Realizing water transitions: the role of policy entrepreneurs in water policy change

Abstract

This special feature aims to further our understanding of the way in which transitions occur in water management. We contend that if we want to understand such transitions, we need to understand policy change and its opposite, policy stability. These issues have attracted considerable academic attention. Our interest is, however, very specific and thereby unique: we review the role that (groups of) individuals play in the process of preparing, instigating, and implementing policy change. In this article, a review of the literature on policy change provides the basis from which we extract a set of strategies which are available to policy entrepreneurs. The questions for the rest of this special feature are first, can we detect the influence of policy entrepreneurs in actual cases of major policy change, and second, which strategies have they actually used to affect policy change?