Researcher in Focus: Professor Catherine Durose

Posted on: 29 October 2024 by Dr Catherine Durose in 2024 Posts

In this 'researcher in focus', meet Professor Catherine Durose, Co-Director of the University of Liverpool's Heseltine Institute for Public Policy, Practice and Place. Learn about her research engaging citizen and community voices in policy and decision-making processes, as well as helping to shape the future of Liverpool and the wider city region.

Listen to Professor Durose talk about her work in more detail in our 'researcher in focus' podcast.

Catherine Durose is an award-winning Professor of Public Policy, whose pioneering work has advanced thinking on how to engage citizen and community voices in the policies and decision-making that affects their everyday lives. Her research spans from critical work decentring the power, politics and limits of participation to a practical focus on the conditions under which it works well.

She has written extensively and secured diverse funding for research on a range of issues relating to public policy and urban governance. Alongside, her highly cited academic work, she regularly provides comment and analysis for wider audiences, for example her recent piece for UK in a Changing Europe on the future of devolution.

Catherine also has a sustained track-record of working with policymakers, practitioners and communities. Her policy-facing work has centred on how to foster creative and inclusive responses to addressing policy challenges. She is currently working with the UK civil service’s Public Design Community to synthesise evidence and help build momentum and credibility for the use of design in policy. 

She is also now part of a nascent collaboration with other leading UK political scientists who are interested how positive public policy can be mobilised for effective government. This work is aiming to mobilise academic research and expertise to support policymakers in developing new approaches to meet the significant policy challenges of the moment.

Championing co-production

Catherine is particularly well-known for her work on co-production. Co-production is a process of bringing together stakeholders with different yet relevant expertise to address a shared problem or concern. The aim is not participation for the sake of it, but rather the involvement and value of those with a stake in addressing a given issue.

One way in which co-production can enable creative solutions that would otherwise not happen is by bringing together professionals and those traditionally on ‘the receiving end’ of their expertise. Inspired by her wider research, over the last decade she has considered how co-production can be used to transform relationships between researchers and ‘the researched’. This could, for example, look like poverty researchers working with those experiencing poverty to reveal hidden or excluded perspectives. In this way, co-production can help research to be more relevant or impactful.

Professor Durose wrote in Nature on how universities can better support co-produced research. She is now Co-Lead for an innovative Research England-funded project, the Co-Production Futures Inquiry into how the higher education sector can address institutional barriers to enable more meaningful co-production of research. The two-year Inquiry will generate evidence and bring together key stakeholders, including funders and professional associations to deliberate and develop an action plan for change.

Catherine is Co-Director of the University’s Heseltine Institute for Public Policy, Practice and Place. In this role, Catherine supports the delivery of the Place and Innovation pillar of the Liverpool 2031 strategy, alongside convening research and policy engagement activity around the Institute’s research priorities, including the future of the city. Catherine has worked on key Heseltine initiatives, including the recent Manifesto for Liverpool City Region, provides strategic oversight for the Institute’s policy briefing series and leads on its programme of policy impact training, supported by the University’s ESRC Impact Accelerator Account.

Liverpool Feminist City network

She also convenes the transdisciplinary Liverpool Feminist City network, which seeks to bring a gendered perspective to debates on the future of the city. Catherine also has a long-standing interest in the role of the university as an anchor institution within the local community. She has worked over the last decade with Citizens UK, a national charity using community organising to build power in local communities and for social change. She is now working to support the development of a new local chapter, Liverpool Citizens.

Professor Durose has also recently (September 2024) been made a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences (ACSS), who champion the vital role social sciences play in education, government and business. Upon receiving her Fellowship, Catherine said "In a world of rapid change, radical uncertainty and growing polarisation, the social sciences have never been more important in understanding how we can respond to these challenges and build a more just world. I’m excited to work with the Academy and other Fellows to do so." Read more on this great achievement here.

Learn more about Catherine on her staff page.

Follow Catherine on Twitter / X.

Download the Catherine Durose podcast transcript [Word doc 39kb]