This article investigates how policy narratives shape sustainability governance, by examining sustainability imaginaries and macrolevel narratives in urban transport policy through the lens of the Narrative Policy Framework. It examines how sustainability policy is shaped not only by institutions and interests, but by the stories actors tell about the future. Focusing on sustainability governance, it argues that policy processes are structured by competing macrolevel narratives that articulate different understandings of what sustainability means and how it should be pursued.
The article brings together two bodies of scholarship that are often treated separately: sustainability science-based research on sustainable imaginaries, and policy process theory, particularly the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF). Sustainability, the authors argue, is inherently normative and future-oriented. It begins as a vision of a desirable future before being translated into policy action, and these visions are continually reworked through policy discourse.
Building on work by Adloff and Neckels, the authors conceptualise three ideal-typical sustainability trajectories — modernization, transformation and control — and translate them into sustainability policy paradigms. Drawing on Stauffer’s account of macrolevel narratives as policy paradigms “in story form”, they show how each paradigm is underpinned by distinct cultural and institutional narratives.
Modernization narratives emphasise economic growth, technological innovation and efficiency, treating sustainability as compatible with existing lifestyles. Transformation narratives, by contrast, are grounded in strong sustainability and foreground intrinsic environmental value, social justice and changes to consumption and mobility patterns. A third paradigm, control, centres on emergency framings and authoritative intervention, though it plays a more limited role in the empirical analysis presented.
The article’s core research question asks to what degree macrolevel narratives aligned with these sustainability paradigms shape specific policy processes. To address this, the authors develop a novel heuristic that links macrolevel narratives to observable policy discourse. They operationalise paradigms as ideal-typical “motifs” — coherent sets of policy stances an actor would hold if fully aligned with a given narrative — and compare these with empirically observed positions.
This approach is applied to twelve years of urban transport policy discourse in the Swiss city of Zürich. Using automated discourse network analysis of a large newspaper corpus, the authors examine how organisational actors position themselves on issues such as car use reduction, cycling infrastructure, public transport, e-mobility and speed limits. Across multiple empirical tests, they find that Zurich’s transport policy discourse is meaningfully structured by modernization and transformation narratives, even if real-world actors rarely conform perfectly to ideal-types.
The article contributes both theoretically and methodologically. It demonstrates the value of conceptualising sustainability imaginaries as macrolevel policy narratives within the narrative policy framework, and it offers a heuristic that can be adapted to other policy domains. More broadly, it underscores a central insight for sustainability research: the stories told about sustainable futures matter for how policy processes unfold.
You can read the original research in Policy & Politics at
Angst, M., Müller, N. N., Walker, V., & Pham-Truffert, M. (2026). How policy narratives shape sustainability governance: a case study of urban transport policy discourse. Policy & Politics (published online ahead of print 2026) from https://doi.org/10.1332/03055736Y2025D000000084
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