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 also supervises PhD students and chairs a support network for early career researchers. Peter is also Managing Editor of Local Government Studies and Co-Convenor of the UK Political Studies Association's Specialist Group on Local Politics.
Alongside his post at NBS, Peter also works part-time at the Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space in Erkner (near Berlin), where he studies climate policy in German cities.
Career overview
Academic experience
Peter joined NBS as a Senior Research Fellow in April 2018 and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2023. Before that, 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. 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 such as climate change.
He has published a single-authored monograph, Power and capacity in urban climate governance, co-authored a book with NTU colleagues, Rebuilding the Fire and Rescue Services, and co-edited a multi-authored volume, e-Business Fundamentals. He has also published over thirty articles in various peer-reviewed international journals, including:
- Nature Urban Sustainability
- Public Administration Review
- Journal of European Public Policy
- Regional Studies
- Environmental Politics
- Public Management Review
- Policy & Politics
- Environment and Planning A
- Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews
- Climatic Change
He is primarily a qualitative researcher and interested in a range of research methods, including interviews, focus groups, and policy and documentation analysis.
Peter is acting head of the Public Policy and Management Research Group at NBS and a member of the Centre for Economics, Policy and Public Management.
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, 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).
Publications
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.
Eckersley, P., Flynn, A., Lakoma, K. and Ferry, L. 2022. Public procurement as a policy tool: the territorial dimension. Regional Studies.
Salvia, M., Reckien, D., Pietrapertosa, F., Eckersley, P., et al. 2021. Will climate mitigation ambitions lead to carbon neutrality? An analysis of the local-level plans of 327 cities in the EU. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 135, 110253
Burns, C., Eckersley, P. and Tobin, P. 2020. EU environmental policy in times of crisis. Journal of European Public Policy 27 (1), 1-19.
Eckersley, P. 2018. Who shapes local climate policy? Unpicking governance arrangements in English and German cities. Environmental Politics, 27 (1), 139-160.
Press expertise
- English and German local government
- Climate change
- Sustainability