Moving beyond traditional policy implementation: street-level bureaucrats’ policy entrepreneurship

Can street-level bureaucrats act as policy entrepreneurs and affect the design of the policies they are supposed to implement? Linking policy entrepreneurship with street-level bureaucracy is a developing area in the literature. The core idea behind this link is that street-level bureaucrats can promote or block policy change at the individual level as policy entrepreneurs. Policy entrepreneurs take advantage of opportunities to influence the outcomes of the policies they are supposed to implement without having the necessary resources to do so alone. They use innovative ideas and strategies to tweak these policies. We demonstrate how they do so and also provide an overview of the breadth of research on street-level policy entrepreneurship. Finally, we discuss the implications of this involvement of street-level bureaucrats for the implementation literature.