Toward Shared Meaning: A Challenge Paper on Social and Behavior Change and Social Norms

In 2019, discussions between USAID and the USAID-funded Passages Project identified a lack of community consensus on matters related to social norms work. With USAID guidance, Passages began a process of engaging “traditional social and behavior change (SBC) practitioners” in a discourse on social norms, and invited a broad array of people who work in SBC and in social norms to join in the dialogue. The aim of this ‘challenge dialogue’ was to draw together implementers, researchers, and donors to consider the best ways to apply social norms approaches to SBC programs. This paper presents a summary of those discussions focused on responding to, How do we best apply social norms approaches and measurement to SBC programming to facilitate and achieve sustained SBC?