Abstract
Many initiatives to address contemporary complex challenges require the crossing of sector, domain, and level boundaries, which policy entrepreneurs are believed to facilitate. This study aims to enhance our understanding of how, why, and with what effect such entrepreneurs operate to cross boundaries. As this requires an account of both entrepreneurial strategy and the surrounding policy environment, we embed entrepreneurship in the policy frameworks of multiple streams, advocacy coalitions, and punctuated equilibrium. We use qualitative methods to analyse policy development for climate-smart agriculture (CSA) in Kenya. CSA is a cross-cutting strategy to sustainably increase agricultural productivity, resilience, and food security while curtailing greenhouse gas emissions. Our results demonstrate that policy entrepreneurs target varying ideas, interests, and institutions across boundaries in order to establish cross-boundary linkages, but this requires additional resources including connections, funding, and time. Simultaneously, this process offers opportunities, for instance, regarding choice of audience and potential resources to tap. Cross-boundary entrepreneurial strategies include venue shopping to soften up communities; framing CSA in multiple ways to address different audiences; demonstrating brokerage between coalitions through impartial leadership and creating a neutral institutional setting; and process manipulation to bypass complexities arising from the scattered policy environment. Although entrepreneurs managed to realize the adoption of a Kenya CSA strategy, the process displays limited changes in policymakers’ ideas; the policy remains the main responsibility of the agriculture ministry alone and receives limited support from local authorities. This raises questions regarding the cross-boundary nature and implementability of this strategy.
Highlights
Policy entrepreneurs play an important role in policy processes (Mintrom and Norman 2009; Brouwer and Huitema 2018)
Having outlined our theoretical and methodological approach, we show how the climate-smart agriculture (CSA) policy development process can be interpreted through the lens of each framework separately (Table 2)
This section briefly demonstrates how the process of CSA policy development in Kenya can be explained by the application of the separate lenses of advocacy coalitions framework (ACF), punctuated equilibrium theory (PET), and multiple streams approach (MSA)
Summary
Policy entrepreneurs play an important role in policy processes (Mintrom and Norman 2009; Brouwer and Huitema 2018). Level, and sector boundaries requires significant political and strategic work (Mintrom and Thomas 2018; Briassoulis 2004; Candel and Biesbroek 2016). Recent studies suggest that policy entrepreneurs play an important role in crossing and bridging boundaries (Faling et al 2018a; Mintrom and Thomas 2018; Schaltegger et al 2018), but our understanding of the boundary-crossing process and the role of policy entrepreneurs therein is limited at best (Candel and Biesbroek 2016; van Meerkerk and Edelenbos 2018; Faling et al 2018a). The relevant literature has long treated policy entrepreneurs as individuals acting in a void, but increasingly acknowledges the need to incorporate the policy environment that co-determines whether, when, how, and with what effect policy entrepreneurs operate (Mintrom and Norman 2009; Bakir and Jarvis 2017; Faling et al 2018a)
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