back

Special Recognition Award

Prof Alice Brown

Professor Alice Brown was chosen to receive a Special Recognition Award in light of her exceptional contribution to the study of Scottish politics over an extended period, together with her important impact on policy. The jury commended her deft elision of the theory and practice of politics. The combination of her research findings and advocacy of women’s political representation helped to ensure the promotion of this cause in the context of Scottish devolution. As Professor, then Vice-Principal of Edinburgh University and as Scottish Public Services Ombudsman she has helped to shape constitutional debate and policy within the UK.

Professor Alice Brown became a political scientist by an unusual route. Born in 1946, she left school at the age of 15 to take a job at an insurance company and then left work to raise a family. She returned to education in her thirties, when she enrolled as a politics student at the University of Edinburgh. She began lecturing in Economics at the University of Stirling in 1984, moving back to a post at Edinburgh the following year. She gained her PhD in 1990, then began a meteoric rise, becoming a senior lecturer in 1992, Head of Department by 1995 and Professor of Politics in 1997. Her publications include Gender Equality in Scotland (1997); The Scottish Electorate (1999); and The New Scottish Politics (2002).

From 1999 Professor Brown was Vice Principal of Edinburgh University, and she was also co-director of its Institute of Governance. Also in 1999 she was appointed to the Committee on Standards in Public Life, on which she served for four years. She was central to efforts to establish a woman-friendly parliament in Scotland, first as a member of the Scottish Constitutional Commission and later as a member of the cross-party committee which proposed standing orders and procedures for the Scottish Parliament. Professor Brown was a co-founder of Engender, a group set up to promote women’s influence in Scotland, and was a member of the Scottish Women’s Coordination Group.

In 2002 she was appointed as the first ever Scottish Public Services Ombudsman. The office of ombudsman was set up to provide a single channel for all public complaints against a number of public bodies and improve the efficiency of the complaints process. Among the innovations she brought to the complaints procedure were the ability to make complaints in person, and in different languages and formats, rather than simply through traditional letter-writing. She strove to encourage a ‘culture of service’, where complaints would be seen by those in public offices as ‘jewels to be treasured’ rather than as ‘duels to be fought.’

Professor Brown stepped down as ombudsman earlier this year, but continues to have oversight over public service provision as a member of the Administrative Justice and Tribunals Council, whose purpose is to help make administrative justice and tribunals increasingly accessible, fair and effective. Among other public roles, Professor Brown chaired the Task Force on Community Planning in Scotland and served on the Scottish Low Pay Unit as well as the Economic and Social Research Council and the Scottish Higher Education Funding Council. She is currently a Sunningdale Fellow, Trustee of the David Hume Institute, and lay member of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.