ABSTRACT
Policy entrepreneurs engage in collaborative action to promote broad societal changes. They distinguish themselves from other political actors through their willingness to promote policy innovations that are new within specific contexts. Research on policy entrepreneurs has burgeoned over the past three decades. In this book, we showcase eight new explorations of policy entrepreneurship in Asia. Previous studies of policy entrepreneurship within specific contexts across this vast region have confirmed the explanatory power of the concept, even though the political systems under investigation are distinct from the political system in the United States, where the notion of policy entrepreneurship was coined. This introductory chapter reviews the concept of the policy entrepreneur. It then introduces the eight chapters that follow. The scholarship on display here confirms that future theory-driven research on policy entrepreneurs could do much to advance our understanding of dynamic change in contemporary politics, from the local to the global level.
