Major Read: The siloing of approaches to discourse and narrative analyses in public policy

Imagine you are a new graduate student assigned to undertake a comprehensive survey of the many narrative analytical approaches to public policy and management. All of this is fresh for you and, naturally, you look first for current literature reviews of primary approaches. What would be among your first findings?

By way of answer, a major review of 25 years of discourse analyses (DAs) around policymaking (Leipold, Feindt, Winkel & Keller 2019, p. 448) notes:

Although its name resembles Roe’s (1994) Narrative Policy Analysis, [the Narrative Policy Framework, NPF] is not part of the landscape of discourse analysis covered in this special issue. NPF scholars clearly distance their work from post-structural ontologies and methods and position NPF as a positivist alternative to the study of policy discourses and narratives. Their aim is to provide an analytical basis for an ‘empirical’ access to socio-cultural meaning structures (i.e. generated through the analysis of large sets of text data) that stands alongside established ‘positivist’ frameworks for the analysis of the policy process (for an overview of these approaches see Weible & Sabatier, 2017). . . .

with the review authors adding that “discourse analytical approaches were ‘ignored’ in political science handbooks ‘largely on grounds that they don’t follow scientific norms’ of ‘clarity, hypothesis-testing, acknowledgement of uncertainty, etc.’ (Sabatier & Weible, 2014, p. 11).”  As the passage more than hints, the same exclusionary focus of discourse analysis to NPF is found in the NPF literature with respect to DAs.

Take, by way of example, a major review of decades’ work on NPF (Schlaufer, Kuenzler, Jones & Shanahan 2022). Both the latter review and the Leipold et al (2019) review call for more interdisciplinary, cross-context research. But our graduate student quickly notes that the  NPF review does not pursue the facts:

• That discourse analysis has also analyzed policy narratives in the same areas as NPF, notably the environment;

• That policy processes, a core focus of NPF, have also been a core focus of discourse analysis: “How does discourse analysis contribute to our understanding of environmental policy processes. . .?” (Leipold et al 20l9, p. 446);

• That a central place given in NPF to heroes, villains, victims and plot in policy narratives has also been a centerpiece of other narrative approaches, notably the narrative-networks model (NNM) of political scientist Helen Ingram and her colleagues, Raul Lejano and Mrill Ingram (e.g., Ingram, Ingram & Lejano 2019); and 

• That mixed methods and interviews, found to be prominent in the NPF review, are equally prominent in other narrative analytical approaches. To take one from many examples, Q-methodology is used in the NPA work of van Eeten (2006), discourse analysis work of Stevenson (2019), and the NPF work of Brumbaugh & Rupp (2020). Q-methodology and interpretative policy analysis (IPA) have had a long association as well (e.g., Lundberg 2020).

Such studied disregard, it must be stressed, has been mutual and reciprocated. Where the discourse analysis review mentions the Weible and Sabatier framework of processes, it lists by name only allied discourse approaches; the NFP review lists by name only the Weible and Sabatier processes, seeing no need to recognize others, however well-established. 

So what?

The reader might now expect me to argue and make the case for cross-fertilization, or at least better interchange, between and among the narrative analytical approaches. The aim here is more modest. An important step has to be taken before pinpointing areas of mutual benefit. That is, attempts at cross-fertilization are premature where the methodological reasons that render narrative analytic approaches different are not first better identified and appreciated. 

These differences go well beyond conventional binaries of positivist versus post-positivist, quantitative versus qualitative, holistic versus reductionistic, incommensurable versus commensurable, and scientific versus interpretivist. Even where the terms have been used by founders and acolytes of the different narrative analytical approaches, the binaries have been complicated from the very get-go.

Qualitative versus qualitative—and yet the first example of formal quantitative network analysis among the approaches discussed here is the irrigation case study of Narrative Policy Analysis (1994). Positivist versus post-positivist—and yet you can imagine the perplexity of those in other narrative analytical traditions, grounded as they are in case analysis, to the statement, “The NPF brought empiricism to the study of narratives” (Schlaufer et al 2022, p. 261). Scientific versus interpretivist—and yet major semioticians (notably, A.J. Greimas [1987, pp. xl – xli, 121ff]) would have treated as risible any intimation that theirs wasn’t a rigorous, scientific project.

The argument is that, in light of these and like complications, there needs to be greater clarity about three under-acknowledged methodological issues prior to comparing these narrative analytical approaches and drawing lessons from and for each other. Three deserve special mention.

Different approaches ask different questions.

