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Peter Eckersley

Associate Professor

Nottingham Business School

Staff Group(s)
Department of Accounting and Finance Public Service Management (Research Group)

Role

Dr Peter Eckersley is an Associate Professor in Public Policy and Management at NBS. His research focuses on central-local government relations, public policy, climate change, sustainability and public accountability. He supervises PhD students, chairs a support network for early career researchers, and teaches public policy to Masters students. Peter is also Managing Editor of Local Government Studies and Co-Convenor of the UK Political Studies Association's Specialist Group on Local Politics and Governance.

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.

Research areas

Peter’s research focuses on how public bodies, particularly at the local level, seek to achieve their policy objectives, especially around climate change and sustainability. This involves analysing relationships between public bodies and other state and non-state actors, as well as the specific policies that governing institutions adopt as a result. He is especially interested in how central-local dynamics shape the strategies that public bodies adopt to collaborate with these other governing actors when addressing ‘wicked’ issues.

He is head of the Policy, Place and Public Services Research Group at NBS and a member of the Centre for Economy, Policy and Place. He is primarily a qualitative researcher and interested in a range of research methods, including interviews, focus groups, and policy and documentation analysis.

Peter has published three monographs, a co-edited book, and over fifty articles in various peer-reviewed international journals, including:

  • Nature Climate Change
  • Public Administration
  • Public Administration Review
  • Journal of European Public Policy
  • Regional Studies
  • Environmental Politics
  • Public Management Review
  • Policy & Politics

Two of his academic articles have been awarded prizes for being the best papers to appear in a volume of those journals:

Winner of the Haldane Prize for Best Article to feature in volume 103 of Public Administration:

Eckersley, P., Lakoma, K., Murphy, P., Caygill, T. and Pell, C. 2025. Accountability as a function of power relationships in governance networks. Public Administration 103(3), 906-922. https://doi.org/10.1111/padm.13032.

Winner of the Prize for Best Article to feature in volume 27 of the Journal of European Public Policy:

Burns, C., Eckersley, P. and Tobin, P. 2020. EU environmental policy in times of crisis. Journal of European Public Policy, 27 (1), 1-19. https://doi.org/10.1080/13501763.2018.1561741

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 and TV, Japanese and German state television, LBC, multiple podcasts and blogposts, in the Financial Times, Liberation, the  Municipal Journal and Public Finance magazine, and has written for the Conversation and Carbon Brief. He 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 German Academic 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 Katarzyna Lakoma, Bernard Kofi Dom and Will Rossiter.

Externally, he has worked closely with 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), Laurence Ferry (Durham University), Paul Tobin (University of Manchester) and Anthony Flynn (Cardiff University).

Publications

Other recent publications of particular note:

Eckersley, P., Otto, A., Haupt, W. and Kern, K., 2025. Climate capacity in medium-sized German cities: (how) do smaller municipalities implement mitigation and adaptation policies? npj Climate Action, 4: 62

Eckersley, P., Flynn, A., Lakoma,  K. and Ferry, L. 2023. Public procurement as a policy tool: the territorial dimension. Regional Studies 57 (10), pp. 2087-2101.

Haupt, W., Eckersley, P., Irmisch, J.L., and Kern, K. 2023. How do local factors shape transformation pathways towards climate-neutral and resilient cities? European Planning Studies 31 (9), 1903-1925. https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2022.2147394.

Eckersley, P., Flynn, A., Ferry, L. and Lakoma, K, 2023. Austerity, political control and supplier selection in English local government: Implications for autonomy in multi-level systems. Public Management Review 25 (1), 1-21. https://doi.org/10.1080/14719037.2021.1930122.

Reckien, D., Buzasi, A., Olazabal, M., Spyridaki, N.A., Eckersley, P., et al. 2023. Quality of urban climate adaptation plans over time. npj Nature Urban Sustainability 3, 13, https://doi.org/10.1038/s42949-023-00085-1.

Eckersley, P. and Lakoma, K. 2022. Straddling multiple streams: Policy entrepreneurs and problem brokers in the governance of English fire and rescue services. Policy Studies 43 (5), 1001-1020. https://doi.org/10.1080/01442872.2021.1892620

Otto, A., Kern, K., Haupt, W., Eckersley, P. and Thieken, A.H. 2021. Ranking local climate policy: assessing the mitigation and adaptation activities of 104 German cities. Climatic Change 167 (5). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-021-03142-9.

See all of Peter Eckersley's publications...

Press expertise

  • English and German local government
  • Climate change
  • Sustainability