Disaster Narratives and Forestry Policy: A Comparative Analysis of National and Regional Media Coverage of the 2025 Sumatra Floods

The 2025 Sumatra floods generated policy debate across Southeast Asia. Media coverage demonstrates how news organizations frame crises and legitimize particular policy responses in their role as policy actors. This study compares the elements and strategies of media policy narratives in Indonesia, Singapore, and Malaysia using the meso-level Narrative Policy Framework (NPF). It applies qualitative content analysis to 309 online news articles published between November 2025 and May 2026. The findings show that Indonesian media exhibit the strongest combination of containment (90.5%) and angel-shift (85.3%), constructing a Story of Control that positions the government as the Hero and privileges domestic solutions. Singaporean media maintain a high level of angel-shift (92.3%) in operational elements while increasing expansion (20.5%) in structural elements, shifting the narrative toward a Story of Decline and demands for accountability. Malaysian media display the highest levels of expansion (25.4%) and devil-shift (22.0%), casting corporations as Villains and constructing Stymied Progress narratives oriented toward regional reform. These three patterns correspond to each country's National Narrative Position, defined by the interaction of media ownership linkages with state actors, press freedom scores, and the media's structural position relative to the event, rather than by actors' belief coalitions as assumed in conventional NPF applications. The findings support three propositions for extending the NPF: cross-national narrative bifurcation, whereby policy legitimacy surrounding the same transnational event branches rather than converges; moderation by National Narrative Position, whereby media ownership structures and press regimes shape the direction of bifurcation; and legitimation-to-policy direction, whereby narratives not only produce legitimacy but also steer policy trajectories across countries. The study extends the NPF into disaster governance and demonstrates that media narrative framing shapes the legitimacy of forest-management policy reform in Southeast Asia.