Urban Brazil: Visions, Afflictions, and Governance Lessons By Iva ...

Resistance to policy change can come from many sources. It can be the result of interest groups acting on their own behalf, bureaucrats who have incentives to preserve and expand programs under their administration, or even entire municipal bureaucracies operating according to their own rules independent of city hall. The multiple sources of resistance to change have led some scholars to focus on the characteristics of those local governments that are more successful than others in changing policy direction. Douglas Yates, for instance, has argued that satisfactory responses to urban problems are intrinsically related to the ability of local public officials to shape the policy arena. Local officials who are able to escape the cycle of damaging policies have been labeled “public entrepreneurs,” following Joseph Schumpeter’s work on innovation and entrepreneurial behavior.¹⁰ Mark Schneider and Paul Tesk, for instance, have equated public entrepreneurs to agents of change who “…inject innovation into the practices of their own local governments, which can then diffuse throughout the entire system of government…while public entrepreneurs seek to maximize their own profits, they produce benefits that others garner. And just like economic entrepreneurs, public entrepreneurs provide important pecuniary externalities to the other actors in the system.”¹¹ In a similar vein, Don Lavoie observed in 1991 that public entrepreneurs examine a given situation in a manner that is qualitatively different from that of others; this ability, he speculates, seems to be a consequence of a higher degree of sensitivity toward the needs of others.