Radioactive Waste Disposal at Sea: Public Ideas ... - IMO

38 Chapter 3
of international organizations. Strategically skilled, they reshape political
coalitions, primarily by changing the content of policy debates. They influence
policy by raising new issues or redefining existing ones, by brokering
among stakeholders, and by building and broadening public and political
support behind their policy solutions.
Policy entrepreneurs invest their energy, talent, reputation, and time in
order to shape policy. Persuasiveness, substantial negotiating skills, and
persistence are some of their most important characteristics. Sometimes
policy entrepreneurs are motivated mainly by protection of private interests,
such as jobs, organizational influence, and prestige. At other times,
they mainly wish to promote their values and shape public policy. A particularly
apt account of how policy entrepreneurs may primarily be concerned
with the public, rather than private, interest can be found in a study
on Jean Monnet, the intellectual architect of the European Community:
“Such people are not politicians, because they hold no elected office. Yet
they display great political ability. Nor can they be called bureaucrats.
They may or may not operate in a formal bureaucracy. They are even antibureaucratic
to the extent that they are impatient of routine minds. Again,
though they are entrepreneurs, they are not people of business. Their imaginations
are fired by the public, not a private, interest. They answer needs
the citizen recognizes as his own once they have defined them. But whereas
the creative politician crystallises the public’s consciousness, their medium
is action ahead of common awareness. They operate at the borders
between politics, bureaucracy and business and belong to none. They are,
for want of a better term, entrepreneurs in the public interest.” (Duchêne
1994, p. 61) In such cases, increasing the overall well-being of society is
policy entrepreneurs’ main motivation, and they will make strong appeals
to concern for the collective interest. Nonetheless, it often seems to be a
combination of private interests and concern for the public interest that
motivates policy entrepreneurs.
Policy entrepreneurs are most effective when a policy window opens up,
and they need to act before the policy window closes again. 12 Policy windows
appear when a problem demands the attention of decision makers or
when decision makers are strongly motivated to solve a problem. In general,
policy windows open at those relatively rare occasions when three usually
separate policy streams—problems, politics, and policy ideas—come
together. When policy windows appear, policy entrepreneurs push ideas