Steffen Eckhard

Steffen Eckhard is a non-resident fellow with the Global Public Policy Institute (GPPi) in Berlin and professor of Public Administration & Public Policy at the Zeppelin University in Friedrichshafen. In his research and teaching, he focuses on policy-making and implementation in national and international public organizations with an emphasis on administrative crisis management as well as peace and security governance. 

For his research and consultancy projects, Steffen has spent time in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Pakistan and with various international organizations including the UN, EU, OSCE and NATO. He is author of various books, including International Bureaucracy: Challenges and Lessons for Public Administration Research (2017, Palgrave) and several dozen academic articles. He has also published on policy blogs such as International Politics and Society and Le Monde diplomatique. Steffen’s academic work often features international collaborations with other institutes. For example, he examines – together with the University of Ottawa, British Columbia and Reading University – how knowledge about local contexts is or should be generated in international interventions (a project funded by the Canadian Research Foundation SSHRC).

Among other research, one of his ongoing projects investigates the politics of evaluations in international organizations – using Natural Language Processing (funded by DFG). Steffen also shares academical knowledge gained at practitioner-focused events. For example, as a panel speaker at the Methodological Learning Series of UNICEF’s Evaluation Office. In addition, Steffen’s research sheds light on administrative language in citizen-government interactions. Here, real-life conversations between administrators and citizens are linguistically analyzed. A publication from this project was awarded the Christopher Politt Prize for the best paper at the annual conference of the IRSPM. The societal impact of local crisis management with a focus on the 2015 to 2016 German refugee crisis and the Corona crisis (funded by BMBF) constitute a further research focus of the chair. 

Between 2014 and 2018, Steffen was the scientific coordinator of the International Public Administration at the Chair of Christoph Knill at the Geschwister Scholl Institute of Political Science (GSI) at LMU Munich, where he habilitated in 2020. Between 2011 and 2014, Steffen was a research associate with GPPi, working for clients such as the German Foreign Office, United Nations and the Center for International Peace Operations (ZIF). Furthermore, he is a member of the Cluster of Excellence ​“The Politics of Inequality” at the University of Konstanz. 

Steffen studied political and administrative science in Konstanz, Grenoble and Stockholm. In 2013, he received a PhD from the University of Konstanz for the thesis International Assistance to Police Reform: Managing Peacebuilding (2016, Palgrave). From 2018 to 2022, he taught as an assistant professor of public administration and organizational theory at the University of Konstanz. In support of his research, he received scholarships from the Friedrich-Ebert Foundation and the Ministry of Education Baden-Württemberg and research funding from the Center of Excellence at Konstanz University, the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).