort to achieve the program’s full transformative potential and optimal benefits for the affected group (Malenfant et al., 2019). When funding comes from federal, state or territory governments, the program is particularly susceptible to shifting government priorities and electoral cycles, creating instability that can compromise the achievement of durable transformative outcomes (Nordin et al., 2022).

Encouraged and supported by the journal editor, this special issue was practitioner-initiated and Indigenous-led, arising from the practical realities of an Australian Indigenous community-controlled organisation and guided by three Australian Aboriginal guest editors. Its originality also lies in a whole-circle feedback loop that aligns with Australian Indigenous knowledge systems ways of knowing, being and doing, which includes the cyclical, co-construction of meaning together with relational accountability (Barambah, 2026; Enoch and Curran, 2025). This whole-circle feedback loop is in harmony with the relational and cyclical knowledge patterns articulated by Australian Indigenous authors Yunkaporta and Kelleher (2025) in Snake Talk, where global serpent narratives emphasise movement across domains to reveal patterns and responsibilities that guide collective understanding and action. In this loop, practitioners set the agenda from lived experience, scholarship clarifies the structural conditions shaping what is possible, and a practitioner response returns interpretation to practice and community-grounded judgement through dialogic sensemaking (Martin, 2003; Rigney, 2017; Wilson, 2008). This structure also supports a pathway-to-impact framing that distinguishes outputs and dissemination from impact itself (Russell-Bennett and Reid, 2026).

Mudth-Niyleta Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Corporation, established in 1988, is an Aboriginal community-controlled organisation that is managed and operated by local Indigenous people. Located in regional Queensland, Australia, this non-government organisation offers holistic services addressing accommodation, health, youth initiatives, employment, education and cultural preservation. It also serves as an advocate for the Indigenous community, negotiating with government and non-government agencies to support community development and well-being.

The practical challenge facing Mudth-Niyleta Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Corporation is navigating short-term funding and government election cycles to achieve sustainable, transformative social impact for their community. Meaningful social impact takes time, money and public policy support. As a community-based organisation, Mudth-Niyleta invests considerable time and energy identifying, applying for and administering consecutive short-term funding in an effort to achieve the full transformative potential of their social impact programs to improve the length and quality of life of their Indigenous community. As most of their social impact programs are funded by national, state or local governments, who set policy priorities, government election cycles create instability as changing priorities can stall, compromise or even halt the progress of their social impact programs.

Short-term grants and contracts are policy instruments. They carry built-in assumptions about risk, control, evidence and time, and they shape the balance of power between funders, delivery organisations, frontline workers and communities. Collaborative governance scholarship has long argued that complex social problems require cross-boundary arrangements built on trust, shared understanding and iterative learning (Ansell and Gash, 2008). The integrative framework advanced by Emerson et al. (2012) similarly positions collaboration as requiring resourcing and sustained over time.

Short-cycle funding works against these requirements. It produces what practitioners routinely describe as “stop–start” delivery, perpetual reinvention and compliance fatigue. Importantly, the strongest scholarly accounts demonstrate that this is a structural problem. Malenfant et al. (2019) reveal the invisible emotional labour that funding-chasing demands, documenting how the work of maintaining relationships, credibility and momentum becomes an unrecognised cost of short-cycle resourcing. Their contribution matters for social impact scholarship because it makes clear that the instability created by short funding horizons is financially, relationally, emotionally and organisationally corrosive.

Short-term funding systematically biases what counts as impact. Compressed contract periods intensify an orientation toward outputs that can be verified quickly (e.g. the number of service encounters delivered, the number of participants enrolled) at the expense of outcomes that require years to materialise, such as reductions in chronic disease prevalence or sustained improvements in educational attainment. The peer-reviewed evaluation literature is clear that equating outputs with outcomes is mistaken, as Ebrahim (2019) shows that social change is seldom immediate; attribution is rarely straightforward; and credible evaluation must be matched to plausible causal pathways and realistic time horizons.

Benjamin et al. (2022) argue that evaluation has become institutionalised in ways that constrain leaders from engaging productively with it, particularly when evaluation is configured as upward accountability. Ebrahim’s (2003) earlier work on non-governmental organisation accountability reinforces this point. He distinguishes between accountability mechanisms that function as “tools” and those that operate as “processes” and shows how upward accountability can crowd out strategic and downward forms of accountability when imposed through standardised reporting routines.

