The Narrative Structure of Policy Analysis

Kaplan, Thomas

doi:10.2307/3324882

Cited by 96 publications

(23 citation statements)

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“…Based on this assumption we believe that we can identify storylines in actors' statements and documents on REDD+. Second, seeing storylines on a middle ground between actors and discourses implies that they do not need to have a clear beginning, middle, and end, and in this our framework differs from the storyline concepts of other strands of discursive policy analysis (Kaplan 1986, Roe 1994. Put differently, we will discuss and analyze storylines in their current representation of forest-related discourses, not in their wider development over time.…”

Section: Storylines and Practices In A Complex Governance Architecturementioning

confidence: 98%

Seeing the forest for the trees: identifying discursive convergence and dominance in complex REDD+ governance

Zelli¹,

Nielsen²,

Dubber³

2019

E&S

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Scholars of international law and international relations largely agree that global governance today, and global environmental governance in particular, is marked by institutional complexity. Environmental policy fields are, to varying degrees, governed by a plurality of institutions with different levels of legalization, membership, and jurisdictional scope, and with different degrees of coherence among them. The international governance architecture on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) is a case in point. Located at the intersection of the governance systems on climate change, biodiversity, forestry, and development, REDD+ governance provides a stage where a large variety of intergovernmental and transnational institutions come together, collaborate, or compete on questions of standard-setting, financing, implementation, and evaluation. This complexity poses challenges to the effectiveness of REDD+ governance in general, but also to specific actor groups and organizations that lack the resources to understand and navigate such a fragmented governance landscape. Against this backdrop, we introduce an analytical framework to read and structure a complex governance architecture. The framework breaks new ground by adopting argumentative discourse analysis and the concept of storylines to the study of institutional complexity. We argue that beyond the messy surface of institutional complexity there may be a surprising degree of convergence, in the sense of discursive hierarchies that run across institutions, practices, and scales. We illustrate such a cross-cutting hierarchy for the complex REDD+ governance system, focusing on the sensitive issue of forest carbon monitoring. In our analysis of respective guidance documents and country reports, we find, underneath the institutional complexity across governance scales, a considerable dominance of techno-managerial perspectives and a preference for carbon commodification. This discursive hegemony and convergence resonates with the dominance of certain REDD+ funding institutions and the prioritization of the monitoring practice of remote sensing.

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Section: Storylines and Practices In A Complex Governance Architecturementioning

confidence: 98%

Seeing the forest for the trees: identifying discursive convergence and dominance in complex REDD+ governance

Zelli¹,

Nielsen²,

Dubber³

2019

E&S

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“…The concept of narrative has attracted considerable attention in the field. Kaplan (1986) first wrote about criteria for good analytic narratives in policy analysis. They are characterised by truth, richness, consistency, congruency and unity; such narratives can be used to convey situations and have enhanced credibility.…”

Section: The Role Of the Meta-narrativementioning

confidence: 99%

Narrative policy analysis and the integration of public involvement in decision making

Hampton

2009

Policy Sci

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“…During recent decades, there has been an increasing expression of interest in the study of policy as discourse. Such interest has manifested itself in the advocacy and use of broad Foucauldian approaches – that is, approaches that focus on both text and ‘con-text’ in the construction of policy (Fairclough, 2001; Greener, 2004; Scrase and Ockwell, 2010; Shaw, 2010) – as well as of more specific forms of discourse analysis that concentrate directly on features of rhetoric (Majone, 1989; Rein and Schön, 1993; Russell et al ., 2008), and especially argumentation (Fischer, 2003; Fischer and Forrester, 1993), narrative (Kaplan, 1986; Roe, 1994), or semantics (Iannantuono and Eyles, 1997, 1999). A key assertion in the work of such writers is that language matters, and that the ways in which policy problems and their solutions are ‘framed’ (Garvin and Eyles, 2001; Yanow, 2000) in discourse are key to understanding what does and what does not get done in action.…”

Section: The Discursive Turn In Policy Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In the latter case, there is a need to collect and analyse data that are dispersed across a wider range of materials than can be obtained from the personal interview. It is in this broader context of studying 'collectives' that writers such as Fischer (2003), Kaplan (1986), and Roe (1994) have demonstrated how narrative method can be applied to the analysis of animal rights and environmental policies, local and national health service policies and even national budgets.…”

Section: Policy As Narrativementioning

confidence: 99%

The Discursive Turn in Policy Analysis and the Validation of Policy Stories

2012

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This paper is concerned with the language of policy documents in the field of health care, and how 'readings' of such documents might be validated in the context of a narrative analysis. The substantive focus is on a comparative study of UK health policy documents (N = 20) as produced by the various assemblies, governments and executives of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland during the period 2000-09. Following the identification of some key characteristics of narrative structure the authors indicate how text-mining strategies allied with features of semantic and network analysis can be used to unravel the basic elements of policy stories and to facilitate the presentation of data in such a way that readers can verify the strengths (and weaknesses) of any given analysis -with regard to claims concerning, say, the presence, absence or relative importance of key ideas and concepts. Readers can also 'see' how the different components of any one story might fit together, and to get a sense of what has been excluded from the narrative as well as what has been included, and thereby assess the reliability and validity of interpretations that have been placed upon the data. The discursive turn in policy analysisDuring recent decades, there has been an increasing expression of interest in the study of policy as discourse. Such interest has manifested itself in the advocacy and use of broad Foucauldian approaches -that is, approaches that focus on both text and 'con-text' in the construction of policy (Fairclough, 2001;Greener, 2004;Scrase and Ockwell, 2010;Shaw ,2010) -as well as of more specific forms of discourse analysis that concentrate directly on features of rhetoric (Majone, 1989;R e i na n dS c

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The Narrative Structure of Policy Analysis

Cited by 96 publications

References 0 publications

Seeing the forest for the trees: identifying discursive convergence and dominance in complex REDD+ governance

Seeing the forest for the trees: identifying discursive convergence and dominance in complex REDD+ governance

Narrative policy analysis and the integration of public involvement in decision making

The Discursive Turn in Policy Analysis and the Validation of Policy Stories

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