Each of the respective narrative approaches proffers different interrogations of policy narratives. This would be banal, were it not for the logical and empirical implications.

Perhaps the best example is NPA when compared to both NPF and DAs: the former asks how narratives underwrite and stabilize the assumptions of decision making under uncertain and complex circumstances; the latter two approaches make no such claim. For them, as for other approaches, narratives are stories with various uses, including—and certainly not excluding—that of persuading others of what is already taken to be known or true. 

Being clearer about key-question differences would aid in identifying areas of useful cross-approach interchange. For example, the NPF review notes: “However, not much is known about how these narratives affect the policy process or policy outputs. That is, where policy narratives originate, whom they impact, and to what effect are all important policy narrative questions that are rarely addressed simultaneously” (Schlaufer et al 2022, p. 259). That latter point, nevertheless, is a settled matter from the perspective of some narrative approaches. It’s precisely how narratives originate, whom they impact, and what are their other effects that are demonstrated in the environmental governance focus of NNM. 

Also, NPA was extended to demonstrate how infrastructure operators and emergency managers underwrite and stabilize real-time decision making under turbulent conditions. Systemwide failure scenarios—a type of policy-relevant narrative—affect real-time decisions, even if (and especially because) some contingencies cannot be narrativized at that point in decision making. More, the well-documented real-time use of failure scenarios complicates any kind of micro-meso-macro distinction (a key feature of the NPF, for example). Stabilization, even in normal operations in large critical infrastructures, takes place frequently in the form of team situation awareness of systemwide operations interconnected with the operations of other critical infrastructures (Roe & Schulman 2008, 2016). 

“Meso-levels” may become clear only later on, though that too can’t be assumed beforehand. Nor is a persisting lack of clarity over levels-of-analysis unfamiliar in the social sciences. “Interdependence” has long been notorious for the absence of agreed-upon empirical measures (see La Porte 1975/2015).

Methodological advances in the approaches are not cabined to scholarly confines. 

Reviews of the narrative analytical approaches are not as comprehensive as they might first appear. This happens especially when the gray literatures of practicing policy analysts, public managers and scholar-activists are not canvassed. The reasons are various, including but not limited to the case material not entailing a focus, e.g., on discourse coalitions as in many DAs (Hajer 1993), the more-than-human in the narrative networks of NNM (Ingram et al 2019), the four-step method of an NPA (Roe 1994), or the specific assumptions of NPF (Schlaufer et al 2022).

Consider a timely example. A recent working paper, Understanding the role of narratives in humanitarian policy change and published by the London-based Overseas Development Institute (Saez & Bryant 2023), is explicitly produced for a non-scholarly audience and states it is grounded in NPF. Yet it is not clear how the working paper’s highly original and useful Figure 1 (Ibid, p. 16) derives from the NPF (note too the wider appeal to “discourses” at the figure’s center):

Arguably more important, Figure 1 highlights the fact that policy narratives can be geared around delaying rather than supporting this or that policy and management (for other examples, see Hermann 2024). In other words, different narrative analytical approaches must be assumed to have different granularities, irrespective of (in spite of) any prejudgments about “levels of analysis.” 

The differences in granularities open up all manner of possibilities for recasting (think: renarrativizing) so-called wicked policy problems (Roe 2023). For example, while DAs from the get-go focused on “the policy process,” their more recent developments differentiate by way of specifics between and among “maneuvering within a given discursive framework, navigating between different and conflicting discourses, or transforming existing discourses” (Lynggaard & Triantafillou 2023, p. 1).

The methodological challenge of evaluating different types of policy narratives. 

Although ubiquitous, the term, “policy narratives,” is not helpful unless the narratives in question are first differentiated. We just saw the methodological need to distinguish and take note of the more granular uses of failure scenarios in large socio-technical systems. It is quite another matter to single out policy narratives that are conspiracy theories which various leaders, past and present, believe and act upon in their advocacy and sometimes policy-making.

The basic question here is the perennial one of how to evaluate different types of policy narratives, or more specifically: What are the evaluative criteria, if any, of the different narrative analytic approaches? Suffice to say, there are approaches that rely on the policy processes they study or assume for making any such evaluation. Other approaches have evaluative criteria independent of those processes or profess none at all.

An example helps. A complete policy narrative in NPA meets several criteria, including: the narrative—its story with beginning, middle and end, or argument with premises and conclusions—is one that takes seriously that the policy or management issue is complex, uncertain, and/or conflicted. One chief assumption of conspiracy theories is that nothing happens by accident (Barkun 2013). From the NPA perspective, such narratives are inferior when compared to other narratives that posit accidents, happenstance, chance and luck happening in and through policy processes for the same issues.

