Nonprofit Accountability Clubs


The Nonprofit Accountability Clubs research project at the Evans School examines how nonprofit organization engage in collective action to develop voluntary regulation programs in order to demonstrate improvements in nonprofit accountability to key stakeholders.  The programs are one response to growing governance challenges facing the nonprofits as a result of growth in the scale and scope of the sector.  These governance challenges manifest as “agency dilemmas,” whereby nonprofits (as agents) have difficulty demonstrating to their resource providers and authorizers (the principals) that they are governing as agreed and delivering as promised.  Voluntary accountability programs, or ‘club’s we as we term them, are one common mechanism for reducing the information asymmetries that give rise to agency conflict.

While scholars have paid considerable attention to broad accountability issues in nonprofits, there is a lack of systematic examinations of specific accountability mechanisms, particularly accountability clubs.

This research is led by Mary Kay Gugerty and Aseem Prakash, who lay out the theoretical framework for this project in a volume of work under contract with Cambridge University Press titled Nonprofit Accountability Clubs: Voluntary Regulation of Nongovernmental and Nonprofit Organizations.  Book Prospectus (168 KB PDF)  Chapter One (439 KB PDF)

Related Research
In April 2008, the Evans School and Marc Lindenberg Center hosted a number of scholars to present papers answering the core questions asked by Gugerty and Prakash in Nonprofit Accountability Clubs: Voluntary Regulation of Nongovernmental and Nonprofit Organizations.   The papers presented included:

Find out more about our research and reports and publications by contacting us at 206.221.4629 or nbec@u.washington.edu.