ANZSOG’s 2025 EMPA to start with immersive delivery in Christchurch

ANZSOG’s 2025 Executive Master of Public Administration (EMPA) will open with a delivery of the core Delivering Public Value subject in Ōtautahi Christchurch – giving students an immersive exposure to key issues in Aotearoa New Zealand and a deeper understanding of the value of place-based leadership. 

EMPA Academic Director Dr Christopher Walker said that launching the EMPA in Christchurch was a great opportunity for ANZSOG to demonstrate its connection and embedded relationship with Aotearoa New Zealand, which also includes finishing the two-year EMPA program with a module in Wellington. 

“For our New Zealand colleagues, starting in Christchurch is a great opportunity to really experience the EMPA, and our gateway subject, delivered from their perspective and experience,” he said. 

“It will also provide a framework for the Australian students that they can use to compare their ideas, and to compare their thinking so that we can have an engaged critical discussion that compares different situations in New Zealand and Australia  and observe what we can learn from each other.” 

“One of the design principles we’ve introduced to the EMPA is learning and teaching in place, and the idea is that each year we select a subject that is delivered in a new location, a new place that has unique characteristics to highlight, and challenges that public administration leaders might confront or face in their career,” Dr Walker said. 

“We will be working with the experts in that place: the New Zealand academics, the leading public sector practitioners, those that are involved in service delivery or the business environment and look at what we can learn from them about their experiences.” 

“In Christchurch there are specific challenges that have a widely known international reputation, and we want to hear what has shaped that creativity and that innovation in public policy and service responses.”  

Ōtautahi Christchurch has experienced some enormous challenges; from the devastating earthquakes in 2011, to the Mosque terrorist attacks in 2019. How local and central government as well as the community responded to these events will be part of the backdrop of the EMPA. Students will be able to engage with some of the leaders involved in those events including local iwi Ngai Tahu which has been instrumental in making Otautahi what it is today. 

ANZSOG Practice Fellow, Sally Washington was involved in central government following the 2011 earthquakes leading the Seismic Shifts program that tried to draw and scale lessons from Christchurch about public sector innovation  and what it takes for leaders and organisations to be innovative. 

Ms Washington will contribute to the 2025 EMPA delivery and will revisit some of these lessons. 

“I am looking forward to sharing stories and insights with students about how we harness local, central and community strengths to create public value, and how we might move from innovation by necessity to innovation by design,” Ms Washington said. 

The value of place-based leadership

University of Waikato Professor Brad Jackson is one of the academics involved in the delivery, and says that using different locations can change the learning dynamic of leadership programs in a powerful way, and give students a deeper understanding of the value of place-based leadership. 

He said that the way that Christchurch had recovered from the 2011 earthquake was an example of how public sector leaders could respond to a crisis and the needs of local community.  

“I don’t think you can overestimate how severe and massive that was. It required a massive government response – first immediately, then a short-term response and then a long-term one –  in a small country, which doesn’t have a lot of resources,” Professor Jackson said. 

“There’s also been a revolution in terms of the power base and structures, and the city has reinvented itself. There’s a number of really quite remarkable and powerful stories about responding to place and leading from place.” 

Professor Jackson said that place-based leadership, if done well, was a way for public services to connect with local communities, and build relationships that could drive innovation. 

“People have a sense of attachment to place. It matters to people and it probably matters more to them now post-COVID, but also just in this incredibly complex world, people get quite attached to where they are,” he said. 

“There’s lots of different flavours and varieties of place-based leadership, but it’s something that really energises me. If it’s done right it can create a really powerful attractor for a lot of very different groups –  like business, NGOs, and community organisations. 

“It can find a way of encompassing this whole discussion around sustainability and climate in a way that says if we foreground place, we can actually create the leadership that we need for the multi-generational long haul.”  

He said that successful place-based leadership had to be community-driven, rather than government departments getting together to develop policies for a community. 

“If we engage in the community in a way that’s almost like collective sense-making, and working with them to identify what is important, then that will automatically change the way that government departments work. That’s a better approach, and will actually generate more innovation, than governments getting together to decide what this place needs.” 

He said that public servants needed to get out to places and observe what was going on, rather than become too dependent on processes or data, so it was exciting for the ANZSOG EMPA to adopt this approach. 

“Public servants need to develop their geographic imagination. Some people in the public sector do it intuitively, but there are a lot of processes and systems that suppress and thwart those inclinations. So, what I want to do is develop people’s geographic imagination and give them the confidence that this is important and valuable to their work.” 

Building understanding of public value and leadership 

Dr Walker said that Delivering Public Value was one of the opening subjects of the EMPA because public value was one of the key animating ideas of the EMPA. 

“ANZSOG continues to have strong faith in the idea of public value as central to effective public leadership and public sector management, so we believe it’s an effective underlying theme to shape a Master’s in public administration. 

“It’s a great starting point for the students, because it gets them thinking about their position in the public service, how they see themselves as leaders and managers and the relationship that they have to the resources and the communities and the businesses that they serve in terms of creating value.  

“It brings together the components that make for a successful society and we want our students in the EMPA to grasp that idea at the very beginning of their program and we use it as a touchstone or kind of point of reflection throughout the program.” 

“The Christchurch delivery will use the local context to explore innovation, co-governance, stewardship and the use of evidence, as well as how Aotearoa New Zealand government institutions work with First Nations.”  

“We’ll be talking about ethical leadership with the objective of getting students to understand their own leadership style and understand it from different perspectives and then connect that to the way they lead, the place they lead in, and how their leadership contributes to delivering public value.” 

ANZSOG’s Executive Master of Public Administration is a unique two-year program designed specifically for the public sector and delivered with ANZSOG’s partner universities. The EMPA explores the core principles of public sector management and leadership in a contemporary context and  is designed for public sector professionals who are committed to serving at the highest levels of government. Since 2003, more than 70 EMPA students have gone on to hold roles as CEOs or Secretaries (equivalents) after completing the program. 

Applications for the 2025 EMPA program are now open and more information about the program is available here.