Narrative Change has emerged as a field over the past few years, as nonprofits and foundations long focused on supporting human rights saw that many of their hard-won policy victories were being reversed, or were just never implemented in practice. An entire ecosystem of organizations such as the Frameworks Institute, Narrative Initiative, and ReFrame has developed, based on the insight that in order to achieve lasting, systemic change, it is not enough just to change a few policies. We need to shift the underlying system of stories that help people make sense of the world.

This is evident in the case of COVID-19 vaccines. Although the Biden administration eventually called last year for a waiver of intellectual property protections that would enable countries in the Global South to manufacture COVID-19 vaccines for themselves, international consensus on this has proved elusive. Groups such as the Health Justice Initiative in South Africa, I-MAK, and Medecins Sans Frontieres continue to cry out against a global intellectual property system that prioritizes profits over lives. But how different things could be if our underlying story of medicines was that they are public goods. We can get an inkling of this from Jonas Salk, developer of the first polio vaccine. Asked who owned the patent, Salk famously replied, “Well, the people, I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?”

Narrative change is difficult, though. Despite the fact that most Americans feel medicines are far too expensive, despite the logic that new COVID-19 variants are more likely as long as most of the world remains unvaccinated, despite the fact that taxpayer money funds much of the research leading to new drugs, including the COVID-19 vaccines, we still refuse as a society to treat medicines as essential public goods. Another area that illustrates this is that of immigration, where narratives driven by a sense of threat and insecurity seem to dominate, and as the Migration Policy Institute points out, “the stickiest negative narratives about migration are often interwoven with perceived threats to economic, physical, or cultural security, even if these threats are not well supported by data.”

Read the full article about narrative change by Brett Davidson at Stanford Social Innovation Review.