‘Leaving No Girl Behind’? Interrogating Gender Norms and Adolescent Agency in Pursuit of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

Enabling the agency of adolescent girls is central to the SDG commitment to ‘leave no one behind’. Donors are increasingly targeting interventions at 10-18 year old girls, a period considered to present risks including child and early/forced marriage, migration for livelihoods and trafficking. These myriad risks, left unchecked, result in lower educational matriculation rates, with associated ill health and well-being impacts.

Yet the focus on girls obscures two key issues. The first is norms around masculinity, with direct and indirect implications for the adolescent agency that a wide range of funded interventions seek to unleash. Secondly, gender norm change is assumed to be critical to enabling adolescent agency, with less attention paid to structural/institutional barriers in both developed and developing country contexts. The doctoral research project seeks to answer the following questions in response to these concerns:

1. Whose norms count? Why and how do global knowledge processes both shape and validate the gender norms implicit in the SDGs?
2. How do the gender norms validated by the SDGs operate? Is it possible to facilitate South-North and South-South learning on ‘what works’ around gender norm change in the global pursuit of the SDGS?
3. How do we engage the voices of adolescent boys and girls as they navigate gender norms and the dynamics of norm change processes in diverse contexts?

This project will create a partnership with the Overseas Development Institute (ODI)’s Gender and Adolescence: Global Evidence (GAGE) Programme. GAGE is a nine-year (2015-2024) mixed-methods longitudinal research and evaluation programme following the lives of around 12,000 adolescent girls and 6,000 adolescent boys in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Nepal and Rwanda, alongside participatory research in conflict-affected regions of Lebanon and Jordan. The Director of GAGE, Dr Nicola Jones, would be part of the supervision team. In this project the student will work directly alongside the longitudinal engagement in Ethiopia, Jordon and/or Nepal, as well as the project Directorate in London.