Mary Kay Gugerty
Associate Professor of Public Affairs
Ph.D. Harvard University, 2001
Contact Information:
On leave for the 2010-2011 academic year
Parrington Hall, Room 220
gugerty@uw.edu
206.221.4599
Areas of Specialization:
International development; nonprofit and public management; program analysis and evaluation
Mary Kay Gugerty is an Associate Professor at the Daniel J. Evans School of Public Affairs at the University of Washington, where she has taught since 2001. Her research interests focus on governance and the emergence and design of collective action institutions among individuals and organizations, with a particular focus on developing countries.
Gugerty’s current research focuses on the emergence of voluntary regulation and accountability programs among nonprofits and NGOs globally. She is the lead editor of Voluntary Regulation of Nonprofit and Nongovernmental Organizations: An Accountability Club Framework, published by Cambridge University Press in 2010 and co-edited with Aseem Prakash. Gugerty’s work in this area has also been published in Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Regulation and Governance, Public Administration and Development, and Policy Sciences.
Gugerty is the co-editor of a second volume, Advocacy Organizations and Collective Action, also co-edited with Aseem Prakash and published by Cambridge University Press. This volume outlines a new agenda for the study of advocacy organizations based on the collective action framework. Leading NGO scholars contribute chapters that examine NGO emergence, structure, accountability, funding and strategy from the collective action perspective.
Gugerty’s previous research explores the structure and functioning of community development institutions in Africa. This work examines the impact of NGO funding on indigenous self-help groups, the impact of ethnic diversity on collective action, and the role of rotating savings and credit associations (rosca) in promoting rural savings. This research has been published in American Journal of Political Science, Economic Development and Cultural Change, and the Journal of Public Economics, among others.
At the Evans School, Gugerty teaches courses on nonprofit and public management, the political economy of NGOs and foreign aid, program evaluation, international policy analysis and management, and African development. She is the recipient of the 2005 Dean’s Award for Excellence in Teaching and Service.
Outside of academia, Gugerty has served as a consultant to the World Bank and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), studying the impact of economic growth on poverty alleviation, structural barriers to trade in sub-Saharan Africa, and the impact of agricultural commercialization on intra-household resource allocation in Kenya.
She holds a Ph.D. in political economy and government from Harvard University and a MPA from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. She also holds a BA in political science and economics from Georgetown University.
Curriculum Vitae (116 KB PDF)