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Abstract

Narrative change and strategic communications are attractive tools for city officials setting policy for integration and migration. These tools allow for the construction and development of shared stories of place-based identity and belonging. Stories about migration often focus on (border) control, the value of the contribution of migrants, and the need for compassion. However, these frames of compassion and control are often oppositional: they can alienate rather than persuade, and they can neglect constituents whose views do not align with the polarities. They also elide other narrative frames, which may appeal to broader groups, particularly those focused on integration and belonging. This article analyzes three cities’ attempts at narrative change strategies that complexify migration narratives with place-based narratives of inclusion. From these case studies, this article identifies practical implications for local policy-makers and sets an interdisciplinary agenda for future research.

Keywords

integration local government narrative cognition place shaping cities

Narrative change has emerged as an important topic among policy-makers working on migration and integration, including at the city level. As they attempt to identify, develop, and implement shared stories of place-based identity and belonging, policy-makers and politicians are engaging in complex processes of evaluating different, often opposing, narrative frames and their efficacy as tools for policymaking and implementation.

This article critically reviews the relevant evidence that might help in the development of efficient strategic communication approaches that support migrant integration and inclusion. From an academic perspective, these strategic communication approaches sit at interdisciplinary crossroads: many of them have emerged from policy-makers, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and think tanks; and they draw together perspectives from political science, communication studies, migration studies, sociology, policy studies, and cognitive psychology. As such, how can interdisciplinary research support and enrich the development of these narrative change strategies? This article attempts to act as a steppingstone between these disciplinary approaches by scoping a research agenda and providing suggestions for policy-makers at the city level.

Many stories about migration focus on three main areas that are sometimes deployed in combination: control of immigration (e.g., border controls, immigration enforcement; restriction of immigration numbers and access to public services), valuing the contribution of migrants (both economic and social, alongside analysis of costs of migration on services), and the need for compassion (e.g., focused on those seeking protection often linked to universal human rights and international solidarity). However, these stories often elide other narrative frames that may appeal to broader groups, in particular those about integration and place-making—questions about how we live well together and the types of places and communities policy-makers are aiming to create and develop. They do not necessarily reflect findings from relevant public opinion research on prevalent attitudes toward migration and integration. These findings, related to the salience of migration and integration, public opinion, and underlying values and preferences, have potentially profound policy implications.

Theoretical Framework

Narratives shape our collective common sense, influencing what we have been told and have read. They can resonate deeply with how we frame and think about topics. They are the “frames that tell a story. . . . A narrative has a point to it, a moral. It’s about how you should live your life—or how you shouldn’t” (Lakoff 2008, 250). Narratives are persuasive; they constitute and reconstitute the identities and attitudes of individuals, communities, and groups (Mishler 1992). Narrative influence is often an implicit process, although it can be proactively shaped over time through changing collectively held stories about people’s lives and communities. For example, when we talk about poverty, we often draw on deep-seated narratives, such as individual efforts to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps.” We can unconsciously fit new stories into these old narratives. Counternarratives proposed by activists and organizations focus on emphasizing shared humanity and solidarity, and moving the discussion on poverty from the individual to the system, as a proactive process to shift and change these narratives (Miller et al. 2021).

Narrative analysis provides three intertwined levels, the personal story (told by an individual about their own experience), the interpersonal (cocreation between a narrator and their audience), and the public narrative (publicly available shared narratives of social life) (Stephens and Breheny 2013).

This differentiation between the personal and public is mirrored in the grey literature on narrative change, supporting policy actors in developing strategic communications on migration and integration. In their “reframing migration narratives” toolkit, the International Centre for Policy Advocacy (ICPA) describes the link between messaging and stories as crucial to narrative development: “The focus . . . is on humanizing and authenticating messages in an engaging and memorable way through stories . . . for a narrative change campaign, this is a core pillar towards the success of campaigns, as people are really attracted to and remember good stories” (ICPA 2019).

The intersection between differing layers of narrative is pertinent in the case of city actors, where narrative approaches mirror the multilevel nature of city governance—from community and grassroots approaches focused on the individual and then the interpersonal (for example through community organizing) versus the institutional focus of city administrations in creating collective shared narratives.