Three recurring distortions follow from these dynamics (Benjamin et al., 2022; Ebrahim, 2003, 2019). First, short funding periods encourage “output capture” where high-visibility deliverables substitute for meaningful change. Second, they precipitate “outcome drift” where organisations subtly reorient program aims toward what is fundable and measurable within the contract period. Third, they produce “evaluation distortion” where measurement becomes performative, designed to secure funding renewal and loses its diagnostic value for improving practice. These are not claims about the moral failings of organisations. They follow logically from the incentive architecture embedded in short-term funding contracts. There is also an underappreciated cost of organisational learning (Ebrahim, 2005). When renewal uncertainty is high, organisations are disincentivised from investing in long-term measurement infrastructure, staff development and longitudinal follow-up, even though these are precisely the capabilities that support credible impact claims (Ebrahim, 2005).

Election cycles add a distinct causal mechanism. They actively reshape the allocation logic of public funds. Electoral incentives can distort the distribution of public resources relative to need or social welfare benchmarks. Finan and Mazzocco (2021) estimate the magnitude of such allocation distortions and show how electoral rules and incentive structures shape public fund distribution decisions. While these studies do not originate from nonprofit management scholarship, they are directly relevant to social impact programs that rely on government grants and contracts. They provide a theory of why funding priorities can shift sharply even when the underlying social need does not.

Urvoy (2025) explicitly connects elections and nonprofit funding, analysing how electoral motives and political considerations influence financial transfers to local organisations. For practitioners and scholars, the implication is immediate, with program continuity becoming contingent on political responsiveness, narrative fit and distributive strategy, all of which sit outside the program’s original purpose or its intended social impact.

Overall, the literature indicates that election cycles generate a distinctive form of volatility and uncertainty for delivery organisations, such as social enterprises. The question is not only whether funding will continue but also whether the category of the work will remain within the next policy framework. This creates pressure toward rhetorical and programmatic reframing that can dilute fidelity to community priorities and destabilise relational trust with the very populations for whom programs are designed.

Short-term funding and election cycles intensify resource dependence, thereby constraining organisational autonomy. Resource dependence theory explains how organisations adapt their strategies, structures and decision-making to secure critical resources under conditions of uncertainty and external influence (Hillman et al., 2009). In social impact settings, this frequently plays out as a tension between stability and autonomy. Organisations become more operationally stable when government funding is substantial and predictable, but more strategically constrained and less able to exercise autonomously when that funding is conditional, short term or politically beholden (Hillman et al., 2009; Sun et al., 2016).

Green et al. (2021), examining the survival prospects of UK charities, show how different funding streams and their volatility relate to organisational survival, providing empirical grounding for the claim that funding volatility is not merely inconvenient or an administrative burden but also a threat to the survival of many organisations. Nordin et al. (2022) reinforce this by mapping the relationship between nonprofit capacity and social performance, showing that organisational capability is itself a function of the resource environment in which nonprofits operate.

If government contracting and grant-making serve as primary instruments for achieving public value, then the volatility of those instruments is a policy design problem with downstream equity effects. Because volatility can undermine the stability needed for credible, sustainable and transformative social impact generation and measurement, its effects may fall unevenly on organisations collaborating with communities that experience greater structural inequities, such as Indigenous community-controlled organisations.

Short-term funding is linked to a broader phenomenon described in the literature as projectification, being the tendency to organise complex social change as a series of discrete, bounded projects with fixed milestones (Jacobsen, 2022; Löfström, 2025). From a social impact perspective, projectification can be profoundly counterproductive because it treats relational and structural change as modular. Many social outcomes are path-dependent. They require continuity of staff, trust and iterative refinement that cannot be secured when work is partitioned into short cycles with shifting compliance regimes (Schoper and Ingason, 2019).

This is also where short cycles intersect with workforce sustainability. Evidence from human service nonprofits indicates that voluntary turnover is both consequential and patterned, with organisational conditions shaping turnover (Selden and Sowa, 2015). Funding insecurity, well-documented in projectified and short-term contracting regimes, can further amplify these dynamics. The inference for practitioners is clear. If short-term funding produces insecure employment and high workforce churn, then it actively undermines the continuity needed for impact, particularly in services where trust, cultural safety and consistent relationships are core mechanisms of change.

A consistent finding across the literature is that longer-horizon and more flexible funding supports organisational capability. Wiepking and de Wit (2023) develop a conceptual model explaining how unrestricted funding strengthens multiple nonprofit capacities, including staff management, adaptive capacity, strategic planning and innovation. This matters because unrestricted, multi-year funding is one of the few structural levers that directly counteract the distortions described in this editorial. It does not remove accountability. It changes its form, enabling learning-oriented accountability in place of short-cycle compliance.

