The City Mayor as a Policy Entrepreneur of Sustainable Development: Evidence from a Highly- Urbanized City in the Philippines, 2016–2019

Using the elite and expert interview approaches, the article situates the city mayor of a highly urbanized city in the Philippines as a policy entrepreneur championing sustainable development based on Mintrom and Norman’s (2009) four essential qualities of policy entrepreneurs, namely, social acuity, problem-solving, leading by example, and team-building as supported by the narratives and discourses culled from an elite interview and reinforced by relevant literature, documents, independent sources and scholars. More importantly, the article seeks to discover the policy-entrepreneurial qualities of the city mayor on sustainable development, analyze the sustainable development issues and challenges the city mayor encounter, and synthesize how the city mayor addresses such issues and challenges as a problem-solver. Finally, the article implies the necessity of exploring policy entrepreneurship as a potential research thrust in the context of sustainable development particularly at the local government which is the level of governance closest to the people.