Fire victims as policy narrators: Affect and narrator trust

Abstract The participatory processes used by local governments after a disaster are essential for successful community disaster recovery and integral to local land use and planning decisions. Within that process, disaster victims may hold privileged positions as narrators of policy conflicts due to the trust that officials place in these individuals. In 2021, Louisville, Colorado, adopted stringent green building codes with the intention of increasing the community's climate resilience. Shortly after these building codes were adopted, the Marshall Fire destroyed over 1000 homes in Boulder County, 550 of which were in Louisville, making this the most destructive fire in Colorado history. This paper uses the Narrative Policy Framework to understand how the content of narratives changed by comparing public comments before and after the Marshall Fire to understand the extent to which community support for climate‐resilient policies may shift after a disaster. We find support for the importance of narrator trust through the identification of the unique persuasive power of fire victim narrators. We use these findings to offer a potential pathway through which learning that appears normatively “bad” can occur after a disaster.