We are proud to present the following collection of papers on Public Governance and Leadership. The idea behind this book goes back many years. It represents the culmination of a 15-year-long exchange between academics at German, Australian and British universities. Those deliberations inspired us to make Public Governance and Leadership the focus of this collection. Our challenge has been to identify and to bring together a group of internationally well known and renowned scholars to work on a variety of different aspects of this theme. Therefore, our thanks must first go to our contributors, all of whom worked with us to design and produce this compilation as a collective good. This work stands as evidence that very carefully built-up cross-cultural academic social capital can be used as a lever to create what we hope will be a very productive academic result. As editors we have our creditors. It goes without saying, but nevertheless it must be said, that in bringing a multi-national publication to press requires continuous excellent technical support. Our special thanks go to all the staff members and assistants who worked on this project from the Hamburg Helmut Schmidt University. We especially want to thank Ann-Christine Hasemann, who was most professional in her preparation of the manuscript in close co-operation with all the contributors and with the publisher. Any academic praise generated by the publication of this collection must be attributed to the efforts of the contributors.
