UN Women, grounded in the vision of equality enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations, works for the elimination of discrimination against women and girls, the empowerment of women, and the achievement of equality between women and men as partners and beneficiaries of development, human rights, humanitarian action and peace and security. Placing women’s rights at the center of all its efforts, UN Women leads and coordinates United Nations system efforts to ensure that commitments on gender equality and gender mainstreaming translate into action throughout the world. It provides strong and coherent leadership in support of Member States’ priorities and efforts, building effective partnerships with civil society and other relevant actors. UN Women’s work on achieving gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls is guided by its Strategic Plan, which articulates how UN Women will leverage its triple mandate, encompassing normative support, UN System coordination and operational activities. In its integrated approach to address the root causes of inequality and affect broader systems change, supporting positive social norms is a critical area. UN Women’s new Strategic Plan 2022-2025, both, identifies discriminatory social norms as a structural barrier to gender equality and women’s empowerment, and positions positive social norms as a high-leverage mechanism to advance UN Women’s vision.[1] Supporting positive social norms has been identified as one of the seven systemic outcomes in the UN Women global Strategic Plan (2022-2025).[2] While the inclusion of social norms as a specific outcome has been a recent development, UN Women programming has addressed social norms change directly or indirectly in its broader advocacy on gender equality and specifically in its work within thematic areas that require behavioural and attitudinal change, such as ending violence against women and girls and promoting women in leadership. UN Women adopts an integrated approach to transform the unequal power relations and discriminatory social norms, behaviours and practices and promote those that advance gender equality and women’s empowerment. This includes engaging men and boys as allies to promote respectful, equitable and non-violent relationships, contribute to transforming negative stereotypes constraining women’s participation in public and private life, addressing social norms that prevent women and girls’ access to humanitarian assistance, and increase the acceptance of women as leaders and agents of change. Social norms work is also relevant in cross cutting areas such as education, health, sports and peace, humanitarian action and disaster risk reduction. UN Women regularly evaluates its own work to enhance accountability, inform decision making and contribute to learning on gender equality. The Independent Evaluation Service (IES) provides evidence for a more relevant, effective and efficient UN Women with greater impact on the lives of women and girls it serves. UN Women carries out strategic corporate, country portfolio and regional evaluations, as well as decentralized evaluations. IES leads strategic evaluations with the support of external evaluators. They assess effectiveness, organizational performance and normative and operational coherence. Although programmatic efforts on changing social norms have been prevalent in UN Women’s efforts at the global, regional and country level; an explicit recognition of this area of work marks a shift in the organizations philosophy of embedding and advancing social norms work across the four thematic impact areas.[3] Thus, UN Women HQ has taken initiative to begin work defining the social norms outcome area of work to streamline and better inform future programming directions. In this regard, the Independent Evaluation Service is undertaking a formative evaluation: Feminist Collaborative Evaluation (FCE). The FCE will facilitate an in-depth regional approach to provide comprehensive analysis and evidence based on experiences with social norms change programming at the field level across Eastern and Southern Africa, Europe and Central Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean and Asia and the Pacific regions. UN Women Nepal Country Office (NCO) has been selected as one of the case study countries from Asia and the Pacific region based on the desk review (meta-analysis of evaluations, review of annual reports, and the regional portfolio reviews), and consultations with UN Women personnel at regional and country levels. Country case study is a critical component of the FCE, as they will explore the pathways of change and inform implicit/explicit theories of change that can provide inspiration and lessons learned for social norms programming efforts at UN Women. In Nepal’s case, Developmental Evaluation (DE) approach will be adapted as continuation of the previous DE phase – II[4] with the main purpose of supporting implementation of innovative and adaptive development programme strategies focused on social norm change and documenting key lessons learned. The case study will be participatory and led by Regional Evaluation Specialists in collaboration with the country office M&R/E Officer and support from the National Evaluation Consultant. The case studies will engage rights holders, experts in social norms from the country, and civil society in surfacing their understandings of social norms efforts through storytelling or other feminist methodologies rooted in the country and local context. [1] UN Women. Strategic Plan (2022-2025). Accessed from: https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N21/186/22/PDF/N2118622.pdf?OpenElement [2] UN Women. Strategic Plan (2022-2025). Accessed from: https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N21/186/22/PDF/N2118622.pdf?OpenElement [3] (i) governance and participation in public life; (ii) women ’s economic empowerment; (iii) ending violence against women and girls; and (iv) women, peace and security, humanitarian action and disaster risk reduction. [4] Available at: https://gate.unwomen.org/Evaluation/Details?EvaluationId=11529
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