Professor David Adams has been a senior executive in the Victorian Government for 8 years where he has held various positions including head of strategy in the Premiers Department and Executive Director Strategic Policy & Research in the Department for Victorian Communities where he was instrumental in the development of the ‘A Fairer Victoria’ policy statements – setting the long term social policy directions for the Government.

David regularly publishes on the changing nature of communities; the importance of local knowledge to innovation; measurement of community resilience and; post modernism in public administration.

In 2002 David was awarded the national Sir George Murray Prize for his analysis of poverty debates in Australia ‘Poverty: A Precarious Public Policy Idea’. In 2004 David won the Sam Richardson Award for the most influential publication in the Australian Journal of Public Administration and his most recent article on ‘Useable knowledge in public policy’ was the most accessed Australian public policy article in 2005.

David is also the Professor of Management and Innovation at the University of Tasmania and Visiting Fellow in the Asia Pacific School of Economics and Governance at the Australian National University.