One day I hope an academic in Europe replicates John W Kingdon’s ‘Agenda, Alternatives and Public Policies‘.
I stumbled on this book back in 1999 in Boalt Hall Law School. It opened my mind. Here was an academic who wrote clearly, and understood how public policy and decisions really were made. It made a lot of sense to me having just come off a 3 year binge of working on passing laws in EP and the Commission.
If the book were written and read by practioners, maybe there would be a greater realisation of the importance of the policy window and policy entrpreneurs.
The rarest beast -A good Policy Entrpreneur
A good policy entrpreneur will bring a “prepackaged combination of solution, problem and and poltical momentum to the window when it does open” (p.183, 2nd ed).
Practically this means for any problem/issue you are working on having the evidence, solutions, studies, legislative text, briefings, policy memos, and press releases etc. sat on a shelf or in a filing cabinet for when the policy window opens up.
That package of core material may gather dusts for many years. But, when the issue becomes topical and the phones ring, you’ll be ready to deliver the solution.
I’ve known a few good policy entrpreneurs – 3 in fact. One a decade in this town. They are rare beasts. These are people whose ideas and solutions created whole bodies of legislation.
By way of example, the late Tony Long, who established WWF’s European Policy Office, was an excellent and successful policy entrpreneur. He had read Kingdon and applied the ideas. His solutions – based on credible evidence, packaged in the right way, presented in the right style, at the right time – were the basis of long standing EU policy and laws.
The policy entrepreneur’s abscence in this city is glaring. Many people are happy to be issue experts and blissfully uninterested in framing the debate. They seem unready, and uniterested, to deliver the solution when the window of opportunity opens up.
Will you be ready for the when next window of opportunity is open for a brief moment?