One example of creating public narratives at the city level are city branding strategies. These place-branding strategies have a dual role: fulfilling both an internal function of representing the population back to itself to create a shared sense of belonging and helping all residents to identify with the city and an external function focused on attracting investment and tourism (Belabas, Eshuis, and Scholten 2020). Externally orientated branding and marketing are focused on distinctiveness (Kavaratzis and Ashworth 2006), whereas public narratives may seek to focus on questions of identity and belonging—this quest for exclusivity (and desirability) risks being in conflict with that of inclusivity—in particular when applied to topics of migration and integration.

Similarly, if narratives are about setting community boundaries (or deciding who is included), power dynamics are a core facet of the intersection between narrative and place (Jensen 2007). While these power dynamics undoubtedly exist within the city context, these dynamics may also offer a reason as to why city narratives of inclusion can prove easier to craft than those at a national level. According to theories of multilevel governance, migration governance is held predominantly at the national level and contains an intrinsic exclusionary focus, whereas the local competency of integration has the potential to be inherently inclusionary (although this is certainly not a given). However, rather than being imposed upon a populace, effective narratives must be grounded in commonly and collectively held stories (Grenni, Horlings, and Soini 2019), with the process of narrative development being one of identifying and amplifying these existing stories, rather than attempting to impose new ones.

If narrative involves the creation of stories, then framing describes a proactive process of selection and salience, whereby framing is to select aspects of reality and amplify them to make them more salient to promote a particular interpretation. Returning to the example of poverty, given that there is an existing narrative of “an unfair system” alongside narratives focusing on individuals (e.g., bootstraps), one framing approach could be to select, expand, and amplify the narrative of poverty as an unfair system, framing individual stories as navigating this system (Miller et al. 2021).

“Typically frames diagnose, evaluate and prescribe” (Entman 1993, 52). This question of salience and selection is particularly important for migration and integration issues, where migration has much higher salience as a policy area, generally, than integration. Where narrative is about defining certain stories, framing is about taking existing stories and recasting their constituent metaphors and mental leaps to shape perception. As outlined by the Frameworks Institute,¹ “People rely on mental shortcuts to make sense of social problems. We know that some of these shortcuts are more helpful than others in how we see and support solutions. If we communicate in ways that cue unproductive ways of thinking, people dismiss our ideas or jump to unhelpful responses” (see also Fiske et al. 2002; Fiske 2018).

The intersection of narrative and public opinion

The best method for understanding existing public opinion is allied to the question of shaping narratives. Segmentation research has garnered interest from policy-makers in this field. Segmentation has been deployed in the UK through, for example, Hope not Hate’s “Fear and Hope” (Carter and Lowles 2017, 2019), which described seven tribes of public opinion and by More in Common (Hawkins 2019), segmenting and strategizing on public opinion on migration in a number of European states and the United States.

Segmentation derived from marketing in the 1950s onward and has more recently been applied to political campaigning and subsequently within the social sciences, in particular in psychology, where there are overlaps with Jung’s work on personality types (Hine et al. 2017). Jung’s work was instrumental in developing common personality tests that are widely used and influential outside of academia, while being subject to significant concerns about validity from scholars (Pettinger 2005). That being said, scholars have used segmentation analysis on migration to complexify the understanding of public opinion research. Its most important insight is that individuals are well aware of the complex and multifaceted nature of immigration and do not need it to be communicated in a solely “good versus bad” format—omitting the large areas of consensus and forcing the debate into an artificial bipolarity (Dennison and Dražanová 2018).

Segmentation research instead attempts to outline two broad themes (while obviously allowing for differences in differing country contexts, and limited, in this analysis, to Europe and the United States):

The presence of a “middle group” sat between the two polarities of public opinion. Instead of viewing the public as divided 50/50 on the topic of migration, this analysis posits the existence of a majority group whose views and values are distinctive from both those who are extremely antimigration and those who hold very positive views, but who are often not well represented in discourse on migration and its translation into policymaking. Sometimes known as the “anxious” or “persuadable” middle, this group has also been defined as “balancers”—describing “most” people as those who see both the pressures and gains of immigration (Carter and Rutter 2018).

