Entrepreneurial Bureaucrats: A Social Network Analysis of Lomma and Staffanstorp Municipalities, Sweden

Policy (or political) entrepreneurship is an actor-based framework to examine and understand policy change. Rooted in Kingdon’s multiple streams approach, the policy entrepreneur is defined as “a special kind of actor, embedded in the sociopolitical fabric, who is alert to opportunities and acts upon them; he or she amasses coalitions for the purpose of effecting change in a substantive policy sector, political rules or in the provision of public goods”. Political entrepreneurship refers to the agentic capacity of political actors operationalized as (i) access to resources such as information and personal contacts; (ii) alertness to recognize opportunities and take advantage of them; (iii) the willingness to take risks, and (iv) leadership skills. The strategies these actors use to navigate the policymaking process are a function of their agentic capacity and the context in which they find themselves operating. Though considerable scholarship has been devoted to policy entrepreneurs in the policy formulation stage of the policy process, entrepreneurship in bureaucracies and especially at the municipal level becomes opaquer. In this study, we conduct a structural analysis to compare the networks in two Swedish municipalities, Lomma and Staffanstorp in urban flood risk management. Our findings suggest that the actions of the policy entrepreneur in Lomma municipality is decisive for the policy decisions regarding flood risk mitigation.