How policy narratives shape sustainability governance: A case study of urban transport policy discourse

Abstract

Recent research in sustainability science has highlighted the crucial role of imaginaries, stories and narratives in shaping how sustainability governance is understood. One example is Adloff and Neckel's framework of ideal-typical sustainability trajectories: modernization, transformation and control. This article examines how these trajectories can help analyse sustainability policy making when viewed through the theoretical lens of the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF). To do this, we reinterpret the sustainability trajectories as policy paradigms and identify the broader cultural and institutional macro-level narratives that underpin them. We ask how these overarching sustainability policy paradigms shape the way specific sustainability-related policy processes unfold. Empirically, we analyse how macro-level narratives within the modernization and transformation paradigms influence local policy discourse on sustainable urban transport in the Swiss city of Zürich over a 12-year period. Methodologically, the study introduces an innovative approach for assessing how actors' ideal-typical discourse network positions align with macro-level narratives, and how these patterns structure actual policy discourse networks. Our findings provide some evidence that macrolevel narratives do influence the structure of policy discourse. More broadly, the results suggest that the policy paradigms of modernization, transformation and control offer valuable starting points for applying the NPF to sustainability-related policy domains. For policy makers, these paradigms also provide a useful way to situate and interpret the stories told in everyday policy making.