Theorizing Inside Activism: Understanding Policymaking and Policy Change from Below

Abstract

To further our understanding on policymaking and policy change we need to recognize the significance of individual key actors in policy and planning processes. This article theorizes on the characteristics and policy influence of inside activism in which individual public officials act strategically from inside public administration to change government policy and action in line with a civic engagement and value commitment. Based on initial empirical findings from Swedish local government, we argue that inside activism is empirically relevant but not satisfactorily covered by other key actor concepts. We theorize that inside activism is 1) dualistic: open, deliberative, consensus-seeking and tacit, tactical, power-driven; 2) influential through informal networking inside and outside of government; and 3) dynamic as it varies over time and between critical situations. Due to current trends in society and public administration (e.g. governance), we expect inside activism to be increasingly relevant and we encourage further theoretical, empirical as well as normative research and discussion on this phenomenon.

Keywords:

• Inside activism
• inside activists
• individual key actors
• networks
• policymaking
• policy change

Acknowledgements

The research on which this article is based has been funded by the Swedish Research Council for Environment, Agricultural Sciences and Spatial Planning (Formas) and the Swedish Energy Agency. We gratefully acknowledge insightful comments on earlier drafts of this article from Eva Sørensen, Jenny Lewis, and Annika Agger at the Governance Networks Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, 2–4 December 2009, and from the participants of the Social and Political Studies of Climate Change seminar in Örebro, 17 March 2010. We also would like to acknowledge the helpful comments from four anonymous referees and the editors of Planning Theory and Practice.

Notes

1. On the long-running theoretical debate on the relative importance of agency and structure, we take a middle-ground position. In our view, individuals are key vehicles of change, with their own personal resources such as classical leadership qualities. However, they are not atomistic entities but integrated within larger discursive as well as material structures, such as networks and organizations. To separate agency and structure is, in our view, unproductive for understanding policymaking. From a theoretical-methodological standpoint, however, we do argue for the utility of focusing on individual key actors as an entry point in studies of policymaking and policy change.

2. The research design of these empirical studies is based on a combination of qualitative case studies and a quantitative survey. Following the ideas presented in King et al. (1994), in-depth and contextual case studies were used to develop the theoretical category of the inside activist (i.e. an inductive approach). Based on these characteristics, a survey was designed to further elaborate on the category as well as to test its general relevance (i.e. a deductive approach). For more in-depth discussions on the research design as well as specific methodological issues, see references.

3. For this distinction we owe a great deal to Annika Agger (Roskilde University) and Jenny Lewis (University of Melbourne).