Why Do Some Behaviours Change More Easily than Others? Water-Use Behaviour Interventions in Rural Nepal

"[R]eal individual freedom of choice about participation in collective traditions, and the capability to affect collective agency through public reasoning become the most important principles that should steer behaviour-change interventions."

This case study considers a water project that improves institutional water resources management and use, supervises scheme construction, and promotes various water use-related behaviour changes in rural Far West Nepal, affecting both collective and individual spheres of water-related behaviours. The research question is: "Why do some types of behaviour change more easily than others?" The researchers look for the answer from the twofold framing between individual and collective behaviours. The variety of different behaviours and traditions regarding domestic water use in the case study locality allowed them to conduct a precise analysis on the individual and collective opportunities, freedoms, incentives, and barriers of the promoted behaviour changes. In the study, they compare domestic water-use behaviours involving drinking-water supply, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) and small-scale irrigation for home gardening, with human urine use as fertilizer in home gardening, and with the influence of a religious tradition called chhaupadi that shapes the lives and water-use behaviours of women in the case study locality. Another question they consider is whether the behaviour change interventions are justifiable as processes in the first place if they interfere with local cultural and behavioural settings. (The researchers address this tension further in the discussion section of the paper.)

Specifically, the Rural Village Water Resources Management Project (RVWRMP) operates in the Far and Mid West Development Regions of Nepal, among the most remote, food-insecure and water-scarce villages in the country, including the case study district Achham. The scope of RVWRMP includes WASH, micro-hydropower, and community-managed irrigation systems, combined with livelihoods development and micro-financing. The operating principles of RVWRMP emphasize working within local governance, transparency, accountability, community management and participation, a human rights-based approach, and gender equality and social inclusion. The purpose of the ongoing Phase II of RVWRMP is to achieve improved well-being and reduced poverty in the project's Village Development Committees (VDCs).

As background for the analysis, the researchers explore 2 features of life in Achham that impact water use-related behaviours. First, as per the chhaupadi tradition, women are considered impure during their menstruation (chhau) and hence they are prohibited from several types of water use and from participating in family activities, such as entering the house, cooking, touching other people, eating nutritious foods and dairy products, using water taps, using the toilet, and maintaining personal sanitation. RVWRMP has campaigned to eradicate the most serious manifestations of chhaupadi tradition; however, the behaviours continue in many of the villages despite all the activities and declarations. "We could rightly ask whether the chhaupadi localities are really open defecation free on the basis that a significant percentage of inhabitants lack access to toilets and basic hygiene during their menstruation." Another water use-related behaviour is the use of human urine as a fertilizer in the communities, promoted by the livelihoods component of the project. (Commercial fertilizer is rarely available in these remote hill areas, leading to limitations in agricultural production from the poor soil.)

The researcher's apply Amartya Sen's capability approach by considering changes in people's capabilities due to the behaviour change intervention (the approach was not utilised by the water project as such, but rather by the researchers as a means of analysing the project work). In general, the approach sees individual capabilities as freedoms and opportunities that one has reason to value. Capabilities can be considered as both the means and ends of "development" in the sense that capabilities are both opportunities that have value for people per se, but they are also instrumental processes that enable opportunities (Sen, 1999). The researchers apply the capability approach to community settings, involving individual, collective, and relational spheres of capabilities and agency. Individual agency is defined as "what a person is free to do and to achieve in pursuit of whatever goals or values she regards important" (Sen, 1985: 206). Relational agency is naturally represented by the water project as the behaviour change intervener, whereas collective agency is represented by local traditions and customs. These agencies are, in the researchers' conception, understood as separate but interlinked.

Based on a field survey comprising 8 group interactions with community people and several other meetings with local people and project personnel, the researchers find that success in the implementation of the desired water-use behaviour changes largely depended on 3 features: (i) presence of individual choice about participation in collective behaviours; (ii) degree of personal incentive to change behaviours; and (iii) degree of congruence of promoted behaviour changes within the existing collective behaviours (social fit). Table 2 summarises the impacts of the behaviour change efforts and serves as a background for the other results and interpretations. (The main focus of the research remains on examining how and why behaviour changes take place rather than to what extent.) From the table, it is clear that the basic domestic water-use behaviour changes were successfully achieved throughout the district, whereas the status of chhaupadi behaviour change varied from almost total to almost non-existent change. According to the researchers, this is probably explained by the fact that the water project has the expertise and experience in promoting the basic water use-related behaviour changes and participatory activities in the field so that the most basic changes come to be successful. Another finding was that it more likely that the new capabilities would be accepted if they accrued to both men and women, uplifting gender equality and equity as the cross-cutting theme of the analysis.

The researchers analyse the reasons for the differences more closely by classifying them into easy, semi-challenging, and challenging types of change. They observed that the ease of behaviour change varied considerably according to type: Domestic water-use behaviours were the easiest to change, urine use was semi-difficult, and chhaupadi-related behaviour changes were the most difficult to achieve. They locate the results and the reasons for the observed differences in a matrix configuration (see Figure 3). The matrix merges the main findings by illustrating the observed changes according to their difficulty and the 3 explanatory features.

The results also reveal differences between the individual and social aspects of capabilities. Collective agency, e.g., through women's groups, was found to enable some but also prevent other individual capabilities, as collective agency may also restrict individual agency. The study revealed how chhaupadi was clearly collectively sustained and fostered communal affiliation in the sense of being able to engage in communal traditions, but denied women individual choice. On the other hand, the tradition also reduced and restricted some other basic capabilities, especially related to women's bodily health and integrity and control over one's environment, and was linked to social inequality and gender discrimination. Hence, the study did not support the idea that collective agency would automatically increase and support individual agency and capabilities.

As part of the discussion section, the researchers explore the question of whether behaviour change interventions are justifiable as processes in the first place, as they can interfere with the local cultural and behavioural settings. "It could be argued that the project is acting in a neocolonialist fashion, imposing Nordic ideals of gender relations and social inclusion on a totally different society." In this case, however, they find that "the intervention clearly aimed to enhance the most basic individual capabilities and freedoms of choice for the community people, especially for women, which they lacked within conventional social settings. Behaviour-change intervention can be therefore justified as the project operated to improve individual freedom of choice over people’s own lives. In the long run, access to toilets for menstruating women also improves overall sanitation, which is beneficial for the whole community. However, as the question of how we should intervene in other cultural settings remains, we call for further discussion on how to enhance the capability-building modalities and to promote individual freedoms and opportunities."

The researchers conclude with the core finding that "[t]he individual and collective factors that influenced the ease of behaviour changes were much easier to implement when individual freedom of choice was not restricted by social conventions and when the users had clear incentives to change their behaviour. The provision of new capabilities that simply emerged besides the existing customs was much easier to implement than capabilities that required changes in existing customs." They suggest that this study "can provide a design for predicting possible opportunities and challenges regarding behaviour changes in field operations, and for enhancing joint operation of individual and collective capabilities at local levels in the development intervention context."