I
When I started out doing narrative analysis of public policy, big-M metanarratives were getting the attention. These were the grand, overarching narratives criticized by the likes of Lyotard and Baudrillard (think today of criticizing “the Enlightenment Project”).
But just as there were varieties of Enlightenment (not just the very different French and Scottish versions, but others: Naples, English, German, etc.), there are small-m metanarratives far less grand and far more local (think of the many, many varieties of capitalism now being identified [1]). Some observers, of course, have tried to find family resemblances across the disparate versions (an Urpflanze of Enlightenments or Capitalism, if you will). But the more granularity you find at the levels of really-existing context, situation and/or event, the harder it is to dismiss the narrative priority of this particularity in achieving policy relevance.
Small-m metanarratives have always been around, both conceptually and empirically, in the form of those narratives that center on how both “a” and “not-a” can be the case at the same time. More recent explications of conceptual held by sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and philosopher Paul Ricoeur are illustrative:
Through a reconstruction of Bourdieu’s conceptual architecture, I show that his mediation of oppositions transforms dichotomies into internal tensions. Universality is historicized without being relativized; practice is structured yet generative; objectivity is socially produced yet binding. The result is not inconsistency but a dynamic relational framework that preserves theoretical depth at the cost of stability. (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6293418)
Ricoeur argues that genuine political compromise acknowledges the irreducible plurality of legitimate value frameworks. . . .Based on this understanding, I argue that successful compromise becomes not a matter of finding the lowest common denominator but of generating new social arrangements that honor multiple justificatory logics simultaneously. (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11007-026-09731-8)
For example, sustainable development has had to address how that term is not an oxymoron, but in fact can accommodate very different positions (e.g., https://www.academia.edu/164914632/Taking_Complexity_Seriously).
II
The harder problem has been identifying small-m metanarratives that are about “neither ‘a’ nor ‘not-a'” but still relevant for the policy issue of interest. To return to our examples, when it comes to Enlightenment, one can think of Asian approaches to an enlightenment that differs vastly from the Western versions mentioned. So too “policy messes”–situations without agreed upon beginnings and an agreed upon ending, but rather exist in an indefinite present time–fall outside convention notions of policy narratives as stories having beginnings, middles and ends or policy arguments with premises and conclusion (https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.12657/30263/1/648154.pdf).
If or where so, one can then argue that what is “neither sustainable development nor not-sustainable development” might be a policy mess or a form of Asian enlightenment(s). Even so, it still is difficult to see where this gets us in the absence of a particular case and its specifics for analysis.
III
One place where we are left then is having to refine our understanding of those specifics of context, situation or event. An earlier blog outlines what is meant by actionable granularity [2]. What I want to underscore here is the importance to a policy analyst of the first step in any really-existing policy analysis, namely, asking and answering: What is the problem? (Or better yet: What’s the story or stories here?)
It’s banal to say we should define our terms upfront and that different problem definitions entail different problem solutions (i.e., to ask or answer a question assumes you know what would qualify as an answer, were one given). What is less banal is recognizing the necessity of defamiliarizing taken-for-granted problem definitions treated as givens.
For example, the policy narratives we tell ourselves today are all about crises and their intractability to political resolution. It’s another matter, however, to say these contexts, situations and events more resemble “settlements of commotions,” as when royal and counter-royal forces brokered an indefinite cessation of physical battle [3]. You can call such settlements “political” and “polarized,” but that misses the point that indefinite stalemate is itself a form of tractability. Tractability here is a small-m metanarrative that intractable crises occlude. Why? Because the latter are all about big-T transformations that are, we are told, better able to do away with the tractable/intractable binary.
Endnotes
[1] https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2026/04/01/rethinking-capitalism-and-its-upsho
[3] I’m reading a history of British satire which makes just this point: Ian Sperrin (2025). State of Ridicule: A history of satire in English Literature. Princeton University Press: Princeton and Oxford.
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 