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.