Professor Joyce Liddle has a distinguished academic background having worked at national and international levels in the fields of urban and regional development, public policy, entrepreneurship, leadership and management. Much of her research and consultancy work has been undertaken in North East England addressing economic and social policy issues in collaboration with local and national politicians, and public, private, voluntary and community organisations.

In December 2024, Joyce was installed as a Professorial Fellow of St Chad’s College by the Board of Governors, cementing her position as a full member of the College as well as being a member of Policy&Practice.

Joyce was educated at Durham University in politics and sociology, studied for a PhD at the Local Government Centre, Warwick University and went on to hold the position of Course Director in post graduate Management Studies at Durham Business School. Subsequently, Joyce held Professorial, management and research posts in seven UK Universities including Sunderland, Durham, Newcastle, Northumbria, Teesside, Nottingham, Nottingham Trent University and in Aix-Marseille, France.

Her international reputation is reflected in advisory roles for ministers and civil servants in Italy, Finland, the West Indies and China as well as holding Visiting University Chairs in six countries. She also developed education and training programmes for public and civil servants in South Africa, Bahrain, France, Kazakhstan, Brazil and Ethiopia.

Drawing on a successful track record in securing UK Research Council and other research funding she has published over 250 articles, 45 book chapters and written and co-edited some sixteen books as well as fulfilling a number of editorial roles for journals and book series.

Joyce was a founding member and co-leader of an influential Regional Studies Association ‘Trans-border Place Leadership in Europe’ network. She is a Fellow of AcSS for services to the Academy and Society, Fellow of UK JUC/PAC for services to public policy and administration, and a Fellow of Regional Studies Association, for services to UK and international Regional policy and development, She is also a UKRI panel member, Future Leaders’ Fellowship Panel and a member of POGO, Blavatnik Business School, University of Oxford.

During her time at Northumbria (to continue as a Visiting Professor, Newcastle) she acted as Academic Director and Board Member of Insights North East, and led on Inclusive Growth. This regional partnership seeks to bridge the gap between research and place-based leadership policy involving Newcastle, Northumbria Sunderland and Durham Universities, NHS, North East Mayoral Combined Authority (NEMCA), local Councils and other regional agencies. In January 2024 she was an invited member of an Expert Advisory Panel to help to develop NEMCA Investment Planning Framework.

More widely, Joyce’s research nationally and in the North East has included a report for the NE Future Finance Commission (NELEP) on funding for regional development in the NE, a UKRI funded (4 nation state) project on Local Government Procurement under Covid 19, Levelling Up Reports widely discussed in national and international press, Devolution and regional performance in the NE, Place Leadership and Governance issues after Brexit. She was recently invited as a UK discussant at OECD Paris (May 2024), on a panel on Transforming Places: Leading Change. The report is available at OECD, Paris, publications.

Joyce is currently taking forward her work surrounding Devolution in the North East and related public policy and management issues in collaboration with members of the Policy and Practice research group.

The long running triennial Third Sector Trends survey will return in 2025 for the sixth time. While still in the early stages of developing project themes for its next round, it can now be confirmed that the project will go ahead thanks to funding provided by  our long-standing and principal partner Community Foundation Tyne & Wear and Northumberland.

This is the largest and longest running study of the voluntary sector in England and Wales, culminating in six core reports on sector structure, dynamics, purpose, influencing, energy and impact in 2022-23.  Data were then explored further to look specifically at the contribution of the voluntary sector to public health in three separately funded but integrated reports in Yorkshire and Humber, Cumbria and Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire and Berkshire West.

While negotiations continue with other potential contributors to the project, confirmation of renewed support for the study has also been secured from Millfield House Foundation for a second time to look at campaigning and influencing in the voluntary sector. To secure a strong response in Wales, support has also been provided by Wales Council for Voluntary Action and will allow for more in-depth analysis that was possible in the 2022 study.

Announcements on the participation of other partners in the project will be made in the early new year.  If you would like to see more detail on the study, its methodology and its publication of findings, please click here: Third Sector Trends in England and Wales.

