Developing theoretically grounded causal maps to examine and improve policy narratives about global challenges

The Sustainable Development Goals present a call to action for all countries to accelerate the implementation of solutions to address the world's biggest challenges. While policy portfolios to achieve such goals should be varied, often dominant policy narratives cluster around limited themes. We use a grounded theory approach to elicit causality from qualitative data to visualize interactions across variables spanning multiple domains influencing global challenges. We develop a comprehensive causal loop diagram, where we assess the impact of dominant policy narratives and expand the formulation of policy options. Our approach serves as an exemplar application of qualitative system dynamics to distill the operational logic of policy narratives that can subsequently be considered in model‐based policy analysis. We illustrate our approach by focusing on the interactions among poverty and hunger and compare policy implications arising from the dominant narratives only versus those arising from a more comprehensive understanding of the interactions. © 2024 The Author(s). System Dynamics Review published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of System Dynamics Society.