Paul ‘t Hart is currently a professor of Public Administration at Utrecht University, having returned to this post after spending five years as Professor of Political Science at the Australian National University (2006-2010). He is also associate dean of the Netherlands School of Public Administration in The Hague. Paul is best-known for his research and teaching on crisis management and on public leadership. He has (co-)authored and (co-)edited 50 books, including the prize-winning The Pivot of Power: Australian Prime Ministers and Political Leadership, 1949-2016 (Miegunyah Press 2017), the best-selling The Politics of Crisis Management: Public Leadership Under Pressure (Cambridge University Press, 2005 and 2017) and, most recently, Governing the Pandemic: The Politics of Navigating a Mega-Crisis (Palgrave 2021).

His current main research interest is with learning from successful policies, organizations and networks in the public service, resulting in books such as Great Policy Successes (Oxford UP 2019), Successful Public Policy: Lessons From Australia and New Zealand (ANU Press 2019), and Guardians of Public Value: How Public Organizations Become and Remain Institutions (Palgrave, 2020) while volumes on policy successes in Canada and in the Nordic Countries are in progress.
Since the Covid19 crisis hit, Paul has embarked on a wide array of writing, lecturing, public speaking, as well as facilitation and consulting activities for governments and agencies both within the Netherlands and internationally.