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Policy entrepreneurs and their role for policy change, policy integration and cross-cutting governance has been thoroughly investigated. Here, focus is on a previously neglected aspect of policy entrepreneurship: the tendency to employ public bureaucrats with formal positions to act as policy entrepreneurs for policy integration. Based on 34 interviews with these actors in the Swedish local and regional government, three versions of this formalized policy entrepreneurship are identified: Informal compensation for formal vertical flaws, Making others do things and Integration in the vertical formal organization. These versions of formalized policy entrepreneurship brings a deeper understanding to the development of governance for policy integration, and also to the policy entrepreneurial role in the political-administrative organization.

This report is a study of how public administrators responsible for horizontal perspectives in Swedish local government are handling their role as bureaucrats and political promoters. Gender equality, public health, human rights, rights of children, and environmental protection are examples of perspectives which local authorities are obliged to take into consideration when making political decisions. In order to ensure this, certain strategists are appointed who are supposed to work across all sectors promoting the values and goals of their specific perspective. The role of these strategists contains several paradoxes and complexities.

It is argued that political-administrative organizations are becoming increasingly complex with more horizontal governance required. In Swedish municipal administration, there is a group of administrators assigned the task of monitoring and promoting strategic topics that should be integrated horizontally within the organization. Examples of strategic topics are sustainability, safety/security, diversity, children/youth, public health, human rights, and gender equality. In the thesis, these administrators are called cross-sector strategists. The purpose of this dissertation is to explore how cross-sector strategists become a part of the political-administrative organization when representing, enacting, and reflecting on values in the undertaking of their formal posts. They are situated between the tradition of vertical governance, with formal procedures and hierarchy as its foundation, and the tradition of horizontal governance, with informal networks and deliberation as its foundation. Previous research has shown that this is likely to give rise to value conflicts, and the question is if cross-sector strategists experience value conflicts, and if so, how they cope with them. The cross-sector strategists are studied in this thesis from the perspective of situated agency – focusing on both the contextual expectations of the cross-sector strategists and on their internal reflections to solve value conflicts – in order to explore their process of becoming a part of the local government administration. A mixed-methods design is applied, containing analysis of job advertisements for cross-sector strategists, public managers, and social workers; in-depth interviews with cross-sector strategists; and a survey of professional networks for cross-sector strategists. The results show that cross-sector strategists are subjects to ambivalent and often-contradictory contextual expectations. Cross-sector strategists use the ambivalence of their work for their strategic purposes, and such ambivalence allows them to reframe their topics, their methods, their arguments, and their identity according to current situation in order to increase the impact of their assigned topics and diminish the inner conflict of wanting to be both a responsive bureaucrat and an active lobbyist. Combining these two dedications requires them to be highly reflexive and flexible actors. The outcome of cross-sector strategists' coping with value conflicts can be interpreted in two ways: 1) as if the cross-sector strategists are a formal tool to safeguard crucial democratic and ethical values due to the cross-sector strategists' method of sneaking the strategic policy areas into the organization. Or 2) as a to democracy risky administrative behavior in the long-term due to the disguising of value conflicts and diminished possibilities to process these value conflicts

AbstractAs a way to manage political disagreements over public policies, political representatives might be tempted to avoid open discussions by depoliticising political issues—hoping that the conflict may eventually disappear. When decision-makers employ such strategies, it is up to the administration to make political priorities and manage unresolved policy conflicts. Earlier studies indicate that there are at least two strategies that administrators can employ to manage such ambiguities: (re)framing and technical depoliticisation. This article reveals that public administrators also employ a third framing strategy: repoliticisation, where administrators seek to endow their policy areas with political power by connecting politicians to the work and implementation of policies. The study is based on 38 interviews from 11 municipalities in Sweden.

Local development practitioners in local government administration play a significant role in the governance of local development. This category of public officials – development officers, managers, strategists, secretaries, etc. – have received some attention in the local development literature. However, the directions in the literature are just as varied as the descriptions of the different aspects of local development governance they are taking part in. That means that the overarching understanding of what local development practitioners actually do is blurred, and is left to detailed case studies with very little or no conceptual ambition. Against this backdrop, the ambition of this article is to grasp what the local development practitioner role consists of at a conceptual level. This article offers a better understanding of what local development practitioner roles in particular consist of and how these roles relate to existing theories of governance and public administration. In order to do so, we first clarify and refine what the literature has stressed about local development practitioners' roles and functions, and cluster the findings into three theoretically separated roles: the coordinator, the creator and the inside lobbyist. Second, we bridge these roles with recent trends in public administration research. Finally, we discuss how this conceptualization informs us about governance modes of local development, as well as 'new and modern' public official roles in local government administration.

It has been argued that political entrepreneurship is playing an increased role for public organizations and play a vital role in local government organizations. Political entrepreneurship has previously been studied from the motivations and actions of the individual entrepreneur. We argue that in order to understand why political entrepreneurship occurs in local public administration, these aspects are not enough. Instead, we need to consider entrepreneurship as situated, and analyse contextual conditions which form institutional demands for political entrepreneurship. A tentative framework is presented, which distinguish conditions coming from reformed organizational setting and conditions coming from new policy challenges. Finally, we conclude that the character of the conditions and thus the institutional demands directs political entrepreneurship towards either value-generative or collaborative entrepreneurship.