That this process can be used to categorize people into broad categories based on underlying values and that messages can be crafted that speak directly to these groups, while acknowledging the need to maintain a community wide message, rather than micro targeting conflicting messages (Ahad and Banalescu-Bogdan 2019).

Defining dominant integration narratives

If we suppose, then, that processes of narrative formation can be useful to policy-makers, as part of place branding and place shaping, and that this may be strengthened through the use of public opinion research to understand local feeling on this topic, then the next logical question becomes what these narratives might be.

One conception of the dominant migration narratives sees that the majority of narratives fall into one of the “three c’s” of control, compassion, and contribution.² Control lies squarely within the policy field of migration governance, and this is usually a clear responsibility of central governments (Scholten and Penninx 2016), with a minimal role for local government. Control narratives on migration (Bosworth and Guild 2008; Musaro 2019) focus on either in-country controls (such as identity cards, or the “hostile” or “compliant” environment in the UK) or border controls (including visa policy, but also irregular entry at the border). While highly salient, local government (in particular in the highly centralized context of the UK) has limited control over migration in this way, and so it is unlikely to be a common frame for local policymaking outside of border areas (because a city has limited levers it can use to have any effect over it), although it may very well feature strongly as part of a city’s political culture, and often drives media coverage (Allen 2016).

A compassion narrative features a clear focus on universal human rights, a likely skew toward migrants seeking protection, either as refugees or asylum seekers, and a focus on international solidarity. However, this frame can also be complexified, layered as it is with judgements related to the moral deservingness of migrants and “vulnerability” as a criterion for deservingness, when not fully allied with universalism (Smith and Waite 2019).

In the segmentation approaches, this frame is extremely popular for those with strongly pro-immigration views (Hawkins 2019). In Europe, those who particularly value “universalism,” where people are seen as equal and should have equal opportunities in life, are overwhelmingly likely to be pro-immigration; while those who value “security,” “conformity,” and “tradition” are likely to be more opposed (Dennison and Dražanová 2018).

These opposing frames of compassion and control may be as likely to alienate the opposing side as to persuade it and, in keeping with the focus on “balancers,” may not speak at all to those without already fixed views on migration.

The final message of the three c’s focuses on (economic) contribution and its flipside, economic competition. Kierans (2019) provides an overview of the literature, which focuses on the following points made in relation to economic contribution:

immigrants could bring different skills and aptitudes, and transmit those to nonimmigrant colleagues (and vice versa);

immigration could be complementary to trade in goods and services (because of immigrant networks or for other reasons);

immigrants could increase competition in particular labor markets, increasing the incentive for natives to acquire certain skills;

immigrant entrepreneurs could increase competition and bring new ideas into product markets; and

workplace diversity (across a number of dimensions) could increase (or decrease) productivity and innovation.

For example, New American Economy,³ a U.S.-based NGO, focuses on evidencing the economic contribution of migrants. It aims to document this contribution and to draw in new messengers (specifically business). Of course, economic impact of migration does not flow in only one direction, and research also considers the fiscal impact of migration on public services as well as theories of economic competition, although the evidence for economic competition as a driver of antimigrant sentiment is limited (Dennison and Dražanová 2018).

Economic contribution is seen as the more measurable of the narratives outlined, and so related messages often get drawn into debates as to whether “facts” or “narratives” are best placed to influence public opinion on migration. Shirky’s statement in 2016 that policy-makers have brought fact checkers to a culture war gives a sense of an increasingly pervasive view⁴ among policy-makers reflected by Nyhan and Reifler (2010) that in addition to being ineffectual, presenting people with facts can actually produce a “backlash” effect and increase antipathy toward that argument. Wood and Porter (2019) contest this, finding that even when information challenges someone’s point of view, factual information is heeded. However, the method of communication and the messenger clearly play roles as important as the message itself (a point to which I return later).

Examining these dominant (though by no means exhaustive narratives), we can see their interconnectedness, alongside the absence of integration or place-based narratives.

