The narrative policy framework: a traveler’s guide to policy stories

Abstract

The last decade has seen the rise of the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) as a valuable theoretical framework for advancing knowledge of the policy process. In this article, we investigate the NPF’s “travel” capacities across geographies, political systems, policy fields, levels of analysis, methodological approaches, and other theories of the policy process. We assess these capabilities by reviewing extant research and mapping newly explored territories. While we find that the NPF embodies all necessary conditions to travel to different settings, the empirical applications remain largely confined to the U.S. and European contexts, environmental policy, the meso level of analysis, the use of content analysis of documents as a methodological approach, and only a few combinations with other theories of the policy process. Our findings indicate that the NPF can travel well. However, we call for further research to conceptualize the NPF’s macro level, to replicate NPF scholarship beyond liberal democratic institutional contexts, and to affirm the framework’s capacity to be generalizable in varied settings.