The Power of Narratives in Social Norm Interventions: A Study of the Civic Culture Interventions of Antanas Mockus in Bogotá, Colombia

Abstract

Interventions that seek to transform social norms and behaviors in ways that benefit collective life are becoming more and more popular among policy and development practitioners around the world. The potential of these interventions to create behavioral changes in their target population is often determined by the narratives that participants and other stakeholders create and share around them.
In this paper, we focus on a now classic intervention (the mime-artist initiative by Antanas Mockus in Bogotá, Colombia) to illustrate how narratives are essential to analyze how different stakeholders understand and make sense of social norm interventions. To do this, we collected narratives from 117 citizens, 80 press articles spanning over 24 years, and some of the original designers of the intervention. Using automated textual analysis and manual coding of Narrative Policy Framework categories, we analysed the content and structure of their narratives.
Our findings describe the main characteristics that structure the narratives of citizens and the press in this successful case, and which pertain to (i) the main themes, (ii) the main characters and their agency, and (iii) the audience and their agency. We discuss the research and practical implications of these characteristics, with a focus on how narratives support the impact that the intervention had by allowing stakeholders to make sense of it, and by promoting collective self-observation, reflexivity and collective action around it. By doing this, we argue that good behavioral interventions create stories, and we propose seven recommendations that, based on this experience, could inform the design of more effective interventions to achieve positive policy outcomes.

Keywords: social norms, narratives, behaviour, policy, civic culture, narrative policy framework, drama, reflexivity, installation theory, text mining