Reflecting on the segmentation analysis outlined above, some policy-makers focus on arguments that act as a bridge between the polarities outlined here. If control and compassion act as binaries that appeal respectively to those with more anti- or pro-immigration views, then messages that seek to straddle these messages and align them with core value bases (for example, related to “authority” or “care”) will act as unifying messages. Hawkins (2019) sets out that using language that balances competing core beliefs to communicate about topics that are controversial can allow for a broader reach across demographic profiles and political divides. In the case of immigration, an approach that balances the competing foundations of “authority” and “care” is identified as generating the greatest consensus.

This approach seeks to explain attitudes toward migration through a broader framework of values. Moral foundations theory (Graham, Haidt, and Nosek 2009) sets out five sets of moral intuitions: harm/care, fairness/reciprocity, ingroup/loyalty, authority/ respect, and purity/sanctity. It finds that liberals consistently prefer and use harm/care and fairness/reciprocity, whereas conservatives use the five groups more evenly.

Research using a similar approach of ten basic personal values to predict attitudes (Schwartz 2012; Dennison and Dražanová 2018) finds that only four of those values, “universalism,” “conformity,” “tradition,” and “security”—that is, those very clearly aligned with the relatively fixed narratives of control and compassion (conceptualized here through the prism of human rights and universalism)—have strong effects on views on immigration, with others having little or no effect.

However, one core element missing from this overview is the role of local level and localized narratives of place within this story. Integration narratives center on identity and local belonging and can take a place-shaping role—focused on the collective definition of a shared identity—as opposed to the more specifically persuasive function of the migration narratives outlined above. Localized integration narratives may be able to benefit from wider “place-shaping” and “place-branding” efforts, to widen their appeal and ensure that these narratives are not confined only to newcomer communities, or those already engaged. Localized narratives may be able to amplify the newcomer voice itself, not as a distinctive other, but as a constituent and equal part of a citywide or communitywide “we.”

Case Examples

The findings in this article focus on attempts at narrative change or strategic communications in three cities—Bristol and Liverpool in the UK and Pittsburgh in the United States. While distinctive in their respective contexts, each city has attempted to craft a citywide narrative of inclusion.

“Our Liverpool”

The foreword to the “Our Liverpool” strategy sets out its overarching vision:

Liverpool is a welcoming city, a City of Sanctuary that is famed for its long history of inward and outward migration, a history that has contributed to the city’s diversity, vibrancy and the development of our unique accent. But having a welcoming tradition alone is not sufficient; having a well thought out and coordinated approach to helping migrants settle in the city is also vital. Through this strategy, we aim to ensure that people who make Liverpool their new home feel safe, supported and are able to reach their full potential. We have deliberately called the strategy “Our Liverpool” as we want to promote mutual understanding between and within communities and support an inclusive culture in which longer-standing communities feel able to understand and welcome migrants. (Liverpool City Council 2019)

The “Our Liverpool” brand is an attempt to create a distinctive city narrative on migrant inclusion. “Our” is a colloquialism of the distinctive Liverpool accent, and denotes collective ownership, alongside specific Liverpudlian identity. The statement draws on both the long-standing migrant history of the port city and attempts to link this with newcomer communities. Despite the focus on specific refugee and asylum seeker communities, the strategy highlights the “mutual understanding,” including with long-standing communities—a core facet of academic research on integration (that it is a two-way process of mutual accommodation), often missing in practice from much integration work at the local level.

The compassion narrative outlined above is clearly present here, exemplified through the commitment as a “City of Sanctuary.”⁵ However, this is complexified through the wider focus on place shaping and longer-standing communities, aiming to ensure that “Our Liverpool” is a shared narrative across the city, not only for migrant and newcomer communities, or for those already supportive of the compassion narrative.

