Matthew McKenna

Matthew is an ESRC funded doctoral candidate who is researching the relationship between policy failure and policy learning in the context of central-local government relations. To do so, he is conducting a comparative case study design focusing upon two cases of central government intervention into English local government. These interventions range from centrally mandated Best Value Inspections, Improvement Notices, Statutory Directions, statutory and none-statutory improvement measures. He is particularly interested in how local actors interpret central government interventions and in examining the practice of ‘doing improvement’.

Matthew is also a co-investigator on the multi-disciplinary research project “Whose responsibility is it? Socio-political perspectives on Antimicrobial Resistance”, funded by the University of Birmingham’s Institute for Global Innovation and the Institute for Advanced Studies. This project examines the views of national and international policy stakeholders in antimicrobial resistance (eg clinicians, managers, policy makers, politicians), with the aim to explore issues of how responsibility and accountability are managed in policy and clinical practice.