Peter Eckersley

Role

Career overview

Academic experience

Peter joined NBS as a Senior Research Fellow in April 2018 and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2023. Between 2019 and 2023 he also worked part-time at the Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space near Berlin, where he studied climate policy in German cities.

Before joining NBS, he worked as a postdoc in the Department of Politics at the University of Sheffield, in the Environment Department at the University of York, and at Newcastle University Business School.

His PhD in Political Science from Newcastle University highlighted how contrasting intergovernmental systems in England and Germany led one city in each country to adopt very different approaches to climate protection.

Peter also holds an MA in European Union Studies (Pass with Distinction) and a BA in Government and EU Studies (First Class) from Newcastle. In addition to his current part-time post in Erkner (Germany), he has been a visiting scholar at the universities of Münster (in 2013) and Potsdam (in 2016), and also spent one year at the University of Leipzig in the late 1990s as an Erasmus student.

Practitioner experience

Between 2001 and 2012, Peter worked for the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy (CIPFA) where he advised municipal governments on issues of performance management, e-Government, operational efficiency, project management, finance and sustainability. Prior to his time at CIPFA, Peter worked for the City of Edinburgh Council in staff development and training.

External activity

Alongside his role as Managing Editor of Local Government Studies, Peter co-convenes the UK Political Studies Association's Specialist Group on Local Politics and Governance.

As an academic, Peter has featured on BBC radio, Japanese state television, LBC, multiple podcasts, in the Municipal Journal and Public Finance magazine, and has written for the Conversation and Carbon Brief. He helped to write a report for the National Audit Office on the evolving nature of public accountability in 2015, and has also contributed to submissions to several parliamentary committee inquiries into local government and environmental protection.

As a practitioner, he has spoken at numerous conferences and seminars on issues of local governance, public service reform, performance management and sustainability.

Sponsors and collaborators

Peter has been awarded research funding from the Economic and Social Research Council (full scholarships to undertake both his MA and PhD), the GermanAcademic Exchange Service (to support his doctoral fieldwork in Germany), and the Political Studies Association (in return for working on the journal Politics as a postgraduate research student).

Whilst at CIPFA he undertook consultancy projects for central and local government, public sector contractors and third sector organisations.

Peter’s academic collaborators within NTU include Pete Murphy, Katarzyna Lakoma, Charlotte Pell, Martin Jones and Bernard Kofi Dom.

Externally, he has worked closely with Laurence Ferry (Durham University), Kristine Kern and Wolfgang Haupt (Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space), Diana Reckien (University of Twente), Monica Salvia (National Research Council of Italy), Marta Olazabal (Basque Centre for Climate Change), Charlotte Burns (University of Sheffield), Paul Tobin (University of Manchester) and Anthony Flynn (Cardiff University).