The Behavioural Drivers Model - A Conceptual Framework for Social and Behaviour Change Programming

Behaviour change programmes should start by working out why people act as they do, rather than reaching for a communication campaign by default. That complaint is the reason this framework exists: Petit argues that behavioural theory rarely reaches programme designers, so UNICEF synthesised more than twenty decision-making and behavioural theories into a single map, the Behavioural Drivers Model, and tied every element of it to something a programme can actually do.

Drivers are sorted into psychology, sociology and environment, then unpacked from broad factors (Level 1) into their component dimensions (Level 2), covering cognitive biases, interest, attitude, self-efficacy, intent, limited rationality, social influence, community dynamic, meta-norms, the communication environment, emerging alternatives, governing entities and structural barriers. The treatment of meta-norms is the part most relevant here: extending Robert Axelrod’s “norm about norms”, Petit uses it for the deep ideologies and unwritten rules that generate and maintain ordinary social norms and hold social stratification in place.

The report is candid about its own limits. It takes the individual rather than the community as the unit of change, and its tidy left-to-right sequence is a deliberate simplification. The authors print a second, unsimplified version of the diagram and describe it as a plate of spaghetti, conceding that the drivers are entangled and that the tidy version is a trade of accuracy for usability. No driver is weighted, because weighting is the job of local formative research. Offered, in its own words, as a tool rather than a theory.

With thanks to Rose Shurman for suggesting we include this.