Professor Joyce Liddle of Policy&Practice welcomed Colombian doctoral student, Santiago Rodriguez Tabaquiro to our North East region for a three-month research visit between September and December 2024. She is jointly supervising his PhD research at the University of Aix-Marseille, France, where she led the research centre for Public Management, Governance and Regional Development (IMPGT) between 2011-2017.

Santiago is focusing on ‘Shared mobility solutions in public transportation networks’, with a special focus on car pooling, car sharing, car clubs and other micro-mobility solutions to urban and rural transport. His chosen case study here in the UK is the Newcastle and Gateshead metropolitan area which he will compare with his findings on the Aix-Marseille Metropolitan.

He will be undertaking a series of interviews with senior policy personnel and politicians in urban and rural governance across the wider North East region. In particular he will meet with those shaping transport policies in NEXUS, North East transport authorities, local authorities and the Mayor’s Office at the North East Combined Authority. Santiago is working in collaboration with researchers at Insights North East (INE), a University-wide research collaboration of which the University of Durham is a key member.

Santiago is happy to share his findings with other researchers, and if time allows before he returns to France, he will join us at St Chads to discuss his research work

Global and Geopolitical Challenges in a Changing Europe conference, Prague, 14 – 15th March 2024.

In March, Professor Joyce Liddle of Policy&Practice, organised this event with fellow members of the conference series’ committee: Professors Martin Pělucha, Prague University of Economics and Business; John Shutt and Ignazio Cabras, Northumbria University; Dr John Gibney, University of Birmingham, and Professor Markku Sotarauta, Tampere University, Finland. The conference was one a series of events held across Europe which will culminate in a final event in Birmingham in April 2025.

Place leadership has been the subject of extensive academic discourse for many years. Debates took place at a pivotal geopolitical moment, resulting from war in Ukraine and its political and economic consequences – not least of which is an acceleration of Europe’s migration crises. The confluence of unprecedented challenges led participants to call for a dynamic and adaptive approach which requires leaders to redefine strategies, adapt decision-making processes and exercise agility in fast-evolving circumstances.

Professors Liddle, Shutt and Gibney’s contribution identified several challenges facing sub-national leadership. These focused on how to respond to inter-related challenges of Brexit and cross-border cooperation and how to counter challenges to local democracy and enable a sub-national voice?

Many of the contributors in this series of events will prepare articles for a special issue of the journal Regional Studies which will be published in 2025/6 edited by John Gibney, Joyce Liddle, John Shutt and Markku Sotarauta, entitled: Leadership in city and regional development: new perspectives from within and beyond borders.

Left to right: Dr. Ahmad Aizuddin Bin Md Rami, Professors Sarah Banks and Fred Robinson

Dr. Ahmad Aizuddin Bin Md Rami, Faculty of Educational Studies, University Putra Malaysia visited members of Policy&Practice to discuss the role of leaders in the voluntary and community sector in the UK. Aizuddin is a visiting scholar in the Department of Sociology at Durham University for the whole of 2024 to undertake this comparative study of principles, practices and systems surrounding community development in the UK and Malaysia.

In a wide-ranging debate, focused mainly on County Durham, Professors Fred Robinson, Sarah Banks and Tony Chapman shared their observations based on many years of research work in the North of England with Dr Bin Md Rami – with a more specific focus on the way that voluntary and community sector leaders support young people from less advantaged communities to make successful life transitions.

This is the first joint meeting among academics at St Chad’s and the Department of Sociology on this study, but plans have now been made to explore the local situation in comparative context in the coming months.

Findings from Third Sector Trends research on the role of the voluntary sector in supporting local health and wellbeing has been published in three inter-related reports by Dr Jonathan Wistow and Professor Tony Chapman (see further news stories below).

Analytical reports are the product of in-depth statistical enquiry and by their nature tend to be quite long. This limits the extent to which key messages are disseminated more widely. Interest in the research has, however, led to a number of opportunities to speak at events to debate key local findings.

