I am a postdoctoral researcher of public administration at the University of Milan-Bicocca. In early 2024 I defended my PhD at Bocconi University. 

In my research I am especially interested in how representative government can learn from and about the public through public administration. During my PhD I developed a novel perspective of learning from civic challenges in service of representation, using mixed methods to explore how public actors can learn from accountability processes initiated by members of the public and civil society organisations. 

While existing accountability research emphasises top-down, control perspectives, a learning perspective takes seriously the deliberative and constructive potential of accountability in public governance. Meanwhile, scholarship on learning from accountability in the public sector often focuses on high profile crises and failures. I contribute a systematic exploration and theorization of learning in government from more quotidian challenges which arise from citizen-state interactions like complaints, which I term civic challenges, most of which never reach external scrutiny, let alone public attention.  I challenge the received wisdom that such learning never happens:

• A theoretical essay draws links between public administration and democratic theory, arguing that civic challenges represent noisy, democratic data which representative government can and should learn from, with administration occupying a unique position in facilitating the identification and sharing of insights from civic challenges with the public and with representatives. 

• A first empirical essay explores how public challenges are interpreted in police forces in England and Wales. I put forward a multi-faceted analytical framework which sheds light on the plural and competing internal dispositions towards public challenges, interpretive activities and dimensions, what can be learned and what learning from public challenges is for, based on internal perspectives. 

• A second empirical essay builds on the police interview corpus, using mixed methods to explore and then test organizational conditions which favor or constrain learning as understood by internal police actors. Workforce social diversity is explored in particular as a potential condition for learning. Panel data drawing together statistics from a range of administrative sources are used to test hypotheses about conditions for organizational learning along a range of dimensions.

• As individual accountability mechanisms, public challenges may be limited in what they can reveal about systemic issues in public policy and practices. A fourth essay uses interpretive narrative analysis of over 50 interviews with civil society organizations, policy experts and police officers to study an innovative arrangement for the identification of systemic issues in policing. The research design is inductive and explores the roles of cross-sector collaboration, confrontation and evidence in surfacing and articulating systemic collective problems. (With Valentina Mele & Sonia Ospina)

Prior to my PhD I was a member of the UK's Government Economic Service, working as an analytical adviser on a range of policy areas and activities including better regulation, the EU's single market in goods, impact assessment, domestic Brexit impacts and higher education reform. I also worked as a secondee to the Italian public administration as part of a bilateral initiative on the Digital Single Market. 

For more information, keep an eye on my research page, see my  CV or send me an email at rebecca.kirley@unimib.it.

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