Abstract
Until relatively recently, the contribution of policy entrepreneurs in promoting policy change has been largely neglected or underappreciated in the policy science literature. Only since the early 1980s have various political and policy scientists directly or indirectly acknowledged room for these individual actors. Nonetheless, there remain important gaps in our knowledge on who these policy entrepreneurs are. The key purpose of this chapter, ‘Policy Entrepreneurs in Dutch Water Management’, is to give a face to this hitherto rather abstract and underappreciated figure of the policy entrepreneur. Contrary to expectations based on the heroic biographies and case studies and opposed to the widespread idea of a cumbersome and heavily bureaucratic government, this chapter makes clear that entrepreneurship at the local level is, in fact, relatively common. In addition to discussing the incidence of policy entrepreneurs in Dutch management, this chapter analyses their profiles and presents an overview of the kinds of innovative projects that policy entrepreneurs are involved with. The chapter concludes that the “typical” entrepreneur is male, works as a senior policy officer in the sector of (integrated) water management, has a degree in engineering, and is between 36 and 55 years old.
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Notes
- 1.
The observation that the actual selection of policy entrepreneurs turned out to be relatively easy is not to say that the selection criteria were set too low. In fact, 44 % of the key informants answered that, on the basis of the criteria used in this study, they could not identify one single entrepreneur among their water management officials.
- 2.
This observation should not be interpreted as an indication that policy entrepreneurs push oneself to the fore. In fact, the next chapters suggest that they generally operate in the shadows, pulling the wires backstage.
- 3.
In order to comply with the confidentiality agreements made with key informants in the selection procedure, interviewees cannot be named individually in this book. An additional reason why the quotes from interviewees are not attributed in this book is that (in order to encourage honest and candid responses in the interviews, the focus group, and the survey) all policy entrepreneurs were promised anonymity. All quotes from the interviewees, originally in Dutch, have been translated by the author.
- 4.
The data in this section are the result of the policy entrepreneur selection exercise by phone which took place prior to the survey, and therefore, prior to the additional control questions.
- 5.
The underlying assumption of this reasoning is that the size of the municipal organisation is positively correlated to the number of inhabitants.
- 6.
Needless to say, these data give no more than a first impression and can by no means do justice to the complexity of organisational culture (encompassing shared values, beliefs and behaviour expected of members of an organisation). For more elaborate studies on this subject I refer the reader to the work of Schein (1985) or Tennekes (1995).
- 7.
For the municipalities, provinces, and water boards the figures relating to the total workforce are based on the number of staff with a salary starting at €3,000 in 2007 (kosmos kennisbank). The RWS figure is based on the number of staff with a salary starting at €3,000 in 2009 (BW gegevens voor HR-spiegel).
- 8.
In Dutch, Hoger Beroepsonderwijs (HBO).
- 9.
In a small number of cases (5.6 %) the key informant identified him- or herself as being a policy entrepreneur (16 municipal, 1 water board, and 2 RWS key informants identified themselves as policy entrepreneur).
- 10.
Recall that, unlike Kingdon (1984), in the present study the use of the term policy entrepreneurs is exclusively reserved for those individuals who seek to change the direction of policies while holding bureaucratic positions.
- 11.
The observation that many policy entrepreneurs are involved with projects aiming to provide room for water, including various brook recovery projects (which all bear a strong resemblance), provides a good example of the emic perspective adopted in the book, as explained in Chap. 1.
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Brouwer, S. (2015). Policy Entrepreneurs in Dutch Water Management. In: Policy Entrepreneurs in Water Governance. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17241-5_4
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