In October 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India declared a new national campaign to eliminate open defecation within five years. An estimated half of all Indians—mainly those living in rural areas—still defecated in the open, as humankind had done for centuries. Because India’s past programs had focused on building toilets, achieving little success, this time the emphasis was on motivating behavioral change. But exactly how to approach the challenge was left to each state. Ajoy Sharma, a veteran Indian Administrative Service officer, took on the task of implementing Modi’s plan in northern Punjab state in January 2015. To change long-held public acceptance of open defecation, Sharma developed an innovative pilot program that integrated sensitization and social mobilization at the individual, family, and community levels with financial subsidies to support toilet construction. The success of the program and its acceptance in five districts gave Sharma the evidence he needed to apply a similar template across all districts in his state. By September 2017, the project had successfully certified 11 districts—half of the state—as Open Defecation Free, a total of nearly 6,000 villages. This case study offers lessons for governments interested in altering social norms and expectations on a large scale to bring about long-term societal change.

Tini Tran drafted this case study with the help of Asha Brooks and Arpita Tripathi based on interviews conducted from April to October 2017. Case published November 2017.

In 2002, Lithuania was struggling to defeat corruption, which had flourished during the Soviet occupation. Once viewed as the key to survival in an administered economy, offering gifts for services had become an accepted social norm. More than a decade after Lithuania regained independence, polling showed that although 77% of Lithuanians considered this form of corruption a problem, few were willing to change behaviors they saw as practical. The country’s recently created anti-corruption agency, the Special Investigation Service, faced the challenge of changing those social expectations. It decided to focus on a new generation of Lithuanians. The Modern Didactics Center, an educational nongovernmental organization, and a dedicated group of teachers stepped in to help the agency work toward the ambitious goal of changing the attitudes of students across the country. The group experimented with a variety of educational approaches both in and outside the classroom, including a curriculum that integrated anti-corruption elements into standard subjects and projects that encouraged students to become local activists. Despite resistance from educators that limited the program’s scale, the effort developed new approaches that illuminated the ethical and practical downsides of corruption for students across the country.

Maya Gainer drafted this case based on interviews conducted in Vilnius, Mažeikiai, and Anykščiai, Lithuania, during February 2015. Case published June 2015.

Citizens of the Philippines were used to receiving poor service in government offices. Activities as basic as obtaining a driver’s license were slow and complex, and the tortuous processes created opportunities for public employees to solicit bribes for faster service. In an effort to improve service delivery, Congress passed the Anti–Red Tape Act in 2007. But, getting civil servants to comply with the act from civil servants presented a big challenge. In 2010, the Civil Service Commission began to conduct annual social audits to assess both the public’s satisfaction with frontline services and the degree to which offices adhered to the Act’s provisions. For the audits to succeed, the commission had to both persuade skeptical citizens to cooperate with the survey, and find ways to motivate civil servants to improve in response to poor ratings. Because budget constraints limited the use of financial incentives, the commission linked the results to other oversight programs and used social pressure to prod civil servants to improve the quality and efficiency of their work. During the survey’s first four years, the commission oversaw improvement in citizens’ ratings of public services but still faced challenges in raising awareness of the law and using it reshape public expectations.

Maya Gainer drafted this case study based on interviews conducted in Manila in November 2014. Case published April 2015.

Associated Interview(s): Jesse Robredo