A more welcoming Pittsburgh

The “Welcoming Pittsburgh” plan sets out the priorities of this community-wide plan and narrative:

Immigration and migration drove the early 20th-century economic and population growth that built Pittsburgh into a city of 700,000 and one of America’s great industrial centers. Like many of America’s post-industrial cities, Pittsburgh has seen substantial population loss in recent generations, but unlike most others, our city has also seen an accompanying decline: from a thriving destination for immigrants at the height of our population growth to currently having the lowest percentage of new immigration of any of America’s top 40 metropolitan areas. . . . These critical challenges—stagnant population growth, diminished diversity, and persistent hurdles to opportunity—demand a comprehensive approach to change if Pittsburgh is to continue to thrive in the 21st century. (City of Pittsburgh 2014)

The accompanying plan is focused on three main areas:

–Welcome Neighbor (the role of receiving communities),

–Bridge to the City (making the city more accessible to newcomer communities), and

–Prospering Together (attracting and retaining talent).

The “Welcoming Pittsburgh” plan makes a clear contribution argument, focusing on the need for immigration to meet the workforce demands of growth and make the city more inclusive and welcoming for those already there. Population decline is framed as the policy problem, and migration (through talent attraction and retention) as the policy solution. However, the externally focused priority of attraction is partnered with two more internally focused themes—one based on the neighborliness of receiving communities and the second based on developing access to services. This narrative attempts to “reflect back” the city to its inhabitants, acknowledging the challenges of decline while positing migration as a positive contributor but also, crucially, appealing to a “balancer” mindset of neighborliness and friendliness.

Narrative work is complemented by community consultation methods as integral to its formation and implementation.⁶ This method aims to mitigate the risk that narratives, in particular those focused on talent attraction, are exclusive or divorced from existing residents by including them in the process. Community contact is a longstanding integration policy tool (Hewstone and Swart 2011), so these approaches allow for a natural synergy between form and content, both informing communications strategies and, potentially, enacting them.

#WeAreBristol

#WeAreBristol is a communications campaign that

started with the creation of a film involving over 60 Bristol strangers from all walks of life and has since been embraced by the people of Bristol to symbolize our unique and diverse city and the people who live here. #WeAreBristol embodies how we are all working together to build a city of hope, where everyone that chooses to live here is treated fairly and has the same life chances. (#WeAreBristol; Bristol City Council 2019)

The film referenced in the quote takes a distinctive psychological approach presented as an experiment, based on a similar video “All of Us” initially developed as an advertising campaign.⁷ The film focuses on local identity building, focusing on the underlying commonalities of Bristolians despite surface differences. The campaign presents the intersections of micronarratives of personal stories of individual belonging and a larger picture of place shaping and the idea of “Bristol” and what it means to be “Bristolian.”

This approach moves beyond a straightforward compassion narrative, as it does not explicitly frame itself as focused on newcomer communities. Indeed, the design of the video is explicitly to breakdown these identity-based groupings to replace them with a new story of “us.” However, it clearly invokes a narrative of solidarity and universalism, which are intrinsically interlinked with the formulation of this narrative. Again, this method orientates the narrative toward “balancer” opinions focused on shared consensus, rather than overt differences.

Analysis and Lessons

Each of these cities has proactively attempted to use “narrative” and strategic communications as a tool in their integration policymaking.

The missing integration narrative

Narrative work has focused on migration governance narratives to the detriment of narratives that focus on place building and shaping, at least partially due to the lower salience of integration as a policy question. These are core functions of a more expansive conception of the role of local government (e.g., Lyons 2007), which is not often seen through a migration governance or integration lens.

Insights from segmentation research highlight the potential for these integration-focused narratives related to identity and belonging to appeal to groups without strongly held views on migration. They can form part of wider policy projects related to defining shared local stories, which may have a greater chance of appealing to the city as a whole.

This does not mean that the three c’s of migration governance narratives should be abandoned by policy-makers. Rather, the city examples here seek to complexify this narrative. All three examples combine one aspect of these narratives with grounded place-making or place-shaping perspectives. Liverpool and Bristol take the compassion narrative frame and adapt it in their own circumstances—Liverpool with a specific focus on widening their refugee strategy out to a broader audience, Bristol by using individual stories to develop a city-wide narrative of solidarity. Pittsburgh combines a contribution-based narrative of talent attraction, with ideas of neighborliness and accessibility.

