When international advocacy efforts for human rights are successfully translated into national or local legislation, this is often celebrated as a victorious end goal. However, such triumphalism negates the complex and uneven relation between legislative change and adaptation of practice on the ground. Karisa Cloward’s When Norms Collide picks up on exactly this disjuncture between legislative compliance with international human rights norms and local practices. Cloward focuses on the way in which three local communities in Kenya, in the administrative divisions of Oldonyiro, Mukogodo, and Mau, negotiate local and international norms concerning female genital mutilation (FGM) and early marriage.
The starting point of the book is hence a set of very concrete problems: When and how do individuals and communities change their attitudes and behavior? What is the relation between transnational activism and individual shifts in decision making? What do individuals do when faced with conflicting norms concerning cultural practices? As Cloward makes clear at the outset, while her study answers these questions based on a concrete case study—both in terms of the kinds of norms studied and the geographical region—the theory she develops should have relevance to the broader field of the study of norm change. Focusing on nongovernmental organizations, local governors, and individual actors, the book shifts attention away from the state level to the micro level. This is an original move, considering the tendency in international relations more broadly, and the research on norm conflict in particular, to consider states as the primary actors. In addition to literature in international politics on norm change and norm diffusion, norm leaders, and norm followers, the author also draws on psychological literature to explain confirmation bias and belief perseverance.
The book follows a clear structure, introducing the problem it addresses, its reference literature, main concepts, case studies and its context. The concept of “salience,” Cloward suggests, is key to the likelihood of norm change. A particular norm can have local salience, meaning that actors on the ground attribute great importance to it, or international salience, translated, for instance, into an increase in donor funding for international awareness campaigns about the harmfulness of certain practices. The two norms studied in the book, one about FGM, the other about early marriage, vary in their degree of salience. FGM has both high international and local salience, whereas early marriage has low salience among international actors and local communities. Hence, international advocacy against FGM is well resourced, but is also met with greater local resistance, thereby driving down local activism with individuals who are expected to face stronger repercussions when deviating from the norm. Transnational advocacy efforts around early marriage, on the other hand, are rather limited, but local activism is not as risky, and it is easier for individuals to go against the local norm by deciding to marry (off) later. In both cases, moderate activism is therefore expected, albeit for different reasons.
In the study, activism is located both at the international and local levels, and associated with local governance actors as well as NGOs. With regards to the latter, Cloward is therefore also interested in the density of NGOs in the selected case study areas. as well as in the quality of their campaigning message. A higher density of NGOs would mean greater exposure to the international norm, but the quantity of advocacy needs to be combined with qualitatively high programs. Cloward breaks down change in response to the awareness of an international norm that deviates from the local norm in three elements: attitude change, primary behavior change, and changes in secondary aspects of their behavior, that is, the expression of compliance with a particular norm, for instance, in conversation with advocates against FGM, while on the other hand behaving in accordance with the conflicting norm.
In order to test the theoretical framework, the author draws on three types of data: survey data that cover a representative sample of the respective communities’ knowledge, beliefs, attitudes, and experiences with regards to FGM and early marriage; qualitative interview data with key stakeholders, such as NGO workers, local politicians, and public health workers; and, finally, a randomized experiment linked to the survey, which exposed one treatment group to the information that its responses would be disseminated to an international audience, whereas the control group was told that the results would be shared with a local audience. With the last of these approaches, Cloward sought to specifically test changes in secondary aspects of behavior, looking for evidence that respondents changed their responses based on knowledge about international norms, which made them aware of what was considered a desirable answer.
While mixed-methods approaches are increasingly en vogue, it is rare to see a study in which different methods are used with such a well-articulated rationale, weighing and exploiting the merits of each method in gaining insights into a complex problem. The mixed-method approach is also reflected in the scale of the study, which is impressive, especially for a single-authored book, and the description of the 14 months of fieldwork as “intensive” (p. 42) still seems an understatement in light of the approximately 150 semistructured in-depth interviews conducted. The book successfully crosses the quantitative-qualitative divide and will appeal to a readership in both “camps” by taking a pragmatic rather than a principled approach to methodology and methods, using the full arsenal to study the intricacies of norm change.
This pragmatism is applied more broadly. Indeed, in the introduction, the author argues that “the paradigmatic division between constructivist and rational choice approaches in international relations is unhelpful when applied to norms” (p. 5) and that, therefore, the “book remains agnostic about the essential bases of norm compliance” (p. 6). The tone of this assertion reflects the confident voice of the author throughout the book, carefully considering the implications of methodological choices, and of the predictions stemming from the theory she develops, as well as of the findings based on the empirical data. With the theory and testing laid out in such a clear and structured way, the reader could at some points wonder whether, and if so in what instances, the researcher was confronted with surprises in both the data collection and the analysis.
Where the quantitative and qualitative analysis is presented side by side, on the whole the qualitative analysis gives depth to and supports the quantitative findings. Qualitative researchers would, in some instances perhaps, have more strongly highlighted the complexity as well as ambivalences in attitudes and behavior. While Cloward’s micro-level approach centers on communities rather than states, this is not a study that has an explicit agenda of foregrounding women’s voices in the more classical feminist tradition. The book’s remarkable and admirable breadth and depth leaves less space for more narrative accounts of stories of parents’ dilemmas and NGO workers’ considerations. Still, even though the study hinges on the conflict between so-called local and international norms, the rich empirical material implicitly indicates that what is “local” is shifting and increasingly heterogenous.
Critical development scholars who have studied NGOs will be interested in and recognize some of the book’s insights into the perverse effects that strong donor-driven agendas could have on local NGOs. Researchers in this tradition (e.g., Maria Eriksson Baaz, The Paternalism of Partnership: A Postcolonial Reading of Identity in Development Aid, 2005; Wendy Harcourt, Body Politics in Development: Critical Debates in Gender and Development, 2009) would more strongly highlight the complex power politics involved in the aid industry and refrain from making policy recommendations that could further strengthen the existing power imbalance underpinned by (post)colonial structures and discourses. Cloward finds that the quality of the advocacy messages matters, with the likelihood being low that NGOs, which “exist only on paper, for the express purpose of cheating donors out of their money” (p. 66), produce high-quality messages. Her subsequent recommendation that “donors should be particularly vigilant when selecting and monitoring grantees and contractors for programs that address internationally salient issues” (p. 249), does, however, not address the root of unequal donor–local NGO relationships. The important section “The Politics of Culture” in the conclusion—which shows Cloward’s awareness of the colonial history of international interventions, as well as the relation between civilizing missions and notions of backwardness and modernity—could have been highlighted earlier in the book and further developed.
Cloward’s insistence that the theoretical and empirical insights presented in When Norms Collide are relevant beyond the remit of feminist research on norm change, and should also be of interest to researchers studying (for instance) the impact of transnational environmental activism and health campaigns, is both justified and important in a context in which research in IR and gender is often considered niche, rather than received as part of the mainstream or core of the field. One can therefore only hope that this systematic and thorough study indeed gets the wider readership and reception that it merits.
