Research/Areas of Interest:
-Social impact measurement
-Performance measurement
-Accountability
-Governance
-Leadership
-Strategy for social change organizations
-Managing NGOs and Social Enterprises
Education
- PhD, Environmental Planning & Management, Civil & Environmental Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, United States, 1999
- MS, Civil/Environmental Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, United States, 1994
- BSc, Civil/Environmental Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, United States, 1991
Biography
Alnoor Ebrahim is a Professor of Management at The Fletcher School, and the Tisch College of Civic Life, at Tufts University. His research addresses several core dilemmas of social change facing businesses, nonprofit organizations, and public agencies: What strategies should they adopt for delivering and scaling social change? How can they best measure and improve their impacts? How should they handle competing demands for accountability from diverse stakeholders? How can they influence "system" problems such as global poverty that require collective action?
Many of these questions are addressed in Professor Ebrahim's book, Measuring Social Change: Performance and Accountability in a Complex World (Stanford University Press), which has received multiple awards, including from the Financial Times and Impact & Sustainable Finance Faculty Consortium, and The Alliance for Nonprofit Management. He is also author of the award-winning NGOs and Organizational Change: Discourse, Reporting, and Learning and is co-editor of Global Accountabilities: Participation, Pluralism, and Public Ethics (both with Cambridge University Press).
Alnoor serves on advisory boards to the Stanford Social Innovation Review (SSIR) and the World Bank's Global Partnership for Social Accountability (GPSA). He previously served on an advisory board to IRIS+ at the Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN), a working group established by the G7 to create global guidelines on social impact measurement, on Acumen's Lean Data advisory council, and on the board of Imago Global Grassroots. He has also worked with the NGO Leaders Forum, an annual gathering of CEOs of large humanitarian development organizations. His previous research on accountability mechanisms within the World Bank led to a Congressional Testimony on improving the Bank's information disclosure policy.
Professor Ebrahim teaches courses on leadership and strategy, and in executive programs at Fletcher, Harvard, and Georgetown. Prior to joining the Fletcher faculty, he taught at Harvard Business School, where he chaired two executive programs for social sector leaders, and also at Virginia Tech. Professor Ebrahim received his doctorate and master's degrees from Stanford University, and his bachelor of science from M.I.T.
Many of these questions are addressed in Professor Ebrahim's book, Measuring Social Change: Performance and Accountability in a Complex World (Stanford University Press), which has received multiple awards, including from the Financial Times and Impact & Sustainable Finance Faculty Consortium, and The Alliance for Nonprofit Management. He is also author of the award-winning NGOs and Organizational Change: Discourse, Reporting, and Learning and is co-editor of Global Accountabilities: Participation, Pluralism, and Public Ethics (both with Cambridge University Press).
Alnoor serves on advisory boards to the Stanford Social Innovation Review (SSIR) and the World Bank's Global Partnership for Social Accountability (GPSA). He previously served on an advisory board to IRIS+ at the Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN), a working group established by the G7 to create global guidelines on social impact measurement, on Acumen's Lean Data advisory council, and on the board of Imago Global Grassroots. He has also worked with the NGO Leaders Forum, an annual gathering of CEOs of large humanitarian development organizations. His previous research on accountability mechanisms within the World Bank led to a Congressional Testimony on improving the Bank's information disclosure policy.
Professor Ebrahim teaches courses on leadership and strategy, and in executive programs at Fletcher, Harvard, and Georgetown. Prior to joining the Fletcher faculty, he taught at Harvard Business School, where he chaired two executive programs for social sector leaders, and also at Virginia Tech. Professor Ebrahim received his doctorate and master's degrees from Stanford University, and his bachelor of science from M.I.T.
Selected Publications
Ebrahim, A., Brown, L. D., & Batliwala, S. (2022). Governance for global integration: Designing structure and authority in international advocacy NGOs. World Development, 160. doi:10.1016/j.worlddev.2022.106063
Benjamin, L. M., Ebrahim, A., & Gugerty, M. K. (2023). Nonprofit Organizations and the Evaluation of Social Impact: A Research Program to Advance Theory and Practice. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 52(1_suppl), 313S-352S. doi:10.1177/08997640221123590
Ebrahim, A., Battilana, J., & Mair, J. (2014). The governance of social enterprises: Mission drift and accountability challenges in hybrid organizations. Research in Organizational Behavior, 34, 81-100. doi:10.1016/j.riob.2014.09.001
Ebrahim, A., & Rangan, V. K. (2014). What impact? Aframework for measuring the scale and scope of social performance. California Management Review, 56(3), 118-141. doi:10.1525/cmr.2014.56.3.118
Ebrahim, A. (2019). Measuring Social Change: Performance and Accountability in a Complex World. Stanford University Press. Retrieved from https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=27990
Ebrahim, A. (2016). The many faces of nonprofit accountability. In The Jossey-Bass Handbook of Nonprofit Leadership and Management (pp. 102-123). doi:10.1002/9781119176558.ch4
Ebrahim, A., Adams, T., & Dichter, S. (2016). The Power of Lean Data. Stanford Social Innovation Review, (Winter), 36-41. Retrieved from http://ssir.org/articles/entry/the_power_of_lean_data
Ebrahim, A. (2020). Midiendo el cambio social Desempeño y rendición de cuentas en un mundo complejo. Deusto.