GLOBAL GOVERNMENT FINANCE SUMMIT 2026
Struan Little, chief strategist at New Zealand’s Treasury, set out the challenges facing finance ministries as they evolve from managing money to helping governments manage the future
Amid increasingly complex global challenges and rapid digital disruption, finance ministries face difficult decisions about how limited public funds should be allocated.
At the same time, their expanding stewardship role is driving efforts to prioritise resources more dynamically without compromising fiscal discipline.
Improving insight into the impact of public spending is therefore critical to ensuring funds are directed effectively and programmes deliver meaningful outcomes.
Against this backdrop, the opening session of the Global Government Finance Summit 2026 on 15 September featured a presentation by Struan Little, chief strategist at New Zealand’s Treasury.
He set out during the session – titled ‘Beyond budgeting: moving from financial planning to delivering outcomes’ – how “traditional finance ministries allocate money” but “future finance ministries create the conditions for better decisions.”
DOWNLOAD NOW The Future of the Finance Ministry – Struan Little was among 10 interviewees for our research report (published on 6 May 2026), which inspired the Global Government Finance Summit 2026’s agenda
Going beyond budgeting
Little opened by identifying three “big issues” that finance ministries around the world are facing as they ‘go beyond budgeting’.
“The first is getting finance ministries to focus on what really matters,” he said.
“The issues that matter the most are often the most complex and that can lead to kicking the can down the road into the ‘too hard’ basket. The urgent crowds out the important,” he explained.
“But, of course, these are enduring issues,” he continued, moving onto his second opening point. “And what makes it particularly hard is they go through multiple governments and multiple times.”
“Then [third] there’s the perennial issue of how you link outcomes to practical expenditures,” he said, adding that it is typically difficult to explain “complex interactions” in an accessible way.
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New Zealand’s approach
Examples were shared of the approach taken in New Zealand, which is widely regarded as a global leader in public financial management.
“The first [approach] is to get very specific about individual priorities, things such as the length of a stay in a hospital emergency department,” he said. “By picking a target, you can focus all your attention on that.”
“Some of those have actually been very successful,” he continued. “I’ve watched the civil service get right behind these. But of course, the downside of this that we’ve found is that you often focus on the measurable rather than the important, and that those targets often change relatively frequently.”
New Zealand has government policy statements that set out priorities, objectives and funding intentions in a specific policy area.
“A good example here is transport,” he said. “I think that has been relatively effective in changing the nature of the conversation – it’s leading to a conversation over a number of years.”
“It’s raising debates about things like: how much [money] should we put into new roads? How much should we put into maintenance? What are the funding sources? So, I think that’s reasonably positive but still limited to an individual sector,” he said.
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On living standards and wellbeing
“Third – and the most ambitious and where we really want to go – is how do you pull all this together, and outcomes as a whole,” he continued, highlighting the NZ Treasury’s Living Standards Framework.
This framework, introduced in 2011, provides a wellbeing-based approach to policymaking that looks beyond GDP to assess New Zealand’s economic, social, environmental and institutional performance.
“We sat down and worked out with the empirics and said: ‘let’s go through every parameter that leads to wellbeing, let’s assess where we are as a country, let’s work out where we’re strong, where we’re weak’. And we pulled that together in a Wellbeing Report [first produced in 2022] and the then-government used that as the basis of actually setting budgets,” he explained.
“One of the things the Wellbeing Report showed was that New Zealand has a very poor track record in mental health and the government explicitly started investing [more] in mental health,” he said. “Of course, the downside here is that this is a Herculean approach that requires a lot of time and a lot of data.”
‘Moving beyond marginal spend’
He then moved on to a separate, and typically “really difficult”, challenge for finance ministries: “moving beyond marginal spend”.
The risk is that government treasuries devote 90 per cent of their effort to less than 10 per cent of spending.
He noted that, in New Zealand, about three per cent of government expenditure is typically subject to new budget decisions each year.
This highlights the relative importance that finance ministries should attach to scrutinising existing spending.
“Yet our budget process runs for over a year – we are working on next year’s budget before we’ve even delivered the current one,” he said.
‘Bring the future into the present’
Based on New Zealand’s experience, he proposed three approaches.
First, is to establish medium-term fiscal strategies (as a growing number of ministries worldwide are doing).
“A fiscal limit, by definition, forces you to make trade-offs about the big decisions you’re making and, probably more importantly, the focus on the medium term finds a nice balance between getting away the tyranny of ‘this year’s budget’ to some sort of outcome that’s years down the track… it brings the future into the present,” he explained.
His second suggestion was to shape the policy agenda, although he acknowledged that New Zealand’s Treasury may be relatively unusual in this regard.
“By statute, we need to produce a couple of public reports (Long-Term Fiscal Statement and Investment Statement), which are done completely independently on behalf of our finance ministry,” he explained. “That’s given us a communications platform over a long period of time to raise important issues. I think we’ve been pretty successful. Certainly, one of the things that has happened is the need for pension reform in New Zealand is now very, very strong, and part of the normal dialogue every day.”
“In addition, there’s some things we’ve been raising about how you provide assistance during crises, such as the current fuel crisis, and the cost of economic shocks,” he continued. “Again, we’re getting a lot of resonance from that.”
His third point was how challenges such as (lack of) data and “information asymmetries” can complicate expenditure reviews. But, he said, such reviews are “still the best of what is a very imperfect toolbox of assessments.”
The prerequisites for success are, he said: political backing by ministers; to be “very, very clear” on the objectives; and “ongoing capability in terms of both the finance ministry and the agencies through time.”