At the same time, scholarship such as FitzGerald and Macdonald (2024) and Lu et al. (2026) on outcomes-based contracting demonstrates that an “outcomes orientation” is not automatically a corrective. Outcomes-based contracts can reproduce short-termism if outcomes are narrowly specified, measurement quality is low or financial risk is offloaded to delivery organisations. FitzGerald et al. (2023) highlight the practical complexities of investment-backed contracts, including social impact bonds. The lesson is that paying for outcomes supports transformation only when outcomes are credibly defined, time horizons are realistic and risk allocation does not destabilise delivery.

This special issue editorial and articles make three contributions. First, it places short-term funding and government election cycles at the centre of explanations for why social impact programs may struggle to achieve and sustain transformation fully. While the social change literature has highlighted tensions, it has not framed short funding horizons and electoral cycles as primary causal forces shaping the trajectories of social impact programs. This special issue foregrounds these temporal-political drivers and traces their organisational and social impact effects. Second, it integrates insights from collaborative governance, resource dependence theory, nonprofit resilience research and distributive politics to show that funding cycles are simultaneously administrative, organisational and political-economic phenomena. Collaborative governance scholarship (Ansell and Gash, 2008; Emerson et al., 2012) illustrates why relationship-based delivery and shared governance, common across many social change settings, require time and stability. Resource dependence research explains how funding dependence reshapes autonomy (FitzGerald and Macdonald, 2024); distributive politics research clarifies how electoral incentives influence allocation (Green et al., 2021); and nonprofit resilience scholarship demonstrates how volatility predicts vulnerability and survival outcomes (Green et al., 2021). Third, this special issue elevates practitioner-initiated and generated knowledge. Malenfant et al. (2019) demonstrate the analytical value of practitioner-experienced labour, which is often obscured by compliance metrics, thereby aligning with this issue’s commitment to bridging scholarly and practitioner perspectives.

This special issue brings together six articles that highlight how short-term funding and election cycles influence the pursuit and achievement of social impact.

Asher (2026) argues that business scholarship must move beyond publish-or-perish norms toward genuine social impact by advancing “theory through doing”. The paper promotes action research as an iterative, trust-building approach and emphasises learning-oriented accountability as vital for resisting short-termism and enabling sustained, meaningful impact. Dale (2026) shows how annual higher education equity funding in Australia undermines long-term equity goals by generating uncertainty, administrative load, staff instability and pressure for short-term results. Using stakeholder theory, the article contends that multi-year funding enables strategic alignment, staffing continuity, stronger partnerships and more credible evaluation, all of which support transformative social impact. Hay et al. (2026) demonstrate how fragmented planning, siloed procurement, low connectivity literacy and short funding cycles weaken telecommunications outcomes in rural, regional and remote areas. Through participatory case studies, the article shows that poor coordination leads to costly, unsuitable infrastructure and low uptake, and it argues for place-based, collaborative, longer-term investment supported by independent advice and cross-government alignment.

Tham and Lim (2026) examine how Rustic Borneo Craft navigates chronic funding shortfalls and political volatility in Malaysia. The case illustrates how cultural identity, community mobilisation and diversified revenue help sustain operations despite disrupted government support, and it uses a collective-tourism social-entrepreneurship lens to show how mission-led organisations maintain impact amid structural uncertainty. Hawley (2026) analyses Queensland’s shift from rapid pandemic triage grants to a tiered, behaviourally aligned micro-grant system. Although award volumes have fallen and grant sizes have increased, aligning funding tiers with risk appetite reduces volatility. It strengthens organisational resilience, though gaps remain in succession readiness and regional productivity. Graham et al. (2026) show how a micro-credential program used incremental funding across ten short agreements to build managerial capability, organisational resilience and community-level value. Drawing on dynamic managerial capabilities, value-creation theory and triple-helix engagement, the case demonstrates how small, iterative funding rounds can sustain continuity, adaptation and learning despite fragmented funding and electoral cycles.

The catalyst for this special issue was the experiences and practice realities of Mudth-Niyleta Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Corporation. From that vantage point, this special issue invites CEO Sam Raciti to offer reflections that translate each article into implications for day-to-day delivery and for the broader social enterprise and impact ecosystem.

This special issue shows that achieving sustainable social impact and transformative change depends on designing for continuity across funding, governance and evaluation, rather than treating short-term cycles as temporary disruptions. Encouraged and supported by the editor, the Indigenous Knowledge System-informed special issue design is novel, and others in the social change and social impact space are encouraged to adopt this whole-circle practice-research-practice feedback loop approach. Ultimately, the shared message of this special issue is that sustainable transformation occurs when systems are designed to support longer horizons, stable relationships and learning over time, enabling communities, scholars and practitioners to plan, partner and adapt with confidence.