Behavioural Approaches for Development and Climate Programmes

Development and climate organizations are increasingly recognising the value of behavioural approaches to maximise the results and impact of their operations and to enhance their sustainability. A critical missing gap in development and climate assistance, with a special focus on climate and gender is a widespread recognition that despite considerable resources being spent on aiming to realise impacts related to climate, nutrition and gender, we are not realising these outcomes. A key reason is that there is an intention-action gap in these areas. Behavioural science presents a potential avenue for dealing with this gap. Indeed, behavioural science creates structures, processes and changes, so we can behave the way we want to. Behavioural science tools ordinarily should not change our pay-offs. Speakers at this session of the UN Behavioural Science Week focused on sharing experiences on how their organizations aim to increase access to and use of inputs, diversify livelihoods, and optimize investment decisions by using behavioural science approaches. The session contributed to exchanging possibilities, building evidence and leveraging on learning from different experiences on what can possibly work and what may not. Speakers discussed how successful results can be adapted to new contexts and scaled up while enhancing the nexus among climate, gender and nutrition.