Lived Experience and Street-Level Policy Entrepreneurship in Migration Policy Design

Street-level policy entrepreneurship refers to situations in which frontline officials seek to influence policy design, change, or continuation rather than limiting their actions to implementation. Although existing scholarship has identified external shocks and opportunity structures as important contextual conditions, it remains unclear how different forms of experience shape the motivations and pathways through which street-level bureaucrats engage in or refrain from entrepreneurial behaviour. This article advances the literature by examining lived experience as a moderating driver of street-level policy entrepreneurship, drawing on representative bureaucracy as its primary theoretical framework. The article addresses a fundamental theoretical gap between representative bureaucracy theory and street-level bureaucracy theory in their respective understandings of experience. Representative bureaucracy research has predominantly conceptualised experience through demographic background and pre-organisational socialisation, focusing on how shared identities and values may translate passive representation into active representation. Street-level bureaucracy theory, by contrast, has centred on professional experience acquired through everyday policy implementation, emphasising how this experience shapes discretion, coping strategies, and moral judgment. As a result, both literatures capture only part of the experiential foundations of bureaucratic behaviour and active representation. This article argues that lived experience offers a conceptual bridge between these traditions by integrating personal background, pre-organisational socialisation, and accumulated professional experience into a single interpretive framework. Empirically, the article examines Dutch migration governance, a critical less-likely context marked by legal density, political salience, and tightly constrained formal discretion, where entrepreneurial action and active representation by frontline officials are far from self-evident. The paper draws on interpretive process-tracing and semi-structured interviews with three groups of street-level migration officials active at the Immigration and Naturalisation Service (IND), the Repatriation and Departure Service (DT&V), and the Central Agency for the Reception of Asylum Seekers (COA), supplemented by interviews with NGO representatives and policymakers. The semi-structured interviews are combined with an observational study conducted at two asylum reception centres operated by COA. This design enables the analysis to capture both articulated interpretations and everyday practices through which lived experience becomes salient. Methodologically, the article employs interpretative process-tracing to reconstruct how actors make sense of their roles, responsibilities, and moral obligations over time. Rather than treating lived experience as a direct cause of policy entrepreneurship, the analysis shows how it conditions the way street-level bureaucrats interpret perceived constraints, policy alienation, and moral tension. Lived experience moderates whether such situations are accepted as legitimate boundaries of the role or reinterpreted as reasons to seek influence beyond implementation. These interpretive processes give rise to divergent behavioural pathways, including entrepreneurial engagement, compliance, and withdrawal. By theorising lived experience as an interpretive mechanism linking representation and action, the article contributes to representative bureaucracy theory by moving beyond demographic characteristics and to street-level bureaucracy theory by expanding the concept of experience beyond professional socialisation. More broadly, it advances understanding of the micro-foundations of frontline agency and representation in politically sensitive governance domains.