In Memorium of Christopher Pollitt
| Author | Andrew Massey,Geert Bouckaert |
| Published date | 01 October 2018 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0144739418802145 |
| Date | 01 October 2018 |
| Subject Matter | Obituary |
Obituary
In Memorium
of Christopher Pollitt
Geert Bouckaert
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium
Andrew Massey
University of Exeter, UK
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
Corresponding author:
Andrew Massey, University of Exeter, Exeter EX4 4RJ, UK.
Email: a.massey@exeter.ac.uk; Telephone: 01392722042
Teaching Public Administration
2018, Vol. 36(3) 301–303
ªThe Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/0144739418802145
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