2026 Harkness Fellow Adam Allington will divide his United States programme between Georgetown University and Harvard University, connecting democratic renewal and public management research with the practical realities of leading inside government. 

Adam Allington, General Manager Strategy, Insights and Performance at Oranga Tamariki – Ministry for Children, has been named the 2026 New Zealand Harkness Fellow. 

His project, Enabling Public Service Leadership and State Capability in a Contested Age, will examine how public management systems shape leadership behaviour, organisational performance, state capability, public value, trust and democratic renewal. 

“The question at the heart of this research is a simple one: are our public management systems helping leaders perform under pressure, deliver outcomes for New Zealanders, and build the trust and capability our future public services need?”, Allington says.

Washington will provide a close view of government institutions, implementation, accountability and administrative reform. Boston will create space to test the findings against scholarship on public value, leadership, democratic governance and institutional renewal, while consolidating the research and writing. 

Allington has spent his career connecting ideas and implementation. His work has ranged across policy, monitoring, organisational strategy, system performance, governance, and investment. At Oranga Tamariki, he leads strategy, enterprise planning and performance, data, research and insights, and has acted as Deputy Chief Executive, System Leadership.

The practitioner-researcher

That experience has made the research personal and professional. In a department working with some of New Zealand’s most complex and consequential issues, the distance between a well-designed framework and a better outcome for a child can be considerable. Leaders must connect strategic direction with policy, evidence, investment, performance and frontline reality, while making decisions amid scrutiny, risk and competing time horizons.

Allington describes himself as a practitioner-researcher. He wants the fellowship to bridge academic work and the practical day-to-day choices faced by people leading public organisations. 

“We talk a lot about adaptive leadership, collaboration, innovation and evidence-informed practice. But leaders do not operate in a vacuum,” he says. 

“They operate inside systems of funding, accountability, risk, reporting and assurance. My research is about how we support leaders to create maximum public value within those realities, while evolving the system itself to enable the leadership that 21st century public service demands.”

“The value of the US comparison is not that New Zealand should copy it, but that its different scale and context offer rich lessons – innovations and failures – about how public services can perform better and build trust,” Allington adds.

Practical outputs

The project builds on emerging work by the Public Service Commission to define executive leadership capability, while looking more deeply at the system settings that enable capability in practice.

Aphra Green, Harkness Fellowships Trust Chair, says Allington’s project impressed the selection panel with its focus on enabling public servants to make the most of the resources at their disposal. 

“We are excited to see what Adam’s research efforts in the US reveal that could apply to Aotearoa, and it is our pleasure to support another fellow to spend time engaging with leading American institutions and thinkers on issues central to the future of public service leadership,” she says.

The intended outputs are deliberately practical: applied case studies, practitioner-focused material, leadership resources, seminar content and a paper on implications for New Zealand public management. The fellowship will also provide foundations for longer-term academic research and writing.

Heather Baggott, Harkness Fellowships Trust Board member and Deputy Public Service Commissioner, says the fellowship, valued at up to $60,000 and offered in partnership with the Leadership Development Centre, continues to attract outstanding leaders working on issues central to the future of New Zealand’s public institutions.

“The project complements the Public Service Commission’s work on executive leadership capability by exploring the system conditions that enable leaders to put that capability into practice,” she says.

Allington says he is humbled and grateful to have been selected. “My sincere thanks to the Harkness Fellowships Trust Board for this extraordinary opportunity, to my sponsoring Chief Executive and colleagues at Oranga Tamariki for their support, and to everyone who has challenged and encouraged my thinking. I hope to honour their investment through the work I undertake and the lessons I bring home.”

Allington is expected to depart for the United States in October 2026 and return to New Zealand in January 2027. He will share lessons from the fellowship with New Zealand’s public sector community following his return.