Faculty and Research

Alnoor Ebrahim is an Associate Professor in the General Management Unit, and in the Social Enterprise Initiative, at the Harvard Business School. His research and teaching focus on the challenges of accountability and performance management facing nonprofit and civil society organizations. He is also affiliated with Harvard University’s Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations.

Professor Ebrahim is author of the award-winning book, NGOs and Organizational Change: Discourse, Reporting, and Learning (Cambridge University Press, 2003 and 2005), and is co-editor, with Edward Weisband, of Global Accountabilities: Participation, Pluralism, and Public Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 2007), which compares accountability dilemmas in nonprofits, business, and government. He has been the recipient of awards for best article in the journals Nonprofit Management and Leadership, and the Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly.

His teaching experience includes courses on nonprofit and nongovernmental organizations, civil society, collaborative governance, and environmental policy. He currently teaches a course on "Leading and Governing High-Performing Nonprofit Organizations" in the MBA program, and in the executive education program on "Performance Measurement of Effective Management of Nonprofit Organizations."

Among his research projects, Ebrahim heads a global team studying how nonprofits seek to create “systemic change” by influencing national policies on poverty. This work is being carried out in six countries of the global South. He also works with nonprofit executive directors in the United States on the challenges of organizational learning in urban poverty contexts. His professional work has included commissioned reports on civil society relations with the World Bank, on NGO accountability at the Inter-American Development Bank, as well as projects with a number of nongovernmental organizations over the past two decades, such as CIVICUS: The World Alliance for Citizen Participation, the World Resources Institute in Washington, D.C., the Tata Energy Research Institute in New Delhi, and the Aga Khan Rural Support Programme in western India.

Prior to joining the faculty of the Harvard Business School, Alnoor Ebrahim was the Wyss Visiting Scholar at HBS, and a Visiting Associate Professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government. He also taught at Virginia Tech for several years, where he was a founding codirector of the Institute for Governance and Accountabilities. He holds a BSc degree from MIT (1991) in civil and environmental engineering, and a PhD from Stanford University (1999), where he studied organizational behavior and environmental planning and management.