On the CUSP: The Politics and Prospects of Scaling Social Norms Change Programming

"While there are technical demands to scaling social norms change programmes, we must recognise and address the political nature of dismantling systems of oppression and reflect on how current initiatives are led by those intent on maintaining the status quo."

Practitioners of gender transformative programming - that is, programmes whose aim is to strengthen and/or create equitable gender norms and dynamics - may face the challenge of seeking to reach additional communities or take programmes to scale. Among these practitioners are members of the Community for Understanding Scale Up (CUSP), a group of 9 organisations with experience in developing social norms change methodologies that are now being scaled across many regions and contexts. (See Related Summaries, below, for more details on CUSP, its members, and their work.). This article examines 5 of the CUSP members' social norms change methodologies in going to scale, with the hope that sharing some common experiences and pitfalls will guide policy and funding to end harmful practices and foster healthier, safer communities.

The article begins by outlining the ExpandNet Consortium's 4 types of scale:

• horizontal scaling up (expansion or replication) - extending innovations geographically or to new populations;
• vertical scaling up (policy/political/legal/institutional scaling) - representing a formal government decision to adopt innovation via policies;
• functional scaling up (diversification) - adding interventions/components to an existing innovations package;
• spontaneous diffusion of innovations - addressesing a need within the programme or when a need brought to attention by a key event.

CUSP members' work focuses on promoting gender equality through prevention of violence against women and girls (VAWG) and expansion of sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR). The programmes outlined in Figure 1 in the article - GREAT, IMAGE, SASA!, Stepping Stones, and Tostan's Community Empowerment Programme - all of which have achieved impact at scale, have multiple similarities. They share a grounding in core principles for ensuring that social norms programmes for gender equality are safe, ethical, and effective, and they are based on lessons from implementation of community initiatives around VAW prevention, power, and HIV.

In light of this experience, and based on evidence from diverse sources, Box 2 summarises guiding principles for social norms programmes. According to CUSP, "Despite evidence that such guiding principles show results, CUSP members have faced political challenges that led us to discuss where breakdowns occurred between principle and practice; and to assess broader policy implications for scaling social norms programmes." In that light, they offer here some lessons for implementation at scale:

1. Invest in the process: "Evidence-based social norms change programmes, including CUSP programme methodologies, are process-oriented, requiring sustained, coordinated programming that engages the whole of society in a principled and reflective approach. However, current development and humanitarian investment strategies are predominantly project-based, with short timeframes, single-focus outcomes and apolitical frameworks."
2. Ensure fidelity to the original programme's core values, structure, and principles: "CUSP programmes have deliberate, successive 'staircase' components that are integral to creating and sustaining social change. Neglecting, rearranging, or curtailing these elements can compromise the programme's success, while also potentially harming the community."
3. Prioritise funding of feminist organisations: "Feminist organisations work for progressive policy change, specifically around VAW....These organisations not only hold legitimacy and expertise; their programming is more likely sustained with meaningful leadership and ownership within communities themselves. By contrast, initiatives predicated on short-term, project-based funding, with social norms change programming designed from the outside, are a common scale-up pitfall and can create unintended harm."
4. Attend to community accountability and demand: "Listen to women in their communities - social norms change is sensitive and potentially dangerous work, especially for women. Determining in which communities to scale, ensuring their meaningful input from the outset and accountability to communities throughout, can avoid harm and avert risky or futile programming."
5. Critically examine who leads scale: "While government engagement may be one indicator of scale-up success, the optimal level and nature of state engagement remains unclear, given sensitive issues like power, violence, and equality. The enduring and deeply political question to consider is whether governments can truly own and lead programmes that aim to transform social norms, when most are gatekeepers of such norms....To transform the status quo and redistribute power more equitably, organisations must start from within."
6. Think more creatively about evaluation to respond to the complexities of social norms change at scale: The emphasis on randomised control trials (RCTs) as the "gold standard" of evaluation not only risks excluding the voices and work of researchers from the Global South, but "[f]avouring programmes that worked well under pilot conditions in an RCT without considering the implications of scale-up and the political realities grounding social norms can be a misuse of resources and may limit the development and spread of programmes cultivated organically within communities."

In conclusion, CUSP reiterates that social norms change programming for gender equality that addresses VAW, and women's SRHR more generally, has been shown to have the power to generate transformative change - toward realising social and political justice. However, "to achieve this, scaling up must be done in an overtly political, ethical, and intentional manner,...drawing on lessons learned from practice, and, ideally, under the leadership of feminist organisations already pioneering sustainable change in their communities."

Click here to read a June 15 2019 blog post about this article, written by CUSP.