About the Group
People use stories to understand the world around them. Stories – or narratives – also play an important part in the way actors think, communicate, and decide about public policy. Thus, the study of narratives has become an increasingly important field of research in public policy.
Our research group examines policy narratives used in current policy debates in Moscow. We focus on questions such as:
- What policy narratives are used to justify and contest policy change in Moscow?
- Through what channels are policy narratives communicated?
- What is the effect of policy narratives in the policy process?
We will examine these questions for urban policy in Moscow overall, and for three cases of recent policy debates in Moscow: the housing renovation program, public transport reforms, and waste management policies.
To answer our questions, we will use the Narratives Policy Framework (NPF), a systematic empirical framework for the purposes of understanding the role of narratives in the policy process
The COVID19 epidemic has seriously affected the format of scientific and educational processes. During this time, we refused group meetings and seminars, but the work continues and, in order to make it successful, we completely switch to digital communication.
The data collection process is in full play and this time, the participants of our group gathered at a seminar to discuss preliminary results of data collection and to analyze the difficulties that arise during the process.
The main sources of narratives for analysis are various texts, and in order not to get lost in the streams of information, members of our group need to identify priority data sources. The third seminar of the research and study group "Policy Narratives in Moscow" was devoted to the study of issues related to the selection of texts, and to determine the time frame for the relevance of the selected data.
This event was a first meeting of the group. Prof. Schlaufer started the work with general introduction into the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) - what are the roots of this theory and what are the components of policy narrative.
