Professor Martin Lodge remembers a wonderful colleague and leading international figure in the fields of public administration and regulation.

We were extremely saddened to learn about the death of our former colleague Christopher Hood in early January. Christopher Hood has been among the most international leading figures in the fields of public administration and regulation.

Christopher joined LSE’s Department of Government as Professor of Public Policy and Administration from the University of Sydney in 1989. He was Convenor of the Department between 1995 and 1998. Christopher subsequently became the Gladstone Professor of Government at All Souls College at the University of Oxford in 2001 (until 2014). Despite his subsequent move to All Souls College, he continued an affiliation with the LSE through its Centre for Analysis of Risk and Regulation. He was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 1996 and received a CBE in 2011.

Christopher Hood’s contribution to international scholarship has been outstanding. Christopher is credited for coining the terms ‘quango’ and ‘New Public Management’. His inaugural lecture at the LSE turned into the seminal article ‘A New Public Management for All Seasons’ (published in 1991 in Public Administration). This article is among the most cited articles in this field of public administration. His 1998 book The Art of the State was awarded the UK Political Studies WJM Mackenzie prize in 2000. In 2016, he was also awarded the WJM Mackenzie prize for his joint work (with Ruth Dixon) on A Government that worked better and cost less? In October 2023, he published the major study in the ways in which the UK has exercised its public spending controls, The Way the Money Goes (with Maia King, Iain McLean and Barbara Piotrowska).

In 2021, he received the American Political Science Association’s John Gaus Award. The award committee noted how Christopher’s work had, over five decades, been characterised by a willingness to address big themes central to the way government’s work, the development of systematic explanatory frameworks and careful empirical analysis. He leaves an enduring legacy.

We mourn a wonderful colleague. We extend our deepest sympathy to his family.

A more extensive obituary will follow in due course.

If you would like to find out more about Christopher’s manifold contributions to his field, Explorations In Governance, published to mark his 65th birthday, examines some of the key ideas and themes of his research with contributions from some of the esteemed colleagues he influenced and worked with.

Image credit: 16 January 1990, Old Theatre, Christopher Hood, Inaugural lecture. (LSE Library/LSE Government)