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Introduction
Social norms, or the informal rules that influence people’s behavior, play an essential role in shaping behavior. Community-based norms-shifting interventions (NSIs) include gender and other social norms as a focus for social and behavior change (SBC) (1). They complement other health promotion and SBC strategies, such as those focused on knowledge, attitudes, agency, or structural supports, by encouraging communities to reflect on and question norms related to behaviors and promote collective change (1,2). Multiple theories exist about how norms, alongside individual and structural determinants, lead to behavior (1). NSIs are gaining traction in international development as a new programming area in SBC (1,3). However, a limited understanding remains of how programs influence norm shifting, including which SBC strategies foster norm shifting, how activities lead to normative change, and whether norm shifting leads to behavior change (2–4).
The Passages Project (2015–2022) aimed to advance the science, practice, and scale-up of NSIs serving adolescent and youth sexual and reproductive health (SRH). Passages hosted the Learning Collaborative to Advance Normative Change, a global community of practice to share and learn about social norms. These joint efforts synthesized much of the adolescent/youth SRH and norms literature, convened consultations, and developed papers on the measurement, practice, and scaling of community-based NSIs.
Passages used a realist evaluation approach tailored for community-based interventions and reflected a program-practical approach to the evaluation of NSIs to explore and build an understanding of how these types of interventions work to achieve change. The realist evaluations used a conceptually grounded collaborative evaluation approach, meaning they defined their approaches using SBC frameworks, theories of how norms influence behavior and shift, and evidence from previous pilots. By collaborative, we mean that researchers and practitioners came together to refine program theory, make sense of evidence gaps, apply methods, interpret findings and make sense of them for program adaptation, inform program scale, and build evidence for a global audience. Immediate practical use of findings was of priority (5).
Passages partnered with four non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Niger, and Senegal that had developed adolescent and youth-focused NSIs, with some outcome evidence of behavior change. The four realist evaluations were founded on collaboratively developed program Theories of Change (ToCs) to include norms-shifting and then systematically...