Cristina M Balboa

Cristina Balboa is an associate professor at the Austin W. Marxe School of Public and International Affairs, Baruch College, CUNY and director of the Center for Nonprofit Strategy and Management. Her research incorporates international relations, comparative policy, and organization theory to demonstrate the relationship between an organization’s internal characteristics (like structure, diversity) and its external accountability, legitimacy, and efficacy. Her publications include “How Successful Transnational NGOs Set Themselves up for Failure on the Ground” in World Development(2014); “Policymaking in the Global Context: Training Students to Build Effective Strategic Partnerships” (with Deloffre, 2015) in the Journal of Public Affairs Education; and the Baruch Center for Nonprofit Strategy and Management Report “International NGOs in New York City: A comparative study” (available free at the center’s website). Her book The Paradox of Scale: How NGOs Build, Maintain, and Lose Authority in Environmental Governance was published by MIT Press in 2018 and was selected for honorable mention for the International Studies Association’s Sprout Award for Outstanding Book in 2020. 

She is a boardmember of the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action, where she is also a founding administrator of the Global Issues/Transnational Actors interest group, and chair of the diversity committee and the Undergraduate Diversity Scholars Program. Professor Balboa received her Ph.D. from Yale University in Environmental Policy and Governance, where her dissertation was awarded the 2010 Gabriel G. Rudney Memorial Award for Outstanding Dissertation in Nonprofit and Voluntary Action Research from ARNOVA. Prior to her academic work, Cristina spent almost a decade working in nonprofits in Washington D.C. and Ecuador on environmental issues in Latin America, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific.