TOP THEMES FROM THE SUMMIT ON SOCIAL NORMS RESEARCH AND PRACTICE

The meeting aimed to discuss and reflect on the collective goals, accomplishments, and future opportunities for the Learning Collaborative to advance theory, measurement, and scale-up of social norms practice to improve health and development outcomes globally. The field of social norms has advanced significantly over the course of this 2.5-year joint effort, with a focus on ethics as a thematic area that has received relatively less attention. Behavior change frameworks need to be simple, practical, and take social norms into account. Existing frameworks can be overcomplicated and impractical for program implementers to apply in everyday work. Including social norms explicitly while recognizing that they are not the sole or most important driver of behavior in some contexts is essential. Theories of change, monitoring and evaluation, and adaptive management approaches are living processes that need to be tested and revisited throughout the project life course. Program failures should be documented, understood, and respected as much as successes to maximize lessons learned. Continuous program management feedback loops can reveal signs of a project not reaching desired results and create opportunities for course correction. Revisiting program theories of change, real-time monitoring, and developing learning agendas in key areas will advance understanding of how programs work. Community-based norms-shifting interventions are one approach to norms change, and the evidence-base on what works and how continues to grow. Understanding how structural interventions work and synchronizing them with community-based interventions is a new frontier for social norms practice. Breaking down silos is essential for advancing collaboration on social norms best practices across a range of programmatic areas, such as Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH), Health, Workforce Development/Livelihoods, Education, and more. A significant barrier to advancing collaboration is a lack of consistent language and terminology used to discuss norms and norm change across sectors and disciplines. Donors are well-situated to leverage their role as a cross-cutting norms facilitator, keeping in mind that no single program can achieve everything. Formative research to identify norms is key to ethical and effective program design and implementation. Quality rapid assessments can contribute to critical and contextual information on social norms to inform program design and prioritize integrity. Engaging a diverse range of power holders and stakeholders is important to understanding how norms operate and influence behaviors in different contexts. Further exploration is needed on the role of meta-norms, indirect norms, norm strength and prevalence, and consequences of following or deviating from norms (benefits, sanctions) are important to behaviors, program design, and effective measurement.