The Differences That Make a Difference in Behaviors

By Cheyanne Scharbatke-Church, Co-Director, CJL

Publicly flaunting wealth, hand washing, denigrating ‘the other’, asking a question at a public meeting, beating one’s wife, littering, and drinking alcohol, are all behaviors. Many of these behaviors are maintained or deterred by the strength of what people think others whose opinion matters to them would do and think they should do in this situation. This is the influence of social norms on behavior.   

Enthusiasm for adopting strategies to capitalize on the role of social norms in sustainable behavior change has varied significantly by sector. Public and reproductive health, gender, and child marriage have been at the forefront, producing enough materials to warrant the creation of clearing houses (see here, and here). In comparison, the anti-corruption and good governance fields have come later to the party.  

For those in this sector interested in using social norms as a lever for diminishing corruption or increasing accountability, can they simply adopt the good work of other sectors?

We’ve asked that question ourselves. Can guidance built on experience shifting the norms that support female genital mutilation, domestic violence or public defecation, be appropriate in tackling norms that sustain the ‘carpet interview’ (the expectation that qualified women have sex with the hiring manager to secure the position), bribery or nepotism?  

The short answer: yes, but not in every way, it depends, tread carefully.

As we have struggled with this question of transferability, we realized it really comes down to whether or not the type of behavior matters? If a social norm drives a behavior that is illegal vs being legal, does it impact how you identify the norm? Does it matter if the behavior represents a significant one-off, life event or is more of a daily, regular occurrence? If the behavior is socially good, bad or neutral––does that influence the appropriate norm change strategy to use?

Which brings me to the longer answer: social norms guidance needs to reflect the distinctive nature of behaviors that represent abuse of entrusted power for personal gain.

The longest answer (but not that long) can be found in Besa Global’s new Social Norms and Endemic Corruption Learning Series. The Learning Series distills years of research and insights generated while accompanying partners from Jordan to the Philippines to the Democratic Republic of the Congo and beyond into practical 'dos and don’ts' for anti-corruption programming.

We currently use three questions to assess how applicable material from other sectors is to the corruption space. How socially acceptable the practice is, where it occurs and who is involved all seem to be important distinctions to keep in mind. We like to think of them as differences that make a difference to whether guidance needs to be adapted to the endemic corruption context.  

Our three questions

1. How socially acceptable and visible is the practice? 

Acts that are one-off, significant life events that are celebrated within the community such as a marriage or female genital mutilation are quite different from the average corrupt transaction. The latter being individual (as opposed to communal), repeated (as opposed to a one-off) and kept in the shadows (as opposed to being celebrated). Especially for the ‘abusers of power for personal gain’, these practices are rarely openly or directly discussed because in addition to often being illegal, it is understood that it is not socially positive behavior. For instance, a teacher demanding sex for grades would not broadcast the demand to the wider public. 

So what? Well, at a minimum, visibility and acceptability affect data collection approaches for social norms diagnostics and monitoring and evaluation. Focus group discussions are rarely the right choice when discussing norms that support an illicit behavior.  

2. Who is involved in decision-making?

Decisions are the precursors to action. The amount of consultation that takes place for making decisions ranges from none to significant input and deliberation. Many corrupt practices (often of the petty variety) are made without much deliberation, sometimes even automatically. While these are still influenced by implicit social expectations, the individual will usually not actively or publicly consult others about any single action — even if they seek or receive advice on how things are generally done. Consider a hiring manager who adds their family member to the short-list of candidates despite their lack of qualifications. This decision would generally not be the result of a consultative process.

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So what? This factor eliminates the most used approach to mapping reference groups — who are the individuals who create and maintain a norm. It also makes it more difficult to identify influential people, which is key to numerous social norms change strategies.  

3. Where is the behavior happening?

Is the behavior conducted by rights holders (i.e. citizens) in community settings or by institutional actors who have formal obligations and institutional rules that they ‘ought’ to be following? People such as civil servants, corporate employees, politicians, judges, or religious leaders are ‘duty bearers’ who have formal or traditional authority and power. While they often are influenced by community and family norms (such as the expectation to support one’s family), duty bearers are also affected by norms within the institution where they work.  

Consider civil servants who are regularly involved in petty corrupt transactions in contexts of endemic corruption because their roles endow them with power to abuse situations for personal gain. Our work finds that civil servants must navigate multiple (often competing) norms. Their decisions may be based on a range of factors: formal rules, ‘practical’ norms about how to behave to get things done, and social expectations regarding corrupt behaviors from multiple reference groups, from the hierarchy to peers, family and community, and patrons and power holders.

So what? The differences in the institutional context need to be considered in deciding what approaches might be useful and/or how they need to be adapted. For instance, your program could adopt a role-model approach to challenge descriptive norms. However, by highlighting how one person behaves differently, the program could set them up for backlash from those within the institution. Here the formal process could be used to punish or even fire the individual because they are not following ‘expected’ behavior.   

The Learning Series

The Social Norms & Endemic Corruption Learning Series offers insights and lessons we’ve learned in integrating social norms change strategies into anti-corruption analysis and programming. Aimed at practitioners, each chapter covers what we have learned (what?), why the lesson matters (so what?) and where we need to go from here (now what?).   

Chapter 1 outlines the four-step social norms integration process. Chapter 2 covers lessons at the organizational level; including a deeper dive into the similarities and differences between gender and social norms. Chapter 3 — what are behaviors — is forthcoming. Finally, we offer a Glossary of key concepts used throughout The Series. As the name (hopefully) suggests we will continue to put out new chapters and update old ones as our learning evolves. So please check it out and let us know what you think.  

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Cheyanne Scharbatke-Church is a practitioner-scholar with a lifelong interest in governance processes that have run amok. She has significant experience in peacebuilding, governance, anti-corruption, evaluation and learning across the Balkans, West and East Africa. She currently serves as the Executive Director of Besa Global, where she also co-leads the Corruption, Justice & Legitimacy (CJL) Program. In this capacity she has pioneered the application of systems thinking to corruption analysis and the role of social norms as a driver of corrupt practices. Cheyanne taught on the intersection of conflict and corruption as well as program design, monitoring and evaluation in fragile contexts at the Fletcher School, Tufts University for 15 years. Prior to this, as the first Director of Evaluation for Search for Common Ground she developed the organisation’s initial strategy to institutionalize an evidence and learning culture and practice. Her interest in understanding peacebuilding effectiveness started during her role as the Director of Policy & Evaluation at INCORE, University of Ulster. She has had the privilege of working in an advisory capacity with a range of organizations such as ABA/ROLI, CDA, ICRC, IDRC, UN Peacebuilding Fund and the US State Department. She can be commonly found in the Canadian Rockies with her fierce daughters and gem of a husband.