<![CDATA[Strategic documents produced by government agencies are rarely examined as discursive artefacts that encode relations of power, ideology, and contested meaning. This study investigates how population policy discourse is constructed, reproduced, and politicised within the official strategic documents of the Kemendugbangga/BKKBN Provincial Representative of Bengkulu, Indonesia, with particular attention to the institutional transition from BKKBN to Kemendugbangga following 2024. Employing a qualitative Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) design based on Fairclough's three-dimensional framework (text, discursive practice, social practice) and complemented by Interpretive Policy Analysis (IPA) as developed by Hajer and Wagenaar, the study analyses six categories of strategic documents alongside semi-structured interviews with eight key informants who served as both producers and consumers of those texts. Three interlocking patterns emerge from the data: (1) a strong centralisation of discursive authority, in which national templates, the RPJMN, and hierarchical indicators constrain local agency to matters of presentational packaging rather than substantive content; (2) a structural tension between field realities and formal reporting requirements, evidenced by informants' candid acknowledgement of systematic positive-framing bias; and (3) a hybrid discursive transformation in which substantive policy shifts coexist with institutional rebranding aimed at aligning Kemendugbangga with the Indonesia Emas 2045 and demographic-dividend narratives. The findings reveal that strategic documents function primarily as instruments of bureaucratic legitimation rather than as operationally responsive planning guides, thereby marginalising qualitative indicators and the voices of vulnerable groups and remote communities. The study contributes the first application of Fairclough's three-dimensional CDA to sub-national population-governance documents in Indonesia, opening a new methodological avenue for critical public administration scholarship in the region. ]]>
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