Bricolage or Entrepreneurship ?
or how much its technical feasibility has been proven , but a criterion based on the efforts made to make an idea acceptable , feasible or even to realize the idea .
Bricolage as a Mode of Coupling the Streams
Because of increasing returns , it can be assumed that the bricoleur tries to avoid the cost of exiting from initiatives developed by the policy community . I hypothesize that the bricoleur will incorporate elements of an idea with no increasing returns to the solution only because policymakers are ripe to it .
Coupling and formulating a policy are for the bricoleur simultaneous and intertwined processes . The bricoleur is thus an agent that couples the streams by formulating a bespoke solution . The bricoleur creates a policy solution that is wary of contextual elements in both the politics and the policy stream . She formulates a policy solution that “ fits ” and in doing so couples the streams .
The hypothesis underpinned by bricolage as a mode of coupling the streams is the following : after framing conditions as a problem , a bricoleur pieces together a solution in order to solve the problem . It is cost-effective for the bricoleur to use policy ideas demonstrating increasing returns ; nevertheless , the bricoleur is also wary of the ripeness of policymakers . As such the bricoleur has the possibility to combine different policy ideas , selected because they present the advantage of increasing returns or because they resonate with policymakers ’ preferences . Bricolage results in a bespoke solution that , in a context framed as urgent , is then swiftly adopted .
The Context : Streams of Disease Prevention and Control in Europe
The Policy Stream : Policy Ideas and Their Increasing Returns
The earliest traceable idea of organization of disease prevention and control in Europe is the “ Charter Group .” It has been briefly mentioned by Greer ( 2012 , 1009 ), on the political science side and in public health publications by Krause ( 2008 ), MacLehose , McKee , and Weinberg ( 2002 ) and by Newton , Grimaud , and Weinberg ( 1999 ), in the latter cases as members of this “ Charter group .” The most precise academic source on the origins of the Charter Group is a 1998 lecture given in Washington by Chris Bartlett , the then-Director of the British Communicable Disease Surveillance Centre ( CDSC ) who shared paternity of the Charter group with Gijs Elzinga from the Rijksinstituut voor Volksgezondheid en Milieuhygiene ( RIVM ), the Dutch National Surveillance Centre . They convened experts from each of the then 12 EU member states , as well as the heads of institutions , with responsibility for national surveillance , to a meeting at CDSC London in December 1993 . This was the first meeting of what would become the “ Charter Group ”: a network of public health experts who would draw on national resources to achieve common surveillance in Europe ( Bartlett 1998 ).
The raison d ’ être of the Charter Group was to actively fleshout coordination of epidemiological surveillance between existing national
52