Narrative strategies in the policy process: social and cognitive foundations

Public policy decisions are often attributed to narrative strategies that impact policy-oriented learning within and across advocacy coalitions. Public policy research recognizes the role of influential individuals and their narrative strategies in this context. Yet frameworks that have been developed through this research lack sufficient guidance to distinguish individual learners. By combining theories of dual learning and public policy processes, this paper presents new strategies to better operationalize the concept of an individual learner, measure micro-level learning and thus the impact of narrative strategies. In particular four lessons are deduced from this literature and applied to empirical research into the rise of the sustainable mobility narrative in British road policy: First, policy learners interpret the world through the lens of their beliefs, and learn by combining heuristics and analytical processing. Second, they learn in different ways according to their education and experiences. Third, learning occurs in a political environment that is shaped to different extents by entrepreneurial and brokerage strategies promoting specific narratives. Fourth, exogenous factors impact these strategies, as does policy-oriented learning.