Policy Design and Practice

Adaptive Leadership: New Directions for Policy Design and Practice

Adaptive leadership has gained renewed attention across public policy, public administration, organisational development, and systems change. Its emphasis on mobilising people to tackle complex, value-laden problems resonates strongly in policy environments characterised by uncertainty, rapid technological change, polycentric governance, and escalating social and ecological pressures. Foundational concepts have been taken up and extended across disciplines, with growing scholarship seeking to operationalise the framework through systems thinking, complexity theory, and empirical investigation of leadership behaviour and performance. This work underscores the growing relevance of adaptive leadership for understanding how policy actors navigate conditions that resist technical solutions.

This Special Issue invites contributions from researchers and practitioners working at the intersection of adaptive leadership, policy design, and public sector innovation. Submissions are sought that extend conceptual understanding, showcase empirical insights from varied policy contexts, and illuminate the diverse ways adaptive leadership is being interpreted and enacted globally—examining it as a socially, politically, and organisationally situated practice, and moving beyond prescriptive or individualised accounts to foreground context, power, institutional constraints, and the collective work of adaptation within public systems.

Contributions are particularly sought that position adaptive leadership not as a neutral toolkit or individual competency framework, but as a form of public practice embedded in political institutions, cultural contexts, and policy regimes—connecting it to questions of systems thinking, adaptive performance, and leadership under conditions of crisis and disruption, and attending critically to the risks of depoliticisation, technocracy, and the uncritical uptake of leadership frameworks in public policy settings.

Proposed themes

Contributions are invited from conceptual, empirical, methodological, or practice-oriented perspectives, and that speak to Policy Design and Practice’s international readership on shared challenges across jurisdictions. Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Adaptive leadership and policy design: how adaptive frameworks shape problem diagnosis, stakeholder engagement, and iterative policy processes
• Leadership in conditions of complexity: case studies of public sector leaders navigating turbulence, crisis, or contested policy environments
• Political dimensions of adaptive leadership: power, authority, legitimacy, and the relational work of mobilising stakeholders
• Adaptive leadership in cross-sector and networked governance: collaboration across NGOs, communities, private actors, and state institutions
• Equity, ethics, and inclusion: feminist, Indigenous, postcolonial, or critical perspectives on adaptive leadership, and tensions between normative commitments and institutional realities
• Diverse geographic contexts: contributions from Australasia, Europe, Africa, Asia, Latin America, and beyond, including comparative and cross-jurisdictional perspectives
• Capabilities and learning: building adaptive capacity within public organisations; pedagogy and leadership development
• Methodological innovation: ethnography, systems mapping, co-design, or practice-based approaches to studying leadership in action
• Future directions: implications of AI, digital transformation, and data-driven governance for adaptive leadership practice.

Contributions that deepen theoretical and conceptual clarity around adaptive leadership while generating new empirical insights into how it is used within real-world policy contexts are especially welcome. Critical perspectives on the political, ethical, and institutional conditions shaping practice are sought alongside contributions that advance methodological innovation and boundary-crossing dialogue between disciplines. By situating adaptive leadership firmly within the landscape of policy design and practice, the issue aims to make a timely and influential contribution to debates about how public institutions can respond more effectively and ethically to complex societal challenges.