Meso narratives are the stories and shared meanings that circulate at the level of communities — a mid-range scale sitting between the vast, society-wide metanarratives (or “meta/grand narratives”) that legitimate a whole social order, and the granular micro-narratives that surface in a single conversation or gesture. The term was proposed by Leni Velasco to name this in-between layer: narratives that a neighbourhood, movement, or cultural group tells about itself, and which shape what its members believe is possible, permitted, or true, without necessarily announcing themselves the way a grand civilisational story does.
Within the wider “narrative ocean” framing used in deep-narrative-change work — the idea that people swim inside “the ecosystems of narratives, ideas, and cultural norms that shape the behaviors, mindsets, and worldviews of millions” — meso narratives are the local currents inside that ocean: less visible than the tides of metanarrative, but more durable and collective than any single wave of a micro-narrative or “street narrative”. Practitioners doing sensemaking or narrative-change work often look here, since community-level narratives are close enough to be legible through qualitative research, yet consequential enough to aggregate into wider shifts.
Also see Meta Grand Narrative, Micro Narratives and Street Narratives