Scott Douglas researches successful collaboration around impossible problems. He examines the performance of collaborations between governments, companies, and community organizations in tackling complex problems in the field of safety, security, and social policy, such as functional illiteracy, radicalization, child abuse, and crises. He has published in Public Administration Review, Public Management Review, Policy & Society, and Evaluation.

Scott brings together research, education and societal impact through innovative projects in which academics, students and practitioners jointly examine the performance of collaborations. Scott led projects for the NWO, the Dutch National Security and Counterterrorism Coordinator, The Literacy Foundation, the municipality of Utrecht and the municipality of Arnhem He is part-time director of the Court of Audit in Almere and frequently contributes to national and local media outlets.

Scott continuously works with colleagues from other disciplines and other countries to better understand complex societal problems. He is co-founder of the interdisciplinary research platform Security in Open Societies and co-chair of the Standing Group on Public Sector Performance of the European Group on Public Administration. He also co-leads an international Horizon consortium investigating how eightteen European cities dealt with the Corona-crisis and the ten year Adapt! consortium on societal responses to crises.

Scott builds innovative tools to collect and share data. Together with colleagues from UMC Utrecht and Oxford University, he built the free online Performance Management Game, he is co-founder and managing editor of the open access Collaborative Governance Case Database, and developed a work session formt with Stichting Lezen en Schrijven to evaluate network performance together with all participants.

Scott completed his PhD at the University of Oxford. He was elected a member of the De Jonge Akademie of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Science in 2023.