Coordinating Crisis Management – Experiences of Policy Entrepreneurship in Water Management

In the past two decades, there has been an explosion in interest in political/policy entrepreneurship (PE) which has resulted in substantial advances in literature. Political/policy entrepreneurs are special actors who seek to affect lasting change in the status quo. Policy entrepreneurship has been evolving as an actor-based perspective in its own right, aimed at examining the agency of individuals at the micro level with a view to understanding dynamics of policy change at the meso and macro levels. At the same time, scholarship on international crisis management has cast resilience as another way to think about change, a useful tool in a territory in flux, such as the Arctic region. In this paper we explore the mechanisms behind the institutional formation of the Coordination Group for High Flows etc at as result of the actions of an entrepreneurial team in the aftermath of crisis management at the Swedish sub-national level. The Coordination group was created after a series of floods and high flows in the rivers in the middle part of Sweden. Problems connected to the spread of information, to the exchange of information, and to the interpretation of information revealed the need of a coordinating network and steps to create such a network were taken by some of the officials at the county administrative board. Through the Swedish case we illustrate the strategies of political entrepreneurs at the sub-national level achieving (i) institutional formation and (ii) increased institutional resilience in the handling of common pool resources.