Strategies of Effective Policy Entrepreneurs in Public Climate Policymaking - By Amy Cano Prentice

Strategies of Effective Policy Entrepreneurs in Public Climate Policymaking

By Amy Cano Prentice

Achieving the level of ambition enshrined in the Paris Agreement’s Nationally Determined Contributions is a complex global task which requires an economy-wide collective effort. It also requires the right enabling conditions for effective policies to be implemented, where decision-making agendas across government departments are aligned, where ideas and innovations are linked together, and where relevant actors with executive power are brought together.

What are Policy Entrepreneurs?

Policy entrepreneurs are individuals who shift the status quo through actions such as advocating for new ideas and developing proposals, defining and reframing problems, specifying policy alternatives, brokering ideas among policy actors, mobilising public opinion, and setting the decision-making agenda. These individuals are willing to invest their resources – time, energy, reputation, and sometimes money – in the hope of achieving change.

Policy entrepreneurs have the potential to shape  public climate policymaking, in a way that can result in expansive and aggregate effects to collectively reach the Paris Agreement goals while also recognising national circumstances and other policy priorities.

My research suggests that there are three key actions policy entrepreneurs should take to support the climate policies they wish to advance:

1. Policy entrepreneurs should target multiple levels of bureaucracy to achieve the institutional anchoring and implementation of climate policies that directly address country NDCs. It is important to focus on maintaining attention and implementing climate policies because there is an alarming gap between NDC targets for 2030 and the current trajectory of emissions, particularly for the United States and the European Union. Engaging with ‘street-level bureaucrats’ and targeting sub-national authorities can be effective given their strong implementation power, as in many jurisdictions they are responsible for the majority of implemented climate policies.

2. Policy entrepreneurs should ensure that their framing and recommendations are contextually relevant and that climate policy is explicitly linked to relevant national priorities. The bottom-up nature of the NDC architecture of the Paris Agreement provides an opportunity for entrepreneurs to target national agenda priorities in their framing. However, it is the responsibility of policy entrepreneurs to ensure that unpopular popular issues do not get ignored, such as the unequal distribution of loss and damage, and just transition concerns.

3. Given the scale and depth of the socio-technical systems anchoring high emission pathways, policy entrepreneurs should ensure that their strategies have an expansive effect on collective climate policy efforts. Policy entrepreneurs can have an expansive effect by demonstrating the feasibility of novel policy proposals and by changing governance practices, both of which are essential to innovatively change the plethora of socio-technical systems that lock in emissions pathways that are incompatible with the goals of the Paris Agreement. It is only through the multiplication of policy entrepreneurship efforts that there is a chance of enough policy change to make meaningful progress on slowing the worst effects of climate change.

Note 1: Amy’s policy brief entitled ‘Strategies of Effective Policy Entrepreneurs in Public Climate Policymaking’ was shortlisted for the Chronos Sustainability Prize 2024. Her policy brief can be found here.

Note 2: Amy Cano Prentice has conducted policy-oriented research for the OECD and the UK Government on a number of environmental and economic issues, including fiscal reform, climate risks and energy transition policy. She is currently completing her postgraduate degree in Environmental Policy and Regulation at the LSE, concentrating on fossil fuel subsidy reform for her thesis, which employs theory-testing process tracing.