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
How systematic is our understanding of policy narratives? After a lot of work on analyzing them in the Moscow policy debate, our colleague Viktor Albert tried to summarize some of the weaknesses of the approaches and methods of narrative analysis.
In total, four reports directly related to the results of the group's work were made at the conference. On two panels, we presented general comparative results for all three cases, and each of them separately. Overall, the feedback was positive, with peers appreciated the quality of the arguments and the data, but at the same time they made a number of important comments.
In July, representatives of our NUG were engaged in writing and preparing their presentations at the General Conference of the ECPR. To make this process more fruitful, we have held several workshops with rehearsal presentations and discussions on their content.
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.