“Expenditure reviews tend to be episodic, and our experience was [that] we lost the technologies and the human capability in actually making them effective,” he reflected.
PHOTO GALLERY Global Government Finance Summit 2026 (14-15 September in Dublin)
Be ‘clear on who the principal is’
His concluding overarching recommendation was for finance ministries to be “clear on who the principal is”.
“Who is your customer?,” he asked rhetorically. “As finance ministries, you’ll be lobbied about wonderful new ideas about how to make performance better and what will work. But my observation is they’re all on the supply side.”
“We’ve got lots of proposals about getting new data sets, tightening accountabilities, more reporting regimes, new technologies. But all of these are simply just going to add to the clutter and result in more activity with no real change in impact,” he cautioned.
“Unless you have a demanding customer, you won’t make much progress,” he explained, suggesting that a finance ministry has “at least three” – ministers, parliament and the public – and they all have “differing needs.”
‘Parliament demanding more’
He summarised his experience in respect of those three audiences.
“For a while, we dealt with four-year plans, trying to get agencies to plan out,” he said, as to ministerial attention. “But that became a compliance burden and gradually they atrophied. Now we’re trying performance plans, which is an effort to actually map out the fiscal track of every department, what risks they’re facing and what impact we’re going to get out of those trade-offs.”
At a parliamentary level, he highlighted the role of committees and the Supreme Audit Institution. The New Zealand Parliament’s ‘Scrutiny Weeks’ see select committees examine public spending and agency performance.
He highlighted an inquiry into performance reporting and public accountability (30-page report, published in May 2026) undertaken by the finance and expenditure committee.
“That is very welcome because it is essentially Parliament demanding more from all of us and from the executive. So, at the same time as our ministers are saying they want more, now Parliament is saying they want more. And I think that is the basis for making real progress,” he said.
As to the public, he described the Treasury as “trying [to] maximise what we publish.”
“I’m really proud of the work we’ve done on being very clear on being specific in terms of some of the risks that the country is facing on the fiscal side,” he said. “And, probably even more importantly, making very clear some of the things that are not currently on the government’s balance sheet that easily could be, and present real risks to the fiscal position.”
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‘Focus will always be on the increment’
The presentation prompted broad agreement that finance ministries need to move beyond a focus on marginal spending.
“With the annual budget, the focus of the political system [and] of the population will always be on the increment – ‘how much is the additional spending?’,” one participant concurred. “Much less attention goes on to [the bulk of the spending] – whether we’re getting value for money for that. Instead, it tends to be on the three or four or five billion increment on top of that. I think this is where finance ministries really have to push the idea that we need to look at the whole quantum of public spending.”
Participants noted that wellbeing metrics can be vulnerable to political challenge and may struggle to gain traction alongside finance ministries’ established responsibilities, most notably the annual budget process.
“It was really difficult to make it ‘real’,” Little observed, on New Zealand’s own wellbeing metrics. “We just got too much information and trying to narrow that down to how you turn that into budgeting was in practice very difficult, and that’s bedevilled by things like the SDGs [Sustainable Development Goals] as well.”
“Having said that, one of the encouraging things for me about the parliamentary inquiry is what they are asking is for some of these enduring outcomes, and that is essentially asking us to go back and [ask] why and how spending is going to contribute to some of those things that matter for society,” he said.
“In my view, it is just doing cost-benefit analysis properly,” another participant observed. “If you’re not taking into account the actual wellbeing impacts of your mental-health interventions compared to your physical-health interventions, you’re just doing the cost-benefit analysis wrong. But that doesn’t mean it completely dominates the decision making and there’s always going to be political choices between one thing or another.”
‘Debate going on everywhere’
Wellbeing metrics can also potentially cause tension between the centre of government and finance ministries, participants observed.
“Finance ministries [can] say ‘yes, it’s really important but, actually, we’re here to make sure that the fiscal position is fine’,” one said. “And [then a response could be] ‘but why do you want the fiscal position to be fine…? Surely it’s about better lives…’.”.
“This is a debate that’s going on everywhere, not just with finance ministries but with other departments,” the same participant continued. “When you get into health, the doctors are all about ‘we’ll reduce waiting times, we’ll do more operations’, and all the rest of it. Actually, what we know from the cost-benefit studies is that prevention [of ill health] is massively more important.”
Another participant referred to the challenge of gaining “true political traction” and having a serious impact on budgetary decisions.
“There’s a lot of pressure to capture all sorts of things ranging from culture to environment, health, etc., and at some point that becomes so broad as to be meaningless,” the participant observed. “And we’ve reached real problems with measurement, in terms of when you’re trying to get timely data about a lot of these things, particularly when trying to look through a lens of sustainability over a period of time.”
Managing the future
Little’s presentation and the discussion it triggered was certainly in sync with The Future of the Finance Ministry report.
In summary, a traditional finance ministry allocates resources, controls spending, monitors budgets and focuses on inputs.
The future finance ministry shapes incentives, improves data and evidence, encourages long-term thinking, and focuses on outcomes and decision quality.
But politics is short term and annual budget cycles continue to dominate thinking in so many jurisdictions.
Finance ministries have always known how to manage money. The harder challenge is helping governments manage the future.
The Summit’s discussions are held under the Chatham House rule to encourage people to speak freely. Struan Little gave permission for his quotes to be used in this report.
The Global Government Summit 2026 was partnered by AWS and Visa.
Source: www.globalgovernmentfinance.com
