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.