An Introduction to Narrative Ecology

What is Narrative Ecology?

Working with stories, relationships and patterns of meaning in a changing world.

“I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’”-Alisdair Macintyre, After Virtue

We make sense of the world through stories. Stories of who we are, where we belong, how things work, what matters and what might be possible.

Some are personal accounts of lived experience. Others are shared across communities, organisations and societies. Some are so deeply embedded in our everyday lives that we barely recognise them as stories at all.

These stories do not exist independently. They emerge through relationships, interact with other stories, influence our choices and actions, and are themselves shaped by the circumstances in which we live.

Narrative Ecology is an emerging practice concerned with understanding and working with these patterns of meaning and the relationships that sustain them.

Its purpose is not simply to collect stories, analyse them or replace existing narratives with more desirable ones. Rather, it is to create conditions in which people can notice the patterns shaping their experiences, explore different perspectives, and discover opportunities to respond and act for themselves.

Where does Narrative Ecology come from?

Narrative Ecology has no single origin or universally accepted definition. Related ideas have developed across several fields, including organisational studies, complexity science, participatory research, ecology and linguistics.

The particular tradition of Narrative Ecology explored here has its strongest practical roots in organisational knowledge management and complexity-informed approaches to working with human systems.

During the late 1990s and early 2000s, researchers and practitioners began experimenting with ways of using people’s everyday stories to understand how knowledge, experience and meaning circulate through organisations and communities.

An important change was taking place. Rather than treating stories primarily as tools for communicating messages or persuading audiences, they were increasingly being recognised as a means of exploring the patterns through which people make sense of their world.

Dave Snowden: Narrative and complexity

Dave Snowden’s work emerged from organisational knowledge management and developed into a wider approach to understanding and working with complexity.

His development of the Cynefin framework, and subsequent work on naturalising sense-making, challenged the assumption that human organisations and communities could be understood simply by analysing their component parts or identifying universal causes and solutions.

In complex situations, patterns emerge from interactions between people, their experiences and the circumstances in which they find themselves. These patterns cannot always be predicted or controlled, but they can be explored, and the conditions influencing them can sometimes be changed.

Snowden recognised the importance of everyday stories, or fragments of lived experience, as a way of understanding these patterns.

Rather than relying solely on expert interpretations, approaches such as distributed ethnography and SenseMaker enable people to contribute accounts of their experiences and, importantly, help interpret those experiences themselves.

Across many stories, patterns of perception, tension and possibility can become visible.

This shifts the emphasis from attempting to impose a preferred narrative towards understanding the existing narrative landscape and identifying possibilities for change within it.

Cynthia Kurtz: Participatory Narrative Inquiry

Working alongside Snowden and other colleagues, Cynthia Kurtz played a central role in developing the approaches that became known as Participatory Narrative Inquiry (PNI).

Its origins lie in research and practical experimentation within organisations around 1999–2001, including work undertaken at IBM by Kurtz, Snowden, Sharon Darwent and Neal Keller.

Kurtz subsequently developed PNI into a comprehensive participatory approach, documented in her book Working with Stories in Your Community or Organization.

PNI brings people together to share, explore and work with stories of their own lived experiences.

Crucially, participants are not simply sources of information for researchers or consultants. They become active participants in the process of making sense of their collective experiences.

Stories can be gathered, interpreted, compared, questioned and explored together, allowing people to discover connections, differences and possibilities that may previously have gone unnoticed.

PNI therefore provides an important practical and ethical foundation for Narrative Ecology: meaning is not simply extracted from people’s stories by an external observer, but explored through participation and collective inquiry.

Ron Donaldson: Towards Narrative Ecology

Ron Donaldson’s work offers an especially important bridge between organisational narrative practice and an explicitly ecological understanding of human systems.

With a background in the natural sciences and conservation, Ron encountered Dave Snowden’s work in 1998 while working at English Nature. His subsequent involvement in knowledge management, community engagement and Participatory Narrative Inquiry brought together an ecological way of observing the world with an interest in how people make sense of their experiences.

In his Field Notes of a Narrative Ecologist, Ron explores the idea of a narrative landscape.

Just as a field ecologist observes a landscape for evidence of relationships, processes and patterns that may not be immediately apparent, a narrative ecologist pays attention to the stories circulating through communities and organisations.

Some stories are highly visible and frequently repeated. Others remain marginal, unspoken or hidden beneath established assumptions. Stories may reinforce one another, contradict one another, or reveal tensions between different understandings of the same situation.

Ron emphasises the discipline of distinguishing people’s own accounts from the interpretations made by an observer. He also explores how narratives influence the conditions from which subsequent actions and stories emerge.

His work helps articulate Narrative Ecology as a developing practice of observation, inquiry and careful intervention.

Rather than assuming that the practitioner knows what needs to change, attention is directed towards the patterns already present, the relationships sustaining them and the possibilities that may emerge when people begin to recognise these for themselves.

A related academic development: Ecolinguistics

A complementary understanding of Narrative Ecology is emerging through academic research, particularly in ecolinguistics.

Arran Stibbe, Professor of Ecological Linguistics at the University of Gloucestershire, explores how language and stories influence the relationships between human societies and the more-than-human world.

