Prof. Duncan Green, Co-Director of the London School of Economics Activism, Change and Influence Programme
For decades, international development organisations have recognised discriminatory social norms as a root cause of gender inequality and a bunch of other bad things too. But progress in turning that into rigorous thinking and action has been slow. If there’s one organisation I would trust to put that right, it’s UN Women, so I was v excited to be asked to be part of an expert group in October 2023, along with some actual experts like Naila Kabeer. That conversation, along with piles of commissioned research, has now produced a big, and hopefully influential, report: Ideologies, Institutions and Power Addressing Discriminatory Social Norms.
The report emerges at a particularly fraught moment — one of growing political polarisation, weakening democratic institutions, organised backlash against gender equality, and a breakdown in the social contract between citizens and states. The framework’s authors argue that this context makes transforming discriminatory norms more urgent, and more difficult, than ever.
The behaviour change dead end
But the target of change has been wrong. The dominant approach to social norms in international development has framed the problem as one of attitudes and behaviours: people hold discriminatory beliefs, and the way to change them is through awareness-raising, community dialogue, and individual behaviour change programmes. This approach has driven billions of dollars of programming. It has also, the framework argues, largely failed — and the reason is structural.
By focusing on ordinary people, often the most marginalised members of communities, mainstream interventions have systematically deflected attention from the institutions and powerful actors that actually produce and maintain discriminatory norms. Changing what a village household thinks about girls’ education matters less than changing what the school system, the local government, the religious authority, and the labour market do about it.
An institutional lens
The framework’s Big Idea is repositioning social norms as institutional phenomena rather than attitudinal ones. Discriminatory norms are embedded in the rules, practices, and narratives of the state, the market, the community, the family, and religion. They prescribe who gets what, who does what, and who benefits — and they are maintained by those with power to maintain them.
The practical implications are significant. Interventions should target parliaments, courts, employers, religious bodies, and media organisations, not primarily individual change. And ideology must be taken seriously — patriarchy, casteism, racism, and classism are not background conditions but active forces, constantly reproduced through narratives that justify inequality as natural, divine, or meritocratic. The guidance note is notably direct about the current threat: anti-gender movements are aggressively spreading misogynistic and nationalist rhetoric through digital media, and the “manosphere” exemplifies how narratives are deliberately deployed to reinforce patriarchal norms. For a UN institutional document, this is pretty edgy stuff.
Learning from the South
Equally distinctive is where the framework’s evidence comes from. Rather than the dominant Northern academic literature, UN Women commissioned original research from scholar-practitioners in Brazil, Egypt, India, Argentina, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Fiji — not as illustrative case studies, but as the actual foundation of the theory.
The cases reveal three mutually reinforcing pathways to norm change: transforming narratives through participatory feminist methodologies and whole-of-society consensus building; changing material conditions through economic opportunities, quality services, and legal reform; and strengthening countervailing power through feminist movements and broad coalitions. In every context studied, it was the combination of all three that drove change.
The examples are great. Women farmers in Brazil used agroecological logbooks to make their economic contributions visible, eventually opening access to credit and markets. In Egypt, feminist scholars drew on progressive interpretations of Islamic teachings to challenge discriminatory family law. In India, adolescent girls organised committees to resist early marriage and petition for school transport. In Argentina, the Green Tide movement united reproductive rights activists, labour unions, and human rights organisations to achieve legal abortion rights. These are not soft interventions. They are political projects targeting specific institutions and power relations.
Measuring what matters
The framework is also pretty honest about measurement. Attitude surveys are structurally inadequate for capturing norm change because they miss institutional dimensions entirely and are prone to social desirability bias (respondents giving what they think is the ‘right’ answer). The alternative — tracking narrative shifts across institutional sites, changes in material conditions, the strength of feminist movements, and ultimately gender equality outcomes — is methodologically coherent in a way that most development measurement frameworks are not.
What the sector should take from this
For aid practitioners, the message is uncomfortable but important. If your social norms programme is primarily targeting individual attitudes in communities, you are likely working at the wrong level. Sustainable change requires engaging the powerful, investing in feminist movements, and accepting that norm change is slow, non-linear, and context-specific — driven above all by women’s rights movements, not just development programmes.
It will be interesting to see if this report resonates, rather than sinks into the swamp of UN research. Certainly hope so. In their email telling us the report was out, UN Women were optimistic:
‘Even as the framework took this long to publish, it has already started to influence the way UN Women now looks at the subject of social norms:
- an institutional approach to change is now embedded in our new strategic plan,
- at least four new thematic strategies have adopted the three pathways of change articulated in the framework (strategies on sports, ending violence, women’s political participation and transforming care systems)
- our collaboration with the CEDAW Committee is focused on driving an institutional and structural understanding and response to ending gender stereotyping across institutional domains.
a couple of pilots to map discriminatory narratives embedded in political and religious discourse, schoolbooks and online spaces are underway.
Going forward, we are looking at developing a global initiative that will apply the framework in our work to pushback against the pushback.
All power to them.
Main photo from Freepik
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