Social sciences have often been concerned with leadership as a general category to describe the role of agency in social phenomena. Scholars define leadership in different ways: while political scientists often focus on charismatic traits of special individuals, scholars in organization and management highlight the relevance of relational resources for collective action. Nonetheless, what leadership is and makes may be not always clear. Taking a policy analysis perspective, policy leadership can be seen as the coordinated action of multiple leaders endowed with different resources that may suddenly become strategic during the policy process, as important contextual elements may change. Indeed, the observation of the policy process shows the role of guidance and steering in different moments of the policy-making, from agenda setting to policy implementation.
This paper proposes a theoretical reflection on policy leadership and uses a heuristic case study in urban planning to develop more specific working hypothesis. In the first part, the concept of policy leadership will be discussed in comparison to similar concepts as policy entrepreneurship, political leadership, distributed leadership and advocacy coalition. This will lead to a more precise definition of policy leadership, with a focus on related resources. The epistemological aspects and the methodological implications of the proposed definition will also be discussed. In the second part, the case of urban planning in Turin between 1993 and 2011 will be used in order to understand what role policy leadership may have in policy design. In particular, the empirical analysis will focus on: a) problem definition and collective sense-making; b) policy visions and policy instruments; c) the occurrence of policy windows in different policy subsystems and the strategic use of different resources (cognitive, personal, economic, political and symbolic).
