By 2000, two camps emerged over what constitutes legitimate public policy theory: postpositivists, who understand policy as contextualized through narratives and social constructions and more positivist- oriented theorists (Sabatier 2000, 137),4 whose approach is based on clear concepts and propositions, causal drivers, prediction, and falsification. The NPF was developed in response to these debates, ultimately conceiving of the framework as a “bridge” (Shanahan et al. 2013, 455) between divergent policy process approaches by holding that narratives both socially construct reality and can be
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