In November 2023, Tony Chapman was invited to speak at three events. The first, in Highland, was hosted by Highland Hospice for the local thirds sector. The purpose of the conference was to critically explore the current extent of partnership working within the third sector and between charities, the local public sector and the NHS.

A second event took place in Chelmsford where findings from a discrete report on the situation of the third sector in Essex was commissioned by Essex Community Foundation. This well-attended event was the first major conference for the local Third Sector Forum on issues surrounding local health and wellbeing. The report can be downloaded here: The Structure, dynamics and impact of the Third Sector in Essex (November 2023)

The final event was held in Kendal, organised by Cumbria CVS. In addition to Tony’s presentation, speeches were delivered by public health directors from the newly established councils and chief officers from the two NHS Integrated Care Systems operating in Cumbria.

In the new year, further dissemination of findings is planned, together with an updated report on key messages for all local areas in England and Wales.

Over the past year Professor John Mawson (St. Chad’s College, Durham University) and Dr David McGuinness (Northumbria University) have been exploring how far, from a leadership and management perspective, a £350 million regional development investment was secured for an area straddling the Anglo-Scottish border referred to as Borderlands. This case study is an input into a wider international Regional Studies Association seminar and research programme on cross border development.

The current case study is seeking to shed light on these issues through an analysis of management, networking and local and regional leadership processes. To date, interviews have taken place with relevant Council Leaders and senior officers, politicians from the different political parties, civil servants from the Scottish and UK Governments and other relevant stakeholders. Attention has focused on how partners were initially brought together, common aims were established, agreed place based narratives were developed, key projects and programmes were identified and common negotiating positions were established for engagement with civil servants and Ministers.

Research has also focused on how the Partnership mobilised the support of national politicians and Ministers in focusing on Borderlands as a funding priority and exercised a degree of influence over the content of the final deal. Clearly in drawing wider conclusions from s single case study there can be no single best practice approach given geographical, structural and temporal variations in specific situations, rather the research has been to identify key considerations and issues which need to be addressed and could potentially be tackled.

The Borderlands Inclusive Growth Deal is a negotiated agreement between two principal funders: the UK and Scottish Governments, and a local authority cross-border partnership. The Borderlands Partnership comprises: Dumfries and Galloway; Scottish Borders; Northumberland; Cumbria; and Carlisle councils. The Deal process was initially developed by the UK Government in England and transferred to Scotland in 2014, when it was gradually modified to accommodate the distinctive geography and policy priorities of the Scottish Government in the form of so called Inclusive Growth Deals.

The Borderlands Deal was one of the later versions and is unique in being the only rural cross border economic development programme in the UK. Covering the size of Wales with a population of around 1 million it comprises largely geographically dispersed market towns, former mining and industrial settlements, and coastal communities with a mix of agriculture, forestry, tourism, textile and other related industries.

This area suffers from an ageing population and a comparatively low skilled and poorly paid workforce. It experiences limited inward investment, new firm formation alongside pockets of severe deprivation in some towns and in Carlisle, the largest urban centre.

St. Chad’s research involvement in this policy issue began in 2012-13 when Fred Robinson and Jonathan Blackie, working with Keith Shaw (Northumbria University) and Frank Peck (Cumbria University) were commissioned to produce a report entitled: Borderlands: Can the North East and Cumbria Benefit from Greater Scottish Autonomy?

This provided an initial vehicle to foster collaboration between the 5 councils in developing a Borderlands Initiative and Partnership with the objective of securing for the first time, some long-term and large-scale regional development funding. The research was highlighted by the Scottish Government and the Scottish Affairs Parliamentary Select Committee and ultimately led to a successful funding proposal in 2021.

The formal process of negotiating the Deal with government departments and Ministers took over four years but when taking into account initial research, partnership building, strategy development and lobbying, nearly a decade. This challenge of developing cross border regional development in rural and more peripheral regions involving alignment of different geographical and funding arrangements is of increasing interest both in the academic world and in the fields of policy and practice.

Interim findings have been presented at two RSA national conferences in Newcastle and London with the aim being to produce a final report next summer once a further round of interviews have been completed.