Avoiding the blame game: NGOs and government narrative strategies in landscape fire policy debates in Russia

Abstract

To what extent can nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) communicate policy problems in an authoritarian country, and how limited are they in narrating policy alternatives? This article seeks to develop studies on the application of the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) in Russia, extend our knowledge about the use of narrative strategies in centralized and authoritarian policy processes, highlight certain methodological peculiarities related to the devil–angel shift calculation, and test causal mechanism hypotheses that have not previously been applied to the analysis of policy debates in Russia. The study examines hypotheses based on the narrative strategies (devil–angel shift, scope of conflict, and causal mechanisms) that were used by government and NGO coalitions in the debate about “landscape fire” policies in Russia over the period 2019–2021. The results show that the differences between the coalition's narrative strategies were not as significant as had been shown previously. The government coalition uses a strong angel shift in its narratives and avoids conflict expansion. The NGO coalition demonstrates a moderate angel shift, but with the use of conflict expansion in parts of the narratives. Both coalitions use the intentional or inadvertent causal mechanism blaming the citizens for starting the fires, but differ in employing causal mechanisms when discussing the large scale of landscape fires.