Policy Networks and Policy Entrepreneurship in the EU: Explaining Structural Policy Change in Pharmaceutical Innovation Incentives and Health Technology Assessment

ABSTRACT Policy process research has excelled in explaining structural policy change within national settings, but extensions and applications to the EU level have long proven challenging for scholars. Given that the EU is currently experiencing its longest period of Treaty stability since the 1980s—having evolved into a sui generis political system with a distinctive multilevel governance architecture—developing appropriate policy process tools for the EU context is imperative to understanding contemporary policy reform. To address this challenge, this study introduces and applies a modified iteration of the Multiple Streams Framework—the EU‐MSF—to two cases of structural reform in EU pharmaceutical policy: the revision of the General Pharmaceutical Legislation and the establishment of the new EU Health Technology Assessment framework. Drawing on primary data, including document analysis and 40 elite interviews, the research concludes that the levels of policy network integration shape both the nature of viable policy alternatives and the effectiveness of policy entrepreneurship strategies in driving EU‐level structural change. The study introduces two novel strategy archetypes—“snooker‐tactics” and “recoil‐tactics” policy entrepreneurship—and sets out new directions for EU‐level policy process research grounded in contextually fit analytical tools and hypotheses.