Emily Clough

College of Social Sciences and Humanities Assistant Professor, Political Science and International Affairs

Emily R. Clough is assistant professor in the Department of Political Science and the International Affairs Program. She studies comparative politics and the political economy of development, with a regional focus on India. Her research and teaching interests focus on public service delivery, state capacity and government performance, civil society, democracy and political accountability, education, bureaucratic behavior and corruption, inequality and distributive politics, the ethics and politics of global philanthropy, and multi-method research design. Past research has focused on food politics, private governance and the ethical certification of global supply chains. Her first book project examines the impact of NGOs on state service provision in India, focusing especially on the education sector. She has published articles on the intellectual history of the civil society concept and its relevance to empirical studies of development, and on the private-sector substitutes for effective state regulatory enforcement in developing countries with weakly enforced labor and environmental regulations. Prior to Northeastern, Professor Clough completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society and one year as visiting assistant instructor in Government and Asian Studies at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. She holds a Ph.D. in government from Harvard University (2017) and a B.A. in political science from Swarthmore College (2003). Between college and graduate school, she spent five years working for the non-profit and social enterprise sectors in the fields of international development, Fair Trade, and conflict resolution.