Alnoor Ebrahim

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.

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

Tufts University Appointments

• Professor
  Tufts University, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, 1 Nov 2016 - present
• Associate Dean for Curriculum
  Tufts University, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, 1 Jul 2022 - present
• Professor
  Tufts University, Tisch College, Tisch College,1 Jul 2016 - present
• Associate Professor
  Tufts University, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, 1 Jul 2016 - 31 Oct 2016
• Visiting Associate Professor
  Tufts University, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, 1 Sep 2015 - 30 May 2016

Academic Positions

• Associate Professor
  Harvard Business School, Social Enterprise Initiative, United States 1 Jan 2008 - 1 Jan 2016
• Visiting Associate Professor
  Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Business School, USA 1 Jan 2006 - 1 Jan 2008
• Associate Professor
  Virginia Tech, School of Public and International Affairs, United States 1 Jan 1999 - 1 Jan 2008
• Waldemar A. Nielsen Distinguished Visiting Fellow
  Georgetown University, McCourt School of Public Policy, Washington D.C., United States 1 Nov 2020 - 30 Jun 2021

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.