Reconstructing the evolution of the dominant story of ‘Holwerd aan Zee’: A memetic analysis of planning narratives

This study adopts a memetic perspective to examine how dominant stories evolve in collaborative planning processes. Using documents and interview data from a long-term planning initiative in the northern Netherlands, a five-layered framework identifies 13 influential ideas, understood as memes, and traces how their shifting configurations shaped stakeholder interaction, meaning-making and decision-making. The findings show that dominant stories evolve not through linear narrative replacement but through shifting prominence among partially overlapping, co-existing memes, temporarily stabilized in distinct narrative configurations. The paper offers planning scholars a more granular analytical vocabulary for studying how narrative coherence is constructed, maintained and transformed over time.