Measuring community norms around women's empowerment in the West Bank: Opportunities and challenges of a novel approach using cultural consensus.

Roseanne C Schuster,Khaled Faqeeh,Peggy Ochandarena,Sereen Hoso,Angie Abdelmonem,Alexandra Brewis

doi:10.1016/j.ssmph.2019.100489

Abstract

Understanding cultural norms is essential to achieving results in development interventions and preventing interventions from causing unintended negative consequences. However, capturing norms within everyday contexts in ways that can be monitored and evaluated can be expensive and time consuming and is not always feasible. We tested a novel method, the cultural consensus analysis (CCA), in the context of monitoring and evaluating a United States Agency for International Development (USAID) justice project in the West Bank, Palestine. We conducted 392 survey interviews with men and women, using 60 true or false questions in the knowledge domains of women's empowerment and gender-based violence (GBV), and tested three gender propositions using CCA. We found no singular cultural understanding of women's empowerment and GBV across West Bank Palestinians (proposition 1). Distinctive cultural models for women and other subgroups (e.g., those living in villages, women who identified as discriminated against within Palestinian society) exist, although there were no shared cultural models among men of any subgroup (proposition 2). Program assumptions regarding structural barriers to women's empowerment conformed to the women's cultural models (proposition 3). To our knowledge, this is the first application of CCA as an approach for describing gender norms in international development programming. CCA was able to distinguish subtle cultural patterns, including between population subgroups, and to identify how those are associated with specific risks, such as GBV. We conclude that CCA is a potentially useful approach for development practice, to ground-truth program assumptions and, potentially, to track program impacts.

Highlights

Ensuring human rights demands attention to gender equity and empowerment
We present the results of an application of a novel rapid survey technique—cultural consensus analysis (CCA)—to allow testing of development program assumptions, in the case of a United States Agency for International Development (USAID) project in the West Bank, Palestine
Using CCA, we were able to ground-truth within local communities and in a condensed time frame the assumptions about gender that had been made by development practitioners during the planning phase

Summary

Introduction

Ensuring human rights demands attention to gender equity and empowerment. women’s secondary status remains “one of the true universals, a pan-cultural fact” (Ortner, 1974, p. 67). Gender inequality is perpetuated by cultural norms and practices that normalize women’s lower social power and fewer rights and vary in subtle but important ways within communities and across time, relevant to efforts to empower women (Marcus & Harper, 2015). Documents that support devel opment programming can contain assumptive generic cultural state ments that are never tested for relevance to the local context. This increases the risk that otherwise technically sound solutions might be rendered ineffective because important cultural norms were not considered or allow for unintentionally negative consequences of development programming for beneficiary populations. Do men and women in the West Bank really think differently about gender-based violence (GBV) or women’s capacities to advance economically? Do individuals who have experi enced gender discrimination espouse different values from others in their local communities who have not experienced it?

Objectives

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Conclusion