Brokers, Entrepreneurs and Leaders in Policy Dynamics: From Individual Actors to Types of Agency

Despite the relevance of structures and constraints to the outcomes of policy-making, agency emerges as a key aspect in accounting for policy dynamics. Indeed, agency is a concept that may embrace different components according to its empirical reference (individual or collective) and policy context. In policy studies, the concept of “broker” is used to describe agency between different group as a key aspect for the equilibrium in a policy subsystem, while at the same time also in institutional and organisational studies the terms of “entrepreneurs” and “leaders” are used to identify prominent actors in the process, so that it is often difficult to distinguish between the three. We assume that these are different types of agency intrinsically embedded in all the phases of the policy-making, with distinctive resources, activities, potential goals and outcomes. Hence, our paper proposes to review the use of these concepts and it aims at developing a functional perspective of entrepreneurship, brokerage, and leadership to better grasp agency as a process aimed at either stability or change in policy making