Abstract
It is with sadness that we learned of the death of our friend and colleague, Professor Christopher Pollitt. Christopher was a former Editor in Chief of the International Review of Administrative Sciences, an exceptional global scholar who researched and published with distinction in the field of public administration. He was an outstanding scholar of his generation and there are few learned papers or books in his fields that do not contain references to his inspired and analytically precise work. He contributed to the discipline in the areas of global comparisons, analyses of public sector reforms, the evaluation of public service policies, programmes and projects. He published extensively in these areas with a voluminous number of books, journal articles, book chapters and edited publications. For example, his book on Public Management Reform (2000) has been translated into several languages.
Christopher held a number of academic positions in prestigious institutions before retiring as Professor at the Public Management Institute, KU Leuven and Scientific Director at the Netherlands Institute of Government. During a career that spanned nearly four decades, he was the recipient of awards such as the Hans Sigrist International Prize and research grant awards from the European Commission framework programmes and the UK Economic Social Science Research Council.
Christopher began his professional career as a civil servant, one of the bright young people selected to enter the UK ‘Fast Stream’, a gilded cohort that was inculcated into the culture and practice of Northcote Trevelyan in those pre-Fulton, pre-New Public Management days. He was never to forget the importance of research and analysis related to the problems of the real world and the need to evaluate what it is that the public sector actually does, rather than what it thinks it does. As he moved into academia, he was special advisor on policy evaluation for the European Commissioner for Budget and Administration. He has also had a wide international role: for example, he was a visiting fellow in the Canadian Centre for Management Development’s Governance Network.
Christopher was also a good citizen and contributed to the discipline, becoming heavily involved in a number of international learned societies such as the European Group for Public Administration (EGPA) and its parent organisation, the International Institute of Administrative Sciences. But he was also a good man; good in the sense that he mentored and encouraged younger researchers and kept an interest in their careers, becoming a life-long friend and gentle but critical advisor to many. And he had a wide hinterland: a cultured man who enjoyed and was knowledgeable about music, history, wine and literature. He remained involved and engaged in many pursuits until his final days, even contributing book chapters and papers to learned journals as well as returning to his personal roots in Brighton and Hove, taking delight in day trips along the A272, a road interesting for its meandering through ancient and modern Sussex and Hampshire and one that provided Christopher with additions for his store of witty and erudite anecdotes.
He faced his death with bravery and equanimity, insisting on writing a short speech to be read out at the 2018 EGPA conference at the announcement of the ‘Christopher Pollitt Award for Best IRAS Article’, insisting it be read out exactly as he wrote it and laboured over several drafts, knowing his words would be spoken by another. He wrote with wry humour: If the Gods of Modern Medicine are to be believed (and they are far from infallible) I will not be attending the EGPA conference because by that time, thanks to my pesky and unusual cancer, I will, to use that charming English phrase, be ‘pushing up daisies’. My … aim is to say something about the field of scholarship in which I have spent three quarters of my adult working life. My belief is that, in parts of Europe at least, it is in some peril, and that we have a role to play. An EGPA survey and interview conceived by Geert Bouckaert was carried out eight years ago and showed that a strong majority of PA scholars believed both in the scientific study of the subject AND in its values and ethic of improved services for citizens from respected, well-trained and remunerated public servants. As do I. Yet today, we face rising populism, nationalism and racism. The authority, expertise and impartiality of civil servants is under attack on all sides, but what we see in academic PA is too often a retreat into scholasticism or, at the other extreme, a kind of highbrow management consultancy. Of course we need both these types, but we also need a solid core of PA scholars who practice independent, high-quality critical analysis of big things which are happening now and will happen in future (climate change, demographic change, migration). Scholars who will build and find funding for ambitious projects aimed at those issues, simultaneously growing networks of concerned scholars across disciplines and fields. And – most importantly – who communicate, not only in learned journals, but also on websites and blogs, radio and TV and the press. Many citizens really are interested in why their schools are failing or their police are corrupt, and far less so in what celebrity politicians said to each other yesterday. We should be a respected voice addressed to that appetite.