This is not an argument for one approach over another—rather, the point again is methodological. In particular, it might be far better to think of evaluative criteria as a major link between policy narratives and the policy processes, including the latter’s technologies and actionable contingencies, in which the narratives are embedded.

Upshot.

A mentor, political scientist Aaron Wildavsky, famously wondered: If planning is everything, maybe it is nothing. So too all of us might want to ask of those policy narratives said to be everywhere and important for almost everything. Are we overthinking narratives (see Brooks 2022)? 

As the start to an answer, a hypothesis is proposed: A less-recognized but major consequence of the siloed approaches to the study of policy narratives has been to slight and confuse the role of very real, very messy policy processes in determining and differentiating types of and criteria for narratives (Roe 2013).

Sources

Barkun, M. (2013). A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America. Second Edition, Berkeley, CA: California University Press.

Brooks, P. (2022). Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative. The New York Review of Books: New York, NY.

Brumbaugh, A. and J.H. Rupp (2020). Wabash CarbonSAFE. Subtask 4.1 – Application of Policy Frameworks for Improved Carbon Capture and Storage. Social Site Characterization & Stakeholder Engagement. Report Number: DOE/ FE0031626‐2. U.S. DOE Cooperative Agreement Number: DE-FE0031625, Champaign, IL.

Greimas, A.J. (1987). Qn Meaning Selected Writings in Semiotic Theory. Trans. P. J. Perron and F. H. Collins, Theory and History of Literature, Volume 38, Minneapolis MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Hajer, M. (1993). Discourse coalitions and the institutionalization of practice: The case of acid rain in Britain. In F. Fischer & J. Forester (Eds.), The Argumentative Turn in Policy Analysis and Planning (pp. 43–76). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Hermann, M. (2024). ‘Narratives of Delay’: How the Animal Pharma Industry Resists Moves to Curb the Overuse of Antibiotics on Farms. (Accessed online at https://sentientmedia.org/animal-pharma-industry-overuse-of-antibiotics/)

Ingram, M., H. Ingram and R. Lejano (2019). Environmental Action in the Anthropocene. Journal of Environmental Policy and Planning 21(5): 492–503.

La Porte, T. R. (Ed.). (1975/2015). Organized Social Complexity: Challenge to politics and policy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Lejano, R., M. Ingram, and H. Ingram (2013). The Power of Narrative in Environmental Networks. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 

Leipold, S. P. Feindt, G. Winkel & R. Keller (2019) Discourse analysis of environmental policy revisited: traditions, trends, perspectives, Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning, 21:5, 445-463

Lundberg, A. (2020). Viewpoints about Educational Language Policies: Multilingualism in Sweden and Switzerland. Malmö Studies in Educational Sciences No. 90, Faculty of Education and Society, Malmö University, Sweden.

Lynggaard, K and P. Triantafillou (2023). Discourse analysis and strategic policy advice: manoeuvring, navigating, and transforming policy. Journal of European Public Policy, DOI: 10.1080/13501763.2023.2217846

Roe, E. (1994). Narrative Policy Analysis: Theory and Practice. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press.

——- (2013). Making the Most of Mess: Reliability and policy in today’s management challenges. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

——- (2023). When Complex is as Simple as it Gets: Guide for Recasting Policy and Management in the Anthropocene. IDS Working Paper 589, Brighton: Institute of Development Studies, DOI: 10.19088/IDS.2023.025

Roe, E. and P.R. Schulman (2008) High Reliability Management, Stanford CA: Stanford University Press.

——- (2016). Reliability and Risk, Stanford CA: Stanford University Press. 

Saez, P. and J. Bryant (2923). Understanding the Role of Narratives in Humanitarian Policy change. HPG working paper. London: ODI (https://odi.org/en/publications/understandingthe-role-of-narratives-in-humanitarian-policy-change).

Schlaufer, C., J. Kuenzler, M.D. Jones, & E. Shanahan (2022). The Narrative Policy Framework: A Traveler’s Guide to Policy Stories. Politsche Vierteljahresschrift 63:249–273.

van Eeten, M.J.G. (2001). Recasting Intractable Policy Issues: The Wider Implications of the Netherlands Civil Aviation Controversy, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 20(3): 391 – 414. 2001.

Weible, C.M., & Sabatier, P.A. eds. (2017). Theories of the Policy Process (4th ed.). Boulder, CO: Westview.