Narratives and storytelling are powerful tools for working with complex social and environmental challenges. They help practitioners and researchers make sense of diverse perspectives and lived experiences, and surface how people understand issues such as climate change, health, or community wellbeing. Stories are particularly valuable for supporting marginalised voices, engaging plural perspectives, and making abstract ideas more accessible and meaningful.
Across research, policy and practice, narrative approaches are being used to inform strategy, shape programmes, and support collective learning. Stories can translate technical knowledge for wider audiences, reveal how policies are experienced on the ground, and create shared language for collaboration across sectors. When treated with care, they can also help people notice patterns, question dominant assumptions, and imagine alternative futures.
For practitioners, the challenge is how to work with stories in ways that are ethical, reciprocal and useful for action. The resources below offer concrete guidance and examples, from science communication and organisational learning to public policy and systems change. They highlight methods, case studies and reflections that can help you design and facilitate narrative work in your own context.
Using narratives and storytelling to communicate science with nonexpert audiences
This 2014 article by Michael Dahlstrom provides a useful introduction to how narrative forms can make scientific information more engaging and understandable for non‑expert audiences. It explains why stories support comprehension, recall and interest, and shows how narrative formats dominate mass‑media science communication. For practitioners, it offers practical guidance and cautions on using narratives to communicate complex science effectively and ethically, especially when working with contested issues or resistant audiences.
Storytelling for Systems Change: Insights from the Field
This report shares practice‑based lessons from people using storytelling within place‑based systems change initiatives in Australia. It offers concrete examples of how stories can be gathered, worked with, and shared to support reflection, relationship‑building, and community leadership. Practitioners will find useful questions, design choices, and cautions for integrating narrative work into programmes, partnerships and evaluation.
Storytelling for Systems Change: Listening to Understand
This companion report focuses on what it takes for governments and funders to genuinely hear and respond to community stories. It unpacks common barriers inside institutions and offers practices that can help build readiness to listen, such as different ways of convening, holding accountability, and working with evidence. It is especially relevant if you work at the interface between communities, philanthropy and public agencies.
Storytelling and Systems Change
This article considers how storytelling can support systems change practice and research. It introduces stories as a way to make systems visible, connect lived experience with abstract ideas, and work with multiple perspectives. For practitioners, it offers a concise set of principles and questions to help design narrative work that is reflexive, relational and attentive to power.
Once Upon a Bureaucrat: Exploring the role of stories in government
This piece by Thea Snow reflects on how stories circulate inside government and what that means for people trying to influence policy and practice. It highlights which stories tend to be heard, how they get filtered, and where there is room to do things differently. Practitioners working with or within public agencies can use these insights to design more attentive, relational storytelling and storylistening practices.
Mastering the art of the narrative: using stories to shape public policy
Michael D. Jones and Deserai Crow unpack how policy narratives are constructed, focusing on elements such as setting, plot, characters and moral. They show how these components influence which policy solutions gain traction and which voices are heard. For practitioners engaging in policy work, the article offers a clear framework for crafting narratives that explain problems, highlight consequences and support evidence‑informed options without oversimplifying complex issues.
How do stories change systems? – Stories and Systems Learning Circle
This 2025 blog by Anika Baset summarises the first session of the Stories and Systems Learning Circle, which explored how stories shape the systems we live and work in. It introduces ideas such as dominant narratives, the dangers of single stories, and the value of holding multiple perspectives. For practitioners, it offers concrete questions and prompts you can use to design learning spaces where people share, analyse and re‑story their experiences as part of systems change work.
Researching Organisational Change and Learning: A Narrative Approach
Carl Rhodes outlines a narrative approach to researching organisational change and learning, grounded in collecting and presenting stories from people within organisations. The paper discusses power, representation and pluralism in organisational storytelling, and describes a research process attentive to multiple voices. Practitioners can use these ideas to design narrative‑based inquiry and reflection processes that respect participants’ perspectives while surfacing how learning and power dynamics play out in organisations.
Narrative approaches sit alongside other social science practices on this site, including social learning, futures and foresight, and evaluation in complex settings.
[* Photo: ICM-Motueka programme]