Kudos to Kate Thompson, IDPhD 2024, for publishing the last of her main dissertation papers this week in Environmental Management. This OA paper, Policy entrepreneurship in urban planning: Tactics for promoting and engaging the ecosystem services concept for urban environmental sustainability, draws on her qualitative data in three Canadian municipalities. The dissertation did not set out to use the multiple streams theories of public administration, but the connections emerged organically. Eleven of her 31 interviewees demonstrated the characteristics of an entrepreneur–“persistent and resourceful public policy actors who advocate for ideas and policy proposals they favor”–finding and leveraging opportunities within their domain of power to achieve things that are not officially their job. These entrepreneurs engineer couplings of the three streams to achieve environmental policy objectives. It was very interesting to work on this with Kate, especially after learning about these ideas of entrepreneurship at the provincial level around managed dyke realignment through earlier collaborations with PDF Tuihedur Rahman. Bravo, Kate!
