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The ontological and epistemological footing of narrative policy research remains uncertain. In this article, interpretive approaches to policy narrative research are advanced and scientism is eschewed. Other themes in the policy narrative literature that serve as points of divergence and/or convergence include: 1) The structural features of a policy narrative; 2) The semiotic nature of policy narratives; 3) Epistemological politics; 4) Emancipatory politics within the literature; and 5) The idea that narratives are a force in themselves, that is, that narratives have agency. In addition, this article argues for a curatorial approach to redescribing policy narratives, and for an evolutionary conception of policy change and political contestation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article furthers previous attempts at integrating narratology in policy analysis. Embracing an open-ended definition of narrative, it stresses the importance of maintaining distinct narrative levels and, more generally, of taking into account the pragmatic dimension of narration as an activity, including the often-implicit role and focalization of the policy analyst. Developing a conceptual analogy between storytelling and the exercise of power, it argues for a critical use of practical imagination in ‘cold’ situations of ‘narrative salience’, characterized by the absence of controversy or uncertainty, an uneven distribution of the power of scenarization. These propositions for a ‘revisited’ approach to policy narratives, equidistant from the positivist and post-positivist dichotomy, are tested on the case of ‘narrative salience’ where a particular storyline, national innovation systems, is so dominant that there appears to be no ‘counter-story’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Policies can be analyzed as stories about who and what is valued within society. Immigration policy (and immigration policy narratives) offer particularly clear renderings of such stories. This article critically adopts the approach of narrative policy analysis to explore the core assumptions that are shared by apparently opposed policy narratives of immigration policy in contemporary New Zealand. It theorizes these shared assumptions as a policy (pre) meta-narrative that is logically related to discourses of national identity, and that effects specific silences and exclusions. These public silences, it is argued, serve to damagingly limit and distort the field of policy debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]