by Evangelia Petridou, Jörgen Sparf and Per Becker
Being an entrepreneur takes effort. It requires energy and presupposes the willingness to stick one’s neck out to bring about innovation. This is what the market tells us and the situation is not much different in politics. In fact, it’s arguable that achieving change in public policy requires even more time and energy, given the glacial speed that is sometimes the core feature of dynamic policy change. And yet, in our recent article published in Policy & Politics on this topic, we show that not all policy entrepreneurs are driven by a focus on intentionality, but by an a priori policy preference that prompts policy actors to seek, grab, and occasionally create opportunities to shepherd their preferred policy solution through the policymaking system.
In our case study, we use the concepts of the proactive and reactive policy entrepreneur (theorised in a previous paper) in Swedish flood risk governance at the municipal level. Proactive policy entrepreneurs, equivalent to market entrepreneurs by opportunity, act entrepreneurially out of a conscious choice. They have other alternatives, but they choose to be entrepreneurial because they have in mind an innovation that they believe will make a difference, and they actively promote it. By contrast, reactive policy entrepreneurs, the equivalent of market entrepreneurs by necessity, act entrepreneurially because it is the best choice available to them, but not their preferred choice. This implies that there are conditions that create a necessity for them to be an entrepreneur. In other words, the difference between these two kinds of entrepreneur is motivation.
We use social network analysis to compare three Swedish municipalities in the way they deal with flood risk management. One municipality deals with the issue solely with technical solutions— bigger pipes, for example. Though infrastructure is important, such issues must have a whole-of-society approach if local authorities are to be successful in averting crises due to flooding. We traced a traditional (proactive entrepreneur) in one of the three municipalities, who worked for many years to elevate flood risk mitigation as a social issue and get diverse stakeholders interested. In the third municipality, we found an entrepreneur who acted entrepreneurially because of the top-down political pressure, a reactive policy entrepreneur. This was a public servant who exhibited entrepreneurial behaviour because she had to, and not necessarily because she was involved in this issue before.
Why does this distinction matter? The importance of this research is that it shows how entrepreneurial outcomes can be achieved by creating conditions of necessity, in our case top-down political pressure if the policy entrepreneur is a public servant. In the market, reactive policy entrepreneurship is not thought to result in innovation, so clearly more research is required to investigate this claim in politics. This line of research is important in enhancing our understanding of policy entrepreneurship within political contexts.
You can read the original research in Policy & Politics at:
Becker, P., Sparf, J., & Petridou, E. (2024). Identifying proactive and reactive policy entrepreneurs in collaborative networks in flood risk management. Policy & Politics, 52(2), 298-320 from https://doi.org/10.1332/03055736Y2023D000000006
If you enjoyed this blog post, you may also be interested to read:
Dunlop, C. A., Radaelli, C. M., Wayenberg, E., & Zaki, B. L. (2024). Policy learning and policy innovation: interactions and intersections. Policy & Politics, 52(4), 547-563 from https://doi.org/10.1332/03055736Y2024D000000049
Goyal, N., & Howlett, M. (2024). Types of learning and varieties of innovation: how does policy learning enable policy innovation?. Policy & Politics, 52(4), 564-585 from https://doi.org/10.1332/030557321X16841388707452
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