As the Spanish empire expanded, the growing abundance of horses elevated an underlying tension between two colonial goals: to populate land with horses bred in new settlements, and to control land in new settlements by regulating the movement, reproduction, and possession of horses in them. The horse population increased due to both evolutionary environmental affinities and the use of traditional husbandry methods, such as loose herd management and protection of the commons, which had some unintended consequences. The responses of Spanish and Indigenous actors to these changes presented opportunities to negotiate the perception of and exercise of Spanish imperial power in a new equine political ecology.

The chapter introduces readers to the major theories of the sector. Those covered include: market-failure theory, government-failure theory, contract-failure theory, voluntary-failure theory, supply-side (or entrepreneurship) theory, social-origins theory, interdependence theory, the commons, mediating structures, and associationalism.

To what extent are contemporary scholars using the ten explanations of the nonprofit sector described in Chapter 2? The authors use scholarship, or published academic articles, as data to answer this question. They find that the ten nonprofit-sector theories continue to be an important foundation for nonprofit studies research. The most commonly used sector theories are associationalism, contract failure, nonprofit/government interdependence, and social origins. However, their analysis suggests that use of the nonprofit-sector theories is merely ceremonial. Nonprofit scholars could do much more to question, develop, and refine the existing sector theories – or to develop new ones. This research highlights the importance of a book like this one to encourage scholars to discuss and question existing sector theories and pose new sector-theory contributions to better understand the nonprofit sector.

In the early 2000s the Holy See submitted papers to the WIPO and the WTO, on the subject of Intellectual Property (IP) rights, genetic resources, traditional knowledge, and access to medicines. This chapter develops some concepts that are mainly implicit in those papers. Catholic Social Teaching does not address directly the subject of IP rights, but contains all the elements for a moral judgment on the present system of IP rights. The chapter develops the discussion in three parts: first, some ideas about private property and the universal destination of goods, and the right to knowledge; second, proposing a vision of IP rights in the light of the aforesaid principles about property in Catholic Social Teaching; third, examining the issue of IP rights in relation to the rights of native peoples. The essay concludes by arguing that, to ensure that patents serve the universal destination of goods and the common good, a new legal theory should be developed in this area. This would reconsider, especially, rules relating to the public availability of the invention, the right price of the licenses, possible exceptions to the patent, means of technological transfer, and the creation of alternative means of industrial knowledge protection.