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Summary

Narrative policy analysis

Narrative analysis in policy and the social sciences more generally has as its main focus the ways in which human subjects mobilise storytelling and the narrative form as a medium for producing meaning about the world and relations to the self. Politicians and policy makers, for example, deploy narratives through speeches and policy documents to achieve particular ends that include persuading the electorate of their vision, commitment or sentiment. Similarly, citizens assembled in a government council meeting addressing local councillors about a particular issue that is affecting them may draw on storytelling as an effective tool for communicating their preferences or grievances and discontents. In both cases, the narrative form of communication can be ‘best understood as the personal enactment of communal methods of self-accounting, vocabularies of motive [and] culturally recognizable emotional performances’ (Wetherell and Edley, 1999, p 338).

Policy as text or discourse can also be approached as narratives (‘policy narratives’) in the sense they reflect technologies, practices or rationalities of government (Bansel, 2015a). According to Chase (2017), narrative is the achievement of ‘[m] eaning making through the shaping or ordering of experience, a way of understanding one's own or others’ actions, of organising events and objects into a meaningful whole, of connecting and seeing the consequences of actions and events over time’ (p 421). A narrative approach to policy studies therefore closely observes how different, seemingly contradictory and competing discourses are brought together through the medium of narratives to communicate and represent definitions and practices of policy as well as policy problems and their solutions. Understood from this perspective, policies as artefacts do not reflect actually existing realities but rather reflect the political work of governments or other actors who actively seek to prefigure and contain realities to complement and realise particular ends. This includes mobilising policy as narratives in order to imagine and manage the possibilities for acting on and governing citizens as bearers of rights, obligations and duties (Wilkins, 2018) (see entry on ‘Governmentality’). The narrative approach therefore concerns questions of power and refusal, namely how policy narratives function as modes for curating governing, on the one hand, and modes for inciting resistance, on the other hand.