ABSTRACT
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Policy narratives are the rules of thumb, arguments, crisis scenarios, “war stories,” and other
accounts about how policy and management have, can, and should proceed in ways that enable
decision makers to take action, be they policymakers, managers, their analysts, or others. More
formally, policy narratives are scenarios (stories and arguments) that stabilize decision making for
issues of high complexity, uncertainty, incompleteness, and conflict. Each narrative has a begin-
ning, middle, and end (or premises and conclusions, if offered as an argument) and revolves around
a sequence of events or positions in which something is said to happen or from which something
is said to follow. A key question, then, is how to analyze and evaluate the narratives when their
truth-value cannot be determined or is disputed. Narrative policy analysis has been developed as an
approach to answering that question.