About
Catherine is Professor of Public Policy, and Co-Director of the Heseltine Institute for Public Policy, Practice and Place at the University of Liverpool. She is recognised as a leading expert on urban governance and public policy, and has written widely on policy design and implementation, devolution, urban transformation, social and democratic innovation, participation and community ownership.
Catherine is particularly well-known for her work on co-production to forge creative and inclusive solutions to economic, social and policy challenges. She has written for Nature on how the academy can better value co-production in research and is now co-lead of the Co-Production Futures Inquiry, a collective intelligence gathering exercise to address institutional barriers to the co-production of research in UK higher education, supported by a cross-institutional award from Research England’s Participatory Research Fund.
Her work is highly cited, and has been published in leading peer-reviewed academic journals, including Political Studies, Governance, Public Administration Review and Urban Studies. Catherine has also been involved in securing and delivering high-value research awards from funders, including the Economic and Social Research Council, Arts and Humanities Research Council and Joint Partnership Initiative Urban Europe. She regularly contributes comment and analysis to a wide-range of outlets.
Catherine is a collaborative and engaged scholar, and has worked extensively with a wide-range of policy, practice and community partners, and consulted to organisations including the UK government and Equality and Human Rights Commission. She is part of a collaboration of leading UK public policy scholars using [Positive Public Policy] (https://paulcairney.wordpress.com/positive-public-policy-popp/) (PoPP) to reorient policy scholarship in support of effective government.
A Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, Catherine has specialised in post-graduate teaching of students in policy and practice roles seeking to advance their public service careers. She is a mentor on the Fleming Fund’s professional development programme and a contributor to the Australia and New Zealand School of Government’s Executive MPA and the UK Cabinet Office’s Leadership for Government programmes, along with the University of Liverpool’s new Masters in Public Administration and Policy programme. She has previously taught at the Universities of Birmingham, Manchester and De Montfort.
Catherine is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and was the recipient of the Joni Lovenduski Prize for Outstanding Professional Achievement in a Mid-Career Scholar in 2020, awarded by the UK’s Political Studies Association. Before joining the University of Liverpool, she was Director of Research at the Institute of Local Government Studies, and the School of Government at the University of Birmingham, where she retains an Honorary Professorial position. She has also held International Visiting Research Fellowships at the Great Cities Institute, University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), the Institute for Governance and Policy at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), Tilburg University’s School of Politics and Public Administration, and the Australia and New Zealand School of Government (ANZSOG). She is Chair of the Editorial Board for Local Government Studies.
Professor Durose is an institutional leader on Place and Innovation, and equality, diversity and inclusion. She convenes the Feminist City network and the Women@Liverpool staff equality network by and for academic women across disciplines and career stages. She acts as a mentor to early career researchers across a range of initiatives.
For further updates, you can connect with Catherine on LinkedIn