ABSTRACT
Over the past two decades the approach to river management has seen great change. Concrete structures, straight channels and top-down management have given way to greener, more complex engineering and participatory decision-making regimes. This chapter examines how individual political entrepreneurship within the state might trigger such change. Entrepreneurial actors seek to bring innovative ideas for managing natural resources onto the policy agenda for dealing with risk. In so doing they introduce elements of a new paradigm into the water management regime. Different literatures are connected with each other to develop an analytical framework for understanding innovation, which is applied to two cases – one in the North (the Netherlands) and one in the South (Bangladesh).
