Institutionalising Policy Entrepreneurship in the Global South: The Case for a Policy and Strategy Incubation Centre in India

Abstract

India’s policy and strategy ecosystem is largely formulated at the centre, with prototyping and implementation proceeding through multi-stakeholder participation across national, sectoral, and regional contexts, typically via pilot phases before pan-India scale-up. This paper examines the case for a Policy and Strategy Incubation Centre (PSIC), or similar centres focused on subsectors/subthemes, within India’s existing policy architecture as a government-anchored mechanism treating policy design as an iterative supportive mechanism and discipline, analogous to technology incubation. Drawing on comparative literature on public-sector innovation labs, including Denmark’s MindLab, the United Kingdom’s Nesta and Policy Lab, the Governance Lab (GovLab) at New York University, and Chile’s Laboratorio de Gobierno, the paper situates PSIC (or more) within the broader evolution of policy labs and adapts it to the Indian context. It proposes anchoring PSIC (or more) within an existing autonomous, multidisciplinary organisation, independent of any single Ministry or within a given ministerial framework, working closely with Ministries and industry, tasked with developing a credentialised cadre of policy entrepreneurs and strategy specialists (as part of cohorts) who contribute to research, identify needs, and carry ideas through the value chain of implementation and engage in guided assignments for ministries or corporates as part of the evolution. PSIC is also envisaged to catalyse think-tanks and enterprises that coordinate with existing institutions, thereby complementing India’s innovation infrastructure, such as the central planning supporting organisation, NITI Aayog. Beyond this administrative rationale, the paper frames PSIC in social and cultural terms and conceptualises it as a case of institutional innovation in the Global South.