A cross-national study of policy entrepreneurship on the part of technical-professional bureaucrats in national environmental agencies: The case of household waste reduction policy in Germany, France and the United States.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This thesis looks for potential policy entrepreneurship on the part of technical-professional bureaucrats in national environmental agencies. It focuses on household waste reduction policy in Germany, France and the United States. Can such officials, in addition to executives and political appointees, be seen in the real-world to engage in policy entrepreneurship?.
Policy entrepreneurship, or public entrepreneurship, in the case of entrepreneurship by public employees, is defined as an individual's shaping of the preferences of a policy system, ‘the novel recombination of existing factors of policy production’ (from Schumpeter, 1950) with the effect of creating new policies. Without the given individual, the policy change would likely not occur. A policy entrepreneur is distinguished by his or her display of. (1) a vision of policy change and (2) energy and commitment applied to seeing that vision though into policy change (from Schneider, Teske and Mintrom, 1995, 8).
Three gaps in the literature on policy entrepreneurship and the politics of administration and planning are addressed. The first is the failure to address working-level technical-professional bureaucrats, administrative policy experts below executive level but above Lipsky's (1977) street-level bureaucrats. The second has been the paucity of empirical study of individual officials. The third has been the limitation to single-nation, particularly U.S., studies.
Document research, informational interviews with key participants in national household waste policy-making and formal interviews with technical-professional bureaucrats in the technical-professional bureaucrats are distinguishable from their peers not only in their display of policy vision and energy and commitment to seeing this vision through into change, but furthermore in their optimism that they themselves, and their institutions, can affect such change and in their creativity to communicate through a variety of audiences and media. Planning and policy research and education need to develop not only analytical, but also communicational skills and understanding of political-institutional dynamics.