Erzählungen des Kindes‐ und Erwachsenenschutzes: Eine Anwendung und Erweiterung desNarrative Policy Frameworks

Abstract

The Child and Adult Protection Authorities (KESB) have been the subject of controversial discussion since their establishment in 2013. The reform of the Guardianship Law provided for an institutional shift away from local guardianship authorities to regional specialist authorities. This article uses the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) to examine the history of today’s controversy, simultaneously proposing an analytic strengthening of said framework. Previous NPF studies summarize policy actors into opponents and proponents. As a result, we do not know whether different actors use different narratives. We therefore separate the expert from the MP discourse. The analysis shows that the experts' arguments for a new institutional arrangement and a person‐oriented narrative dominated, which put the fundamental rights of the persons affected by guardianship measures up front. The study contributes to the understanding of the current controversy, in which a person‐oriented narrative seems to be dominant again, directed against the new authorities.

How to Manage Organizational Reputation when Under Attack: Learnings from the Child and Adult Protection Authorities

“…The reason for this is that we are interested in what actually had a broad public impact. Debates around CAPA otherwise often take place in rather closed expert circles (Hildbrand et al 2020). This communication has no impact on reputation.…”

“…Our case is the Swiss Child and Adult Protection Authorities (CAPA; in German known as "Kindes-und Erwachsenenschutzbehörden (KESB)). The CAPA, which have been in operation since 2013 after an extensive policy change process (see Hildbrand et al 2020 andStauffer 2022a), have gained the reputation of being the "most hated authority" in the German-speaking part of Switzerland within a very short period of time (Dorer 2017; all citations are authors' translations). The so-called "Flaach case," in which a mother suffocated her two children and subsequently accused the responsible CAPA of having driven her to despair, triggered a wave of nationwide outrage that provoked numerous insults and even death threats against CAPA employees.…”

From zero to villain: Applying narrative analysis in research on organizational reputation

“…Thus, the CAPA have both problem-causing and problemaffected target groups. 3 While throughout the twentieth century, local lay authorities had been in charge of implementing the CAPP, the Swiss national parliament judged in 2008 that this task was too complex for laypersons and that forthwith, experts such as lawyers, psychologists, and social workers should take over (Hildbrand et al, 2020). Organized in more than 140 CAPA situated all over Switzerland, these experts took up their work in January 2013.…”

Narrative plots for regulatory, distributive, and redistributive policies

“…Regulatory rules can point either in a restrictive direction, constraining the target groups’ behavior, or in a lenient direction, expanding the scope of action for specific groups. NPF analyses of regulatory policies abound (see, e.g., Gray & Jones, 2016; Hildbrand et al., 2020). In regulatory policies, what is policy‐specific about narratives is that they are essentially about convincing that a suggested or adopted—more restrictive or more lenient—policy action is legitimate, as is the focus on the groups that are targeted through these policies.…”

“…Its key assertions hold that, firstly, policy narratives have a common form, consisting of “precise narrative elements” (Shanahan, Jones, McBeth & Radaelli, 2018, 175), and, secondly, their content can be generalized by studying narrative strategies and policy beliefs (ibid., 177). The NPF has ignited a remarkably active research community, alongside (predominantly) quantitative also including qualitative research (Gray & Jones, 2016), yet—as Stauffer and Kuenzler (2021) also highlight—moving rather slowly to the European community of policy scholars (but see, e.g., Hildbrand et al., 2020; Weiss, 2020).…”