Mary Kay Gugerty
Mary Kay Gugerty
Assistant Professor of Public Affairs
Ph.D. Harvard University, 2001
Contact Information:
Parrington Hall, Room 220
gugerty@u.washington.edu
206.221.4599
Areas of Specialization:
International development; nonprofit and public management; program analysis and evaluation
Mary Kay Gugerty joined the Evans School faculty in 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 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 also leads the Nonprofits Accountability Clubs project at the Evans School, and is the recipient of the 2005 Dean’s Award for Excellence in Teaching and Service.
Gugerty’s research has been published in the American Journal of Political Science, Economic Development and Cultural Change, Journal of Public Economics, and Public Administration and Development, among others.
Her current research focuses on the emergence of voluntary regulation and accountability programs among nonprofits and NGOs globally. She is the lead editor of a new volume under contract with Cambridge University Press titled Nonprofit Accountability Clubs: Voluntary Regulation of Nonprofit and Nongovernmental Organizations (377 KB PDF) with co-editor Aseem Prakash. The introductory chapter to the volume develops a new theoretical approach to understanding nonprofit collective accountability programs, with original chapters by leading nonprofit scholars exploring themes with data on domestic and international accountability programs. Gugerty’s work in this area has been published in Public Administration and Development and is under review at Policy Sciences.
Another component of this NGO research, also undertaken with Aseem Prakash, seeks to outline a new agenda for the study of advocacy organizations. The research views advocacy NGOs as actors for pursuing collective action, and examines how collective action issues bear upon NGOs’ emergence, structures, accountability, resource acquisition, and advocacy strategies. The resulting book volume, Rethinking Advocacy Organizations, lays out this new conceptual framework and engages ten leading NGO scholars by asking them to respond to one or more of the four core project themes: NGO emergence, structure, accountability relationships and resource acquisition, and organizational strategy.
Another stream of Gugerty’s research explores the nature and structure of networks among public health organizations in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. This research is funded through the Gates Foundation in coordination with Evans School faculty members Sara Curran and Sanjeev Khagram.
Outside of academia, Gugerty has served as a consultant to the World Bank and 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 (174KB PDF)