F Foundations-Government Relations Stefan Toepler Schar School of Policy and Government, George Mason University, Arlington, VA, USA Center for the Study of Civil Society and the Non- Profit Sector, National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russian Federation Synonyms Charitable foundations; Government-nonprofit collaboration; Philanthropy; Public-philanthropic partnerships Definition Regulatory and collaborative interfaces between the government and private philanthropic foundations. Introduction In the American context, philanthropic founda- tions are typically understood as private, endowed institutions that pursue public purposes primarily through using endowment income to make grants to other charitable organizations in support of the organizations’ missions, programs, or projects. While the majority of US foundations is grant- making, some foundations also operate their own programs or even institutions in addition to any grant programs they may have. Examples of such operating foundations include the J. Paul Getty Trust, the Kettering Foundation, or the Freedom Forum with its Newseum in Washington, D.C. For historical reasons, operating foundations are more prevalent in other parts of the world, including most of continental Europe and the Middle East, where Islamic endowments often support mosques and religious institutions, for example. However, operating foundations are, conceptually and prac- tically, similar to other nonprofit organizations, and policy interests driving foundation/government relationships therefore focus principally on grant- making foundations. Over the past three decades, governments across Continental Europe have been working to improve tax and regulatory conditions for these institutions in hopes of generating private resources to supplement shrinking public budgets (Anheier and Toepler 1999), and even in the United States, where philanthropy is a long and well-established phenomenon, cooperative rela- tionships between foundations and local, state, and federal governments have gained greater cur- rency in recent years under the heading of public- philanthropic partnerships. As a result, foundation endowments have grown considerably in many countries. In the USA, for example, the founda- tion field grew from some 30,000 at the beginning of the 1990s to almost 90,000 foundations at # Springer International Publishing AG 2018 A. Farazmand (ed.), Global Encyclopedia of Public Administration, Public Policy, and Governance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31816-5_3239-1