Shape Action: A Global Thematic Consultation on Social Norms & Child Marriage to inform our Shared Global Research Agenda

PICTURED: During an in-person consultation in Nairobi, participants work to identify regional evidence gaps that will inform the Shared Global Research Agenda to Prevent and Respond to Child Marriage. Photo: © Nicholas Muyoma.

The details

In October, together with the UNFPA–UNICEF Global Programme to End Child Marriage, UNICEF Innocenti, and WHO, we launched an interactive and inclusive consultation process designed to bring together diverse voices — across stakeholders, thematic areas, and geographic contexts — to help shape a shared global research agenda and identify the most pressing evidence gaps to accelerate action to end child marriage.

Consultations are taking place through a range of formats: facilitated discussions, online engagement platforms, and focus group sessions. Across national, regional, or global level, each consultation workshop creates space for child marriage actors to reflect on, discuss, and prioritise key evidence gaps most relevant to their contexts and work.

We therefore held our Global Thematic Consultation focused on Social Norms and Community Engagement to Prevent and Respond to Child Marriage.

In this interactive session, we:

• Shared a brief overview of the global evidence on Social Norms and Community Engagement centered interventions to help ground our dialogue in shared, evidence-informed insights.
• Identified the research gaps most relevant to our contexts and our work on ending child marriage.
• Collaboratively built consensus on evidence needs for norm-shifting interventions to end child marriage.

This consultation was an opportunity to discuss, debate, and share experiences related to social norms and community engagement, and to propose key research questions that will guide future evidence generation.

We invited stakeholders across national, community, regional, and international levels — including academics; policymakers; representatives of multilateral organisations; programme practitioners and implementers; young people; research donors; advocates; service providers; and individuals affected by child marriage — to join us in this critical discussion.

Your participation in this session was essential to deepening clarity, fostering collaboration, and building consensus on priority research questions for this thematic area.

Key evidence gaps

1. Effectiveness of legal frameworks and their interaction with social norms

More evidence is needed on when, how, and under what conditions legal frameworks against child marriage are enforced, the impact of such frameworks and variation across contexts. Research should examine how legal enforcement interacts with prevailing social norms – whether it reinforces, undermines, or is constrained by normative expectations – and how protection and justice mechanisms function in practice.

2. Power, collective decision-making, and normative influence

Stronger qualitative and mixed-methods research is required to map collective decision-making processes around child marriage. This includes identifying who holds influence within families and communities, how power is distributed across gender and generations, and how these dynamics sustain or challenge the social norm of child marriage in different contexts

3. Pathways, diffusion, and causality of norm change

There are significant evidence gaps on how social norms change spreads beyond direct programme participants. Research should explore diffusion pathways through social networks, influencers, and tipping points, while also clarifying causal relationships between norm change and structural factors such as education, livelihoods, and legal reform.

4. Intersectionality, gender norms, and gender-based violence

The field needs stronger evidence on the intersections between child marriage, harmful gender norms, and gender-based violence, including causal pathways. Research should operationalise intersectionality, examining how overlapping identities (e.g. gender, age, poverty, disability, displacement) shape exposure to norms, risk of child marriage, and responsiveness to interventions.

5. Youth agency, positive deviance, and resilience

Evidence remains limited on meaningful models of adolescent and youth participation that influence programme design, implementation, and outcomes, beyond consultation. In parallel, more systematic research is needed on positive deviance – why some families resist child marriage despite strong normative pressure – and how these insights can inform scalable and context-sensitive prevention strategies.

6. Designing scalable, rights-based, and cost-effective norm change interventions

There is a lack of evidence on what combinations, sequencing, and dosage of multi-component norm-change interventions are effective at scale. Research should generate comparative data on cost, cost-effectiveness, and scalability of rights-based approaches to norm change, particularly in low-resource settings, and examine how social norms interventions perform relative to – and in combination with – structural, legal, or educational approaches.

7. Sustainability, financing, and long-term impact

The evidence base remains thin on how long norm change persists after programme completion and which mechanisms (e.g. community ownership, education systems) support durability. Research is also needed on how funding modalities, timelines, and flexibility affect the sustainability and long-term impact of social norms interventions, as well as on improved indicators and longitudinal data to support policy advocacy and investment decisions.