Abstract
How is public policy implemented, and what informs its implementation by public administrators? Debate in the academic literature over policy development and implementation issues is long standing; a major consensus is that policy making is accomplished rationally, by calculating benefits and risk. In spite of challenges to this consensus, developing a coherent counterapproach has proven extremely difficult.
The persistent scholarly search for new explanations of the differences between policy making and implementation processes has recently yielded to what is described in the academic literature as the narrative approach (Lindquist, 2009; Pepper & Wildy, 2009). New books attempt to explain how it can help policy makers, scholars, and students of public policy and administration understand options in the process of policy development and implementation. Sandford Borins, of the University of Toronto, not long ago published his renowned book—Governing Fables: Learning from Public Sector Narratives and Innovating with Integrity—which explains the repercussions of storytelling for the development and implementation of public policy.
Partly through expanding the role of narratives, or storytelling, on policy analysis and implementation, Hugh T. Miller’s new book, Governing Narratives: Symbolic Politics and Policy Change, has enhanced our understanding of the importance of policy discourse from a narrative perspective. It has, further, added a significant voice to those speaking for the limitations of rationalism in policy making and implementation. According to Miller, the narrative approach seeks to “get beneath, around, and behind the way the media, society, lobbyists, public relations consultants, and people in government discuss public policy” (p. 18).
As Miller himself rightly points out, the essence of the approach, and the purpose of the book, is to cast doubt on the “modern image of a rational, autonomous, intentional actor”: the scientific approach, in other words, to policy analysis that has dominated the field since the era of scientific management government and the emergence of the economic idea propounded by classical policy analysis scholars. Miller replaces that actor with “a decentred subject whose personage is inscribed by childhood experiences, family practices, and educational background, and many other cultural influences (p. xi).” It is a way to understand what and how policy discourses are shaped, and attends to what may be described as the idiosyncrasies of the personalities involved in advancing any course of action. Such a decentered subject, he notes, is not a product of the rational school of thought, but is, rather, “a product of the inscriptions accumulated through socialization and experience, by cultural symbolization, and genetic inheritance” (p. 14).
The preface sets the tone of the book. Thereafter, Miller proceeds to demonstrate the importance of narrative’s governing of the policy making and implementation spheres by examining some critical concepts: he describes them in Chapter 1 as Words/Action. Here he draws the attention of the reader to critical issues in narratives, such as symbolic communication (p. 3), sign, ideograph, and narrative, (pp. 4-10), social action (pp. 10-14), and the decentred subject (p. 14). In all of these cases, he carefully explains the meanings of these words or actions: which, it is important to note, are not common in modern books on policy analysis and implementation. He does it in no haphazard manner, but through a careful analysis that draws on a number of disciplines and important research works. The concepts are systematically linked to show not only how each influences and affects the telling of narratives or stories but also to reveal the powers, in the sense of the actors, that are, or may be, behind a particular narrative. His explanation facilitates the reader’s understanding of the meanings of the narrative concept and gives a glimpse of what lies ahead.
Having explained these concepts and how they enrich the narrative approach, Miller sets out to inform the reader about the ways stories in public policy are mobilized. In this chapter he examines how different narratives on a particular issue may be developed and, at the same time, how one narrative can, and sometimes does, eclipse all others, and become the dominant narrative for a policy. Similar to a number of scholars who have used this approach, the ability to carefully mobilize and craft a story, as well as communicate it, is essential in an extremely competitive discourse environment. He notes that “policy communication is seen as a political contest among competing ideographic narratives on a symbolic playing field. One narrative may rise to dominance when it is legitimated through political processes. A legitimated policy narrative in turn licenses social action . . .” (p. 17). Miller uses this chapter to examine the various approaches to policy analysis by focusing on the strengths and weaknesses of such approaches as the interpretive; the no solution, no problem, causal stories; and the symbolic social construction approaches, and ends with showing how narrative is superior to all of these. Narrative’s superiority, he says, is to be found in the fact that “an expanding appreciation of how stories and narratives function to stabilize the decision making environment in the face of anxious uncertainty further removes policy making from a one-dimensional technical-rational logic” (p. 36).
