The John Gaus Award is presented annually by the American Political Science Association (APSA) to honor a lifetime of exemplary scholarship in the joint tradition of political science and public administration. Aseem Prakash will deliver the Gaus Lecture on Friday, September 12, 2025 at 6:30pm PDT as part of the APSA Annual Meeting.
Citation from the Award Committee:
Our committee has met and has unanimously chosen Professor Aseem Prakash for the 2025 John Gaus Award and Lectureship. Professor Prakash has had an outstanding career devoted to “exemplary scholarship in the joint tradition of political science and public administration.” He is a professor in the Department of Political Science and the Walker Family Professor for the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington, Seattle. Professor Prakash has published eight scholarly books and over 130 articles in peer-reviewed journals. Google Scholar lists well over 18,000 citations to his work.
His nomination letter says the following about his research:
“Professor Prakash is best known for his path-breaking research on the role that private actors, including firms and non-governmental organizations, can play in promoting more stringent environmental standards even in the absence of effective state intervention. John Gaus traced the ‘ecology’ of public administration to the rise of the administrative state. An important implication of the rise of the administrative state, which manages a wide portfolio of activities, is the fiscal, technical, and political demands on state capacity. This has created governance shortfalls. While such shortfalls can cause state failure, they can also create space for the emergence of non-traditional forms of governance. Professor Prakash’s research, especially on environmental issues, has helped to bring “environment” into public administration in a variety of ways, including how businesses and NGOs can fill governance gaps. At the same time, his research has explored how these nontraditional governance mechanisms could lead to issues such as regulatory capture and accountability deficits.
“More recently, has explored different dimensions of both climate mitigation and adaptation… In addition to studying the role of governments and businesses in the policy process, he has written extensively on non-governmental organizations (NGOs), especially about the issue of NGO accountability…”
All this work is of very high quality.
In addition, Professor Prakash has actively contributed to graduate education by chairing 21 PhD committees and served as an active member in 19 other doctoral committees. His advisees have secured faculty positions at very good universities across the globe.
He has made major service contributions to his university and to the world. For example, at the University of Washington he is the founding director of the Center for Environmental Politics, which has over 45 faculty associates and over 60 graduate and undergraduate fellows. At the global level, he founded the Environmental Politics and Governance (EPG) network.
Finally, the committee notes Professor Prakash’s remarkable 180 published op-eds and commentaries in such venues as Forbes.com, Foreign Policy, The Washington Post, Slate, Huffington Post, The Conversation, and The Hill.
To summarize, Professor Aseem Prakash is an eminent scholar who, like John Gaus, has devoted his career to outstanding scholarship in the joint tradition of political science and public administration. We are pleased to recommend Professor Prakash for this well-deserved award.
Aseem Prakash is Professor of Political Science, the Walker Family Professor for the College of Arts and Sciences, and the Founding Director, Center for Environmental Politics at University of Washington, Seattle. He secured B.A. (Hons) in Economics from St. Stephen’s College, University of Delhi, MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, and Joint Ph.D. from the Department of Political Science and the School of Public and Environmental Affairs, Indiana University, Bloomington.
Professor Prakash is the Founding Editor of Cambridge Series in Business and Public Policy and the Cambridge Elements in Organizational Response to Climate Change. He founded the Environmental Politics and Governance network. He is a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration and the Washington State Academy of Sciences. He has served on the National Academies Board on Environmental Change and Society, and as International Research Fellow at University of Oxford’s Center for Corporate Reputation.
His awards include the American Political Science Association Public Policy Section’s Excellence in Mentoring Award, and Science, Technology & Environmental Politics section’s Elinor Ostrom Career Achievement Award; The International Studies Association Environmental Studies Section’s Distinguished Scholar Award, Distinguished International Political Economy Scholar Award, and the James N. Rosenau Award for “scholar who has made the most important contributions to globalization studies”. He also received the Regulatory Studies Development Award from the European Consortium for Political Research Standing Group on Regulatory Governance.
With Nives Dolsak, he maintains a byline in Forbes.com, contributing over 150 commentaries during 2019-2025.
APSA thanks the committee members for their service: Dr. John Bryson (Chair) of the University of Minnesota, Dr. Shana Gadarian of Syracuse University, and Dr. Stephen Page of the University of Washington
Excellent!! Congratulations Aseem! Always knew you had it in you.