Policy Entrepreneurs and Strategies for Change: The case of water management in the Netherlands

“‘Top seven tips to get what you want!’ ‘Five steps to getting anything you want!’ or when
you are less fortunate perhaps ‘Nine tricks to get what you want!’ Who is not familiar
with such promising titles or slogans on the dust jackets of books, magazines and the
internet? Judging the volumes of such covers in popular bookstores and the dazzling
number of webpage’s on the subject – the combination ‘getting what you want’ alone
gives over 34 million Google hits – one could start to believe that the perfect
relationship, successful career, financial stability, radiant health, or something entirely
different we want could, in fact, not be that complicated to obtain. Or alternatively,
judging on the quantity of words that are apparently needed to explain the seemingly
‘small and simple’ steps, one could also reason that people especially desire a lot, but
that ‘getting it’ is after all not that easy. Much to my regret the latter guess seems the
more realistic one, at least where it concerns policy change, the topic of this very thesis.
Indeed, the vast majority of authors studying the policymaking process suggest that,
except for marginal or incremental changes, the margins for policy change are rather
small (see for example Schneider et al. 1995; Ingram and Fraser 2006; Huitema and
Meijerink 2009).”

(Citaat: Brouwer, S. – Policy Entrepreneurs and Strategies for Change: The case of water management in the Netherlands (2013))