In Chapter 3, Miller focuses more on the narrative approach itself. He uses the word “connotation.” Connotation, he explains, is an essential part of narrative, because narrative is about language, which seeks to communicate meanings. How it is that two people can understand a word differently? The answer, of course, is in the “meaning” attributed or understood by the individuals in question. At the same time, he believes that meaning making depends on processes of connotation and association. Connotation thus helps the narrative approach to avoid issuing the stable, authoritative definitions demanded by formal theory (p. 39). This is the case because, as he correctly points out, “connotation suggests multiple concepts, images, associations and interpretations”; hence, there is more than one accepted meaning of a concept or idea, and the general environment, especially the culture, in which a policy is undertaken shapes those meanings.
While the first three chapters are devoted to the explanation of concepts and enabling the reader to accustom his or her mind to the narrative point of view, the following two chapters amount to what may be considered the practical aspect of the agency of narrative in fashioning policies. In Chapter 4, for example, Miller looks at the role of politics in shaping policy outcomes, and how policy antagonists or rivals attempt to shape a policy to their advantage by focusing on their peculiar interests through purposive discourses. Yet, because of the narrative’s cultural sensitivity, it survives purposive actions and discourses as he understands them. Narrative matters in politics, because proponents oppose or seize narratives that may become dominant or, at least, have the potential to become dominant in the effort to resolve a policy impasse (p. 70).
The role of narrative in policy analysis is further expounded on in the next chapter, Narrative Performance. Here Miller deals, essentially, with how narratives become institutionalized in any given context, and how people whose narratives have become the dominant discourse set a pattern of behavior or conduct to support policy endurance. These considerations are then carefully linked to the concluding chapter, which, although quite short, neatly summarizes and integrates the ideas about narrative. He is emphatic about the superior efficacy of this approach and remarks that “narrative thus entrenched into institutionalized practice is able to reject alternative [policy] practices that would implement some competing narrative” (p. 93).
The discussions in the six chapters that constitute the main body of the book are supplemented with two appendixes, each of which focuses on a particular policy area to show how the narrative approached has helped determine the adoption and implementation of a course of action. The first appendix deals with drug policy; here the discussion is about how in the United States, under a number of administrations, various narratives were used in the development of drug policies. Two main kinds of narrative ensured the changes in drugs policies: the narrative that implies criminality, and ones that do not. Going through these narratives and their impact on drug policies, Miller concludes that the dominant coalitions of narratives that have been put into practice through public policy “are not made up of rationality so much as salient imagery and values, . . . but rather through a coherent constellations of emotions, values, stereotypes, cultural habits, and symbolic connotations that give public policy shape and texture” (p. 113). He further demonstrates that “emotions and values share discursive space with logic and facts to distinguish one narrative from another” (p. 113).
Appendix 2 is on environmental policy. Again, Miller takes pains to explain the four narratives that have characterized, and continue to characterize, environmental policy making. In all, these two stories show the practicalities, as well as the intrigues and importance, of narrative as deciding policy outcomes, irrespective of any ideological position taken by the protagonists in the policy arena.
As may be seen from the appendixes, storytelling, and how stories are told, constitute a major element of policy analysis. Miller shows that whether a policy is based on the rational or any other approach, the ability to tell the story of the policy tends to shape the policy’s dynamics. Whether policy makers—or the public—accept any given policy thus depends significantly on the manner of the telling. Miller has given policy makers, students of public policy and administration, and the general public not only insight into the limitations of the rational approach to policy analysis and implementation but also a way to carefully frame stories in the public domain if a particular course of policy action is to be accepted. He has carefully crafted his own story line through a systematic analysis of narrative undertaken by in-depth study of a considerable range of the literature from different disciplines, and he has integrated all of this coherently into an astonishing piece of work. Undoubtedly readers will find the book extremely useful and easy to understand. Anyone interested in finding alternatives to the rational approach, as well as in understanding the narrative perspective on policy analysis, cannot afford to ignore it.