Research overview

Jack’s research considers how decentralisation enables and constrains place-based policymaking and how it affects the spatial distribution of governance capacity and policy outcomes. In simple terms, if power moves downwards, is policymaking more effective and are their fewer inequalities between places?

In recent years, Jack's research has focused on devolution and spatial policy in England, asking how the UK’s changing multi-level politics might enable more integrated, strategic, democratic, and preventative policymaking. Underpinning this analysis is a critical realist theorisation of the social processes and power asymmetries that affect institutional change.

Research history

Since January 2024, Jack has been a Research Fellow on the TRUUD project: Tackling the Root Causes Upstream of Unhealthy Urban Development Decision-making. Within this interdisciplinary project, Jack focuses on how preventative health can be embedded in political discourse and realised though devolution and cross-government working.

Previously, Jack worked at The Productivity Institute, University of Manchester, considering how local economic development would benefit from decentralisation and better central-local relations.

This followed a post at the Bennett Institute for Public Policy, University of Cambridge, where Jack collaborated with the Institute for Government on a review of the UK constitution, focusing specifically on English devolution.

In 2020-2021, he worked on the LIPSIT project at the University of Surrey, considering how over-centralisation limits the policymaking capacity of England’s emerging mayoral combined authorities.

In 2019, Jack completed a PhD at the University of Leeds, focused on the underlying (ontological) assumptions of UK social policy and the Conservative governments of the 2010s. He also holds an MA Politics from Leeds (2014) and a BA Politics from the University of Liverpool (2010).