PLANNING FOR A SUSTAINABLE EUROPE? - TU Berlin

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him points to “a need to devise middle range concepts through which [the] interaction
between discourses can be related to the role of individual strategic action in a nonreductionist
way” (pp.51-52). Hence his focus on discourse coalitions and storylines.
These concepts are partly about bringing a certain amount of agency back into the
picture. Rules and practices are only imbued with meaning as long as they are exercised
by a particular person, and there is always choice involved in picking between different
routines and in precise way in which these are exercised. In other words, rather than
simply note the existence of certain linguistic practices or conventions through rhetorical
analysis, what should interest us when looking at political and bureaucratic decisionmaking,
is the use, re-use, and transformation of particular images, phrases or storylines,
and who benefits from them.
Originally an idea taken from Davies and Harré (1990), Hajer (1995:56) redefines
a storyline as follows:
A storyline, as I interpret it, is a generative sort of narrative that allows actors to draw
upon various discursive categories to give meaning to specific physical or social
phenomena. The key function of storylines is that they suggest a unity in the
bewildering variety of separate discursive components parts of a problem.
Hajer also immediately adds the following key statement:
Political change may therefore well take place through the emergence of new
storylines that re-order understandings. Finding the appropriate storyline becomes an
important form of agency.
Interestingly, although somewhat reluctantly admitting the term “agency” into his
discourse vocabulary, Hajer seems ready at several points in his study to admit a
necessary focus on what one might call the makers of a storyline. Other than in the world
of creative writing, however, Hajer does not attach any importance to being the original