Moving Beyond Awareness: Social and Behavioral Science as a Tool for Sustainable Development
By: Dr. Laura Van Berkel, Technical Specialist, Social and Behavioral Science
Social and behavioral science (SBS) is an important tool in international development to improve program effectiveness and sustainability by focusing on changing behaviors needed to achieve development goals. The success or failure of many programs and activities often depends on assumptions about the development context, including assumptions about how people and groups think and act. SBS can help fill in gaps of traditional development thinking by checking these assumptions and addressing the root psychological, social, and structural causes that influence intended outcomes.
Development practitioners and policy makers often want to change behavior—they see people joining terrorism organizations, not participating in government, or unknowingly supporting forced labor. However, these parties often assume that people are rational actors—that people would engage in the desired behaviors if only they had the awareness or skills to do so. Consequently, programs objectives often focus on increasing skills or awareness, implicitly assuming behavior change will follow but without specifying or targeting the actual behavioral objective. A program may aim to reduce trafficking in persons by increasing awareness of forced labor in garment production, for example, but not address incentives that create demand for products made with forced labor, such as the inertia of shopping habits and social fashion trends, or encourage specific advocacy actions that could pressure governments to act. Unfortunately, people are not strictly rational—they do not always act in line with their own interests and intentions. SBS can help design programs to account for the predictable ways that people really behave. SBS consists of evidence from disciplines such as social and cognitive psychology, behavioral economics, neuroscience, judgment and decision-making, and others about the psychological, social, and structural factors that shape human behavior.
Keeping evidence-based research to predict behavior in mind, Democracy International (DI) leverages insights from SBS to promote responsive politics and empower citizens, strengthen systems of accountable governance, and support peaceful and resilient societies while also improving development assistance through learning (See Figure below). We use a participatory approach to SBS—we apply SBS with the input and equal participation from local partners (e.g., DI field staff members, civil society organizations, government officials, and service providers) and with research and evidence from the local community.
To apply behavioral insights, we first determine if a given problem is a behavioral problem, meaning that people are not acting in line with what we generally expect of them or what they intend for their own behavior. If a problem is a behavioral problem, we precisely define the behavior to target for change. In the areas of politics, governance, and peace and resilience, example behaviors include registering to vote, paying taxes, attending a town hall meeting, and intervening as a bystander when witnessing the potential for violence.
Next, we map the required steps needed to perform a behavior. To vote, for example, a citizen may need to register, research candidates, locate their polling place, find transportation, remember to vote on Election Day, bring any required documentation, persist through long lines, and finally cast their ballot. Target populations may encounter psychological, social, or structural barriers at any point in this process that prevent them from engaging in the desired behavior. Sticking with our well-intentioned voter: they may intend to vote but leave after encountering a long line because they do not perceive their vote as significant, see others leaving, or need to return to work or family care obligations. We identify barriers at each step and design solutions to overcome those specific barriers. In our work to get-out-the-vote in Tunisia, we applied behavioral insights that encouraged people to follow through on their intentions to vote by making concrete plans in advance.
DI builds in ways to pilot and test our behavioral solutions, when it makes sense, to examine whether and to what extent the solution is effective. As USAID Administrator Samantha Power noted in her recent comments at the UN’s Behavioral Science week, “we have to understand human behavior, not on the basis of intuitions, but using new findings and concrete data.… [R]ather than making assumptions or applying what works in one culture to another, we need to gather evidence and data from the specific communities in which we serve.” Target behaviors, their barriers, and their solutions are all highly dependent on the culture and context. By testing our behavioral solutions, we can adapt and scale as appropriate, without wasting resources on ineffective solutions or causing unintentional harm.
Social and Behavioral Science has enormous potential to create sustainable, effective development programs by ensuring that solutions to development problems are guided by necessary human behavior and led by evidence and input from the local community. DI is committed to incorporating SBS into current and future programming and looks forward to working with partners such as USAID and the United Nations that recognize the power of SBS for development.