From the personal to the place based

Bristol’s approach speaks to the interconnected levels of narrative work and the intersection between personal narratives of identity and public narratives. Narrative work on the local level (either citywide or neighborhood specific) provides an opportunity to bind these two aspects. Working on the personal and collective levels allows for the foregrounding of individual voices, including those of newcomer communities (see Pittsburgh’s community planning approach). Narrative approaches derived from political campaigning foreground persuasion as opposed to a shared endeavor of identity construction. This approach can be (even inadvertently) exclusive of newcomer voices (and marginalized longer-standing communities) and risk replicating exclusion. Narrative as a project of persuasion places the emphasis on the views of a fixed public who, in learning more about the contribution of migrants, or the control of their numbers or the need for compassion toward them, nevertheless creates an “us” in contrast to “them”—even in cases where the “them” is being presented in a positive manner. By contrast, place-making approaches seek to dissolve these boundaries and foreground shared processes of mutual accommodation and place making (in keeping the literature on integration processes, e.g., Spencer and Charsley 2016).

Place-making approaches are not immune from instrumentalism, however. Place shaping, when seen through the prism of branding risks, inhibits the development of inclusionary narratives through the need for external exclusivity. Similarly, processes of diversity and the need for in-depth community building and place shaping may be subverted by a superficial attempt to display diversity as a mode of marketing the city, rather than as a reflection of processes of identity building within the city (Belabas, Eshuis, and Scholten 2020).

Show don’t just tell

As narrative and strategic communications become part of the policy toolkit in integration and migration governance, then the case studies presented here highlight the need to maintain the link among these communications and policy-making and service delivery, pairing narrative work with action planning and policy outputs. In Liverpool and Pittsburgh, this is overt—the narrative is itself formed through its link to an accompanying strategy and action plan. In the case of #WeAreBristol, the accompanying website includes calls to action directed to citizens, placing a point of emphasis on shared civic responsibility. In both approaches, we see the importance of communications being matched by action, rather than sitting in isolation, in which case they run the risk of being seen as inauthentic or dislocated.

The role of the messengers

All efforts to define audiences and craft narratives ultimately rely not only on defining a message, but also the messengers. The role of media clearly plays a significant role in both defining and transmitting migration narratives (e.g., Blinder and Allen 2016)—which is not considered in this article—in particular the role of local media. However, the approaches outlined do identify other potentially significant voices, such as the role of employer or business voices, as well as a sustained role for community voices and consultation, including through coproduction.

All of this points to a positive picture for the role of cities in developing local narratives of inclusion. However, capacity restraints and the lack of coordination between policy-making and communications mean that too often policy-makers are charged with refining narrative content, with communications professionals focused only on design or dissemination (Ahad and Banulescu-Bogdan 2019). If narrative change is to be a priority, or at the least a component in the policy toolbox, it needs to be matched with the communications and policy expertise to enact it successfully.

Conclusion

Cities have the potential to define and deliver whole place narratives of inclusion as a core part of their work on migrant integration and inclusion. To do this requires an approach that marries research across disciplines, synthesized to support:

—the understanding of public opinion, from both research and sustained community consultation and partnership, potentially including through segmentation and values-based approaches;

—identification (and testing) of citywide narratives of inclusion that build on dominant migration narratives adapted through a place-shaping lens with a focus on neighborliness, community contact, and belonging; and

—the development of communications expertise as an integral part of the policymaking process on migration and integration governance.

As set out in this issue, stakeholders could benefit from the synthesized expertise drawn from political science to cognitive psychology to develop, define, and deliver narrative approaches as a core policy tool to promote integration and inclusion at the local level.

Footnotes

Notes

Jacqueline Broadhead is director of the Global Exchange on Migration and Diversity, part of the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS) at the University of Oxford. Her research interests include integration policy, migration governance at the local level, knowledge exchange, and narratives of inclusion.

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How an Interdisciplinary Approach to Narrative Can Support Policymaking on Migration and Integration at the City Level

Abstract

Keywords

Theoretical Framework

The intersection of narrative and public opinion

Defining dominant integration narratives

Case Examples

“Our Liverpool”

A more welcoming Pittsburgh

#WeAreBristol

Analysis and Lessons

The missing integration narrative

From the personal to the place based

Show don’t just tell

The role of the messengers

Conclusion

Footnotes

Notes

References