After a long tradition in ‘nature preservation’, Dutch nature policy shifted to a new policy concept called ‘nature development’ in the 1990s. We claim that a relatively small group of individuals played a crucial role in realizing this remarkable change in the nature policy domain. These individuals had the strong conviction that a transition in nature management was needed, and therefore put much effort in convincing others, not in the last place the Ministry departments of which they were part. Eventually they were quite successful because the concept of ‘nature development’ was translated in Dutch policy plans like the ‘Nature Policy Plan’ for the creation of an ecological robust infrastructure between nature areas, and the ‘Room for the River’ policy. The central question that will be addressed in this paper is how this group managed to translate the new concept of nature development in the abovementioned policy plans. To be able to study the relationship between entrepreneurial strategies and policy change, and to account for the interplay between structure and agency, we will take a long term perspective and conduct a document analysis from the early developed plans onwards. In addition we conduct semi-structured interviews with the policy entrepreneurs to fill the gaps we find in the documents. The paper shows that the use of entrepreneurial strategies like idea-development, issue-linking, relation management, venue exploitation and discursive strategies all contributed to gaining support and changing policies. Moreover, it is shown how the recently changing institutional context has put the nature development discourse under pressure, thus limiting possibilities for entrepreneurial success.