His work builds upon ecolinguistics, ecological discourse analysis and the study of the stories we live by: the often-unexamined assumptions about the world embedded in everyday language, economics, politics and culture.

In his 2026 paper Narrative ecology: a storied approach to area, place, and ecosystem, Stibbe draws on ecolinguistics, econarrative research and earlier uses of the term Narrative Ecology to develop a framework in which narratives are understood as part of the information flows operating within ecosystems.

From this perspective, stories are not simply cultural interpretations of ecological reality. They also help shape that reality through their influence on human perception, behaviour and material interactions with the living world.

Stibbe’s approach comes from a different intellectual tradition than the organisational and participatory practices described above. Nevertheless, it raises complementary questions about how narratives participate in ecological relationships and how changing those relationships might contribute to ecological regeneration.

Narrative Ecology as a practice

My understanding and development of Narrative Ecology as a practice draws particularly on the work of Snowden, Kurtz and Donaldson, together with Gregory Bateson’s thinking about ecology, mind, communication and learning. These influences also underpin my doctoral research into meaning-making in social-ecological change.

Bateson invites us to consider meaning as something emerging through relationships, distinctions and patterns of interaction, rather than residing simply in individuals or isolated stories.

Our stories influence what we notice, what we consider possible and how we act. Our actions, in turn, can reinforce the circumstances and relationships that give rise to those stories.

Narratives are therefore not merely accounts of a world that exists independently of them. They participate in the continual making and remaking of that world.

As a developing practice, Narrative Ecology involves:

  • Attending to lived experience: Listening to stories without rushing to categorise, judge or explain them.
  • Noticing patterns and relationships: Exploring how stories interact with identities, communities, institutions, places and material conditions.
  • Making different perspectives visible: Creating opportunities for people to encounter other descriptions of circumstances they may have taken for granted.
  • Exploring what sustains patterns: Asking how particular ways of understanding and acting become established and repeatedly reinforced.
  • Creating conditions for collective sense-making: Enabling people to explore their own experiences and recognise patterns together.
  • Responding and learning: Supporting small, situated actions and observing how relationships and possibilities change as a result.

These are not steps in a fixed methodology. Narrative Ecology draws upon different methods and forms of inquiry according to the circumstances in which it is practised.

Nor is the role of the narrative ecologist necessarily to provide the correct interpretation, identify the problem or prescribe a solution.

The deeper purpose is to create conditions in which people can notice and respond to the patterns of meaning shaping their lives for themselves.

My research: Meaning-making in social-ecological change

My doctoral research at the University of Waterloo explores how people make sense of their lives, work and relationships with the natural world in circumstances of social and ecological change.

Working with narratives from people engaged in farming and land-based livelihoods, I am interested in how meaning emerges through relationships between personal experience, identity, community, place and the wider economic and ecological systems in which people live.

Drawing particularly on Gregory Bateson’s ecology of mind and ideas of recursive framing, logical types and double description the research explores how patterns of meaning become established and sustained. How do stories about work, livelihood, success, responsibility and belonging shape people’s choices? How do those choices reinforce or challenge the circumstances from which these stories emerge? And what happens when different understandings of the world come into tension?

Rather than treating individual narratives as isolated accounts, I am exploring how they interact to form wider patterns — what might be understood as narrative ecologies.

An important part of this inquiry is examining how established ways of thinking about work, economic growth and the relationship between humans and nature may constrain our capacity to imagine and participate in different futures.

The research is also informing my development of Narrative Ecology as a practice. I am interested not simply in identifying or interpreting patterns of meaning, but in how participatory approaches might help people recognise these patterns for themselves, encounter different perspectives and discover possibilities for change.

In this sense, my research brings together ecological thinking, narrative inquiry and complexity-informed practice around a central question:

How might becoming more attentive to the patterns through which we make meaning help us navigate social and ecological change?

Why does this matter?

Many contemporary challenges — ecological degradation, climate change, economic insecurity, social fragmentation and crises of belonging — cannot be understood through technical knowledge alone.

They are also sustained through relationships, expectations, identities and deeply embedded assumptions about how the world works.

For example, the idea that economic growth is necessary for prosperity, or that humans exist separately from nature, does not persist simply because people believe particular statements.

Such understandings are reproduced through institutions, cultural practices, economic relationships and everyday experiences. They are connected to the circumstances within which people live and make decisions.

Changing the story is therefore not simply a matter of replacing one set of words with another.

Narrative Ecology provides ways of attending to these wider patterns of relationship, recognising where differences and tensions exist, and exploring how new possibilities might emerge.

It is both a way of understanding the world and a practice of learning how to participate in its continual becoming.

Further reading and resources

Foundations in complexity and participatory narrative

Dave Snowden

Cynthia Kurtz

Narrative Ecology in practice

Ron Donaldson

Academic and ecological perspectives

Arran Stibbe

Gregory Bateson

  • Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972).
  • Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (1979).

This page presents my evolving understanding of Narrative Ecology as a practice. It draws on several complementary, but distinct, intellectual and practical traditions. It is not intended to represent a definition universally shared by the people and approaches discussed here.