A task no office is responsible for

In September 1962, a book was published that contained no new insight. Rachel Carson, a biologist with no office and no mandate, had conducted no scientific research of her own for her book Silent Spring. She had gathered what had long been known about the consequences of the pesticide DDT. The knowledge lay scattered across specialist journals, unconnected and without political consequence. By publishing her book, she turned a technical and scientific debate into a public problem. Within a few years American pesticide policy shifted: DDT was banned in agriculture, and at the end stood a brand-new agency, the Environmental Protection Agency. The evidence had existed for a long time. So had the solutions. What had been missing was someone who was able to connect them with a public and political moment.

When Uber entered city after city in the 2010s, the company could have fought in advance for better terms within existing taxi regulations. That would have been classic lobbying. Instead, Uber changed the core question being asked from How do we regulate taxis? to How do we organise urban mobility in the digital age? Where no fitting regulation yet existed, the company forced a resolution through early market entry, user mobilisation as a political resource, and generated the pressure under which a new regulatory category emerged.

The two cases could hardly differ more in their approach. Carson worked patiently, over years, toward a political paradigm shift. Uber worked through speed and fait accompli, and created its own window by setting new regulatory conditions. Despite these differences, they share one thing in common: neither optimised a solution within a given framework, both shifted the very context within which decisions were being made.

Whether one should be interpreted as in the public interest and the other as self-interested, remains to be discussed. The question we are interested precedes it and is relevant to both of these cases: What drives someone to question the status quo in the first place? Where lies the trigger that suddenly makes an accepted state of affairs appear changeable?

For in every political order there is a task no office is responsible for. No ministry, no board, no academic chair carries the responsibility for ensuring that a mature problem meets the fitting solution while the political weather is favourable. And yet, it is this task that decides whether the definition of an issue and the development of solutions turn into action, or whether both processes run their course without consequence, until the favourable opportunity for change has passed. This invisible work, this act of connection, is precisely the subject of this platform. We read political change not by its results, but by how it comes about: not in static organigrams, but in the processes between institutions, interests, interpretations, time windows, and people.

Policies rarely fail because of a lack of ideas. They fail because problems, solutions, and majorities do not find one another in time. This coupling does not happen by itself, and this is why actors like Carson are needed, actors who are neither pure administrators nor pure idea-givers, and who ensure that problems, solutions, and political momentum come together at the right time.

Kingdon calls these actors policy entrepreneurs. A policy entrepreneur is an actor willing to invest their own resources – time, energy, reputation, and sometimes money – in expectation of a future return. Such actors can stand inside or outside the state. What unites them is not their position but their function. Michael Mintrom describes them as actors who frame problems, forge networks, build coalitions, set examples, and scale up what has been achieved. The first of these activities in particular is of interest to this platform.

For a long time, problem framing was regarded as mere rhetoric. More recent work paints a different picture: it understands the policy entrepreneur as someone who first produces the meaning of a situation in exchange with others. This figure is, moreover, older than the political-science concept. Anthropology knows it as a threshold figure and mediator, as someone who translates between separate worlds without belonging fully to any one of them.

The gap in which policy entrepreneurs operate has always existed. But it is growing. Political spaces have become more fragmented, responsibilities more dispersed, problems more hybrid. The classic lines between state, economy, science, and civil society have grown more porous. Climate, migration, digitalisation, security: hardly a single pressing question still belongs clearly to one department. They lie crosswise to the institutions that are responsible for working on them.

For organisations, this shifts what is at stake. In such environments, whoever waits until an issue manifests as a rule, requirement, or law has missed the moment in which it could still have been shaped. Merely responding to decisions is no longer enough. The critical ability is to recognise early when and how a diffuse situation turns into a binding decision. To be able to recognise and influence such dynamics, one must continuously observe and translate between separate fields before the situation stiffens. Actors who can connect between fields, logics, and procedures become more important the more hybrid a problem is.

A world going through several technological upheavals and crises at the same time requires more than the ability to react. It requires a method of anticipation: working with scenarios, observing early indicators, reading patterns from earlier trajectories, and deriving from them robust assumptions about where a situation is heading, which problems it will bring to the surface, and which solutions it will make viable. Artificial intelligence, the energy transition, geopolitical shifts change the conditions faster than institutions can keep up with them. This presents a layered challenge: to understand the change and use it; not to wait until a situation is sorted, but to recognise and appropriate the nature of the moment. Carson did this by assembling scattered findings into a robust picture of the ecological consequences of DDT, with the conviction and hope that an open window for change would arise from it.

Whom is this relevant for? This platform is about an activity that begins before it can be called counsel. Before a brief is formulated. Before a problem is cleanly defined. Before it is clear who can act, who wants to act, and which window of opportunity is opening. This phase is often decisive in determining whether knowledge turns into politics, or whether knowledge remains without consequence.

What matters here is not the finished advice but the production of decidability. At this threshold, translation happens between expertise, political opportunity, institutional logic, and social perception. This work has no designated office, but it demands power of judgement. It does not decide, but it makes decidability possible. In practice, it is rarely the work of a single person. It arises where political judgement, analytical preparation, and institutional instinct come together. It is the politically most demanding form of consulting. The difference lies not in the method itself, but in its starting point. Whoever represents interests typically works within given framings. This work starts before these framings are even constituted, when the question of whether and how a situation becomes a politically workable problem presents itself.

This work comes into contact with power precisely because it begins before the decision is made. Whoever frames problems distributes attention, urgency, and responsibility, whoever determines what counts as a problem has a hand in deciding what others orient their action toward – and does so, before any procedure takes hold. This is why one and the same method can serve enlightenment or mere influence.
This ambivalence is a part of the figure of the policy entrepreneur and cannot be entirely resolved: Where does working with possibility end and manipulation begin? When does framing defy public justifiability, and when does it become the mere assertion of interests? Policy entrepreneurs don’t replace democratic procedures. At best, they help to transform situations into a politically negotiable form, that in turn must prove itself in precisely those democratic procedures. This is why, observing this point of tension and treating it with nuance is one of the responsibilities this platform must fulfil.

This platform is not an advertising space for consultancy. It is a public workshop for a skill that becomes decisive in fragmented political spaces: making situations legible before they are decided. To that end, it connects the theory of Kingdon and Mintrom with interdisciplinary perspectives from anthropology, sociology, philosophy, and beyond.

This is to say: we analyse cases in which political windows opened or closed, and take a look behind the scenes. We present actors who made situations legible when few others could, and ask what prompted them to do so. We define terms whose meaning may have become blurry and describe tools of problem framing. This skill is relevant to professionals whether they are in politics, administration, associations, companies, or academia. Those who want to work the gaps in their own field, or already have, can use this platform as a resource that enables them to recognise the right moment to act, when an issue shifts, who needs to be won over and which window is about to open.

For there is a task that no office is responsible for. Whether diagnosis turns into action is decided on the question, if it is taken up or left unrecognised. Who takes it up, by what means, and to what end: that is what Policy Entrepreneur aims to shed light upon.

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Kingdon, John W. (1984/2011): Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies. 3rd ed. Boston: Longman.

Mintrom, Michael (2019): „So you want to be a policy entrepreneur?“. In: Policy Design and Practice 2 (4), pp. 307–323. https://doi.org/10.1080/25741292.2019.1675989

Mintrom, Michael (2020): Policy Entrepreneurs and Dynamic Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Mintrom, Michael / Luetjens, Joannah (2017): „Policy Entrepreneurs and Problem Framing: The Case of Climate Change“. In: Environment and Planning C 35 (8), pp. 1362–1377.

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