My first week of internship started earlier than I expected. I was due to begin in June, but the eMBeD team reached out asking if I could begin a few weeks earlier in May due to the urgent staffing need for on one of their projects. The project was a large-scale nutrition intervention focused on combatting child stunting across South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. I found the project very interesting and since I didn’t have any other plans, I was happy to kickstart my summer internship a few days ahead of schedule.
As part of my onboarding materials, I received several reports and documents to get me acquainted with eMBeD’s work and provide me context on the use of behavioral science in international development and policy. A report that I found particularly useful was the 2015 World Development Report – ‘Mind, Society, and Behavior’ – released by the World Bank. This report reflected the growing interest and use of behavioral science approaches in development and set the foundation for eMBeD as a separate entity at the World Bank.
While I didn’t have much time to go through the report since I had to jump onto my project immediately, it was useful to briefly locate the emergence of behavioral science in development discourse.
Something I found particularly useful was the unique conceptualization of the intervention cycle for approaches incorporating the psychological and social aspects of decision making. The cycle is a five-stage continuum including (1) definition and diagnosis, (2) design, (3) implementation and evaluation, (4) adaptation, (5) re-defining and re-diagnosis. The last stage then feeds back to the first and the process continued indefinitely. The same guiding process has been adopted by eMBeD for all their work.
Source: World Development Report 2015
Several factors make this intervention cycle unique. Time and resources are meticulously allocated for diagnostic work prior to the design of the intervention. The implementation period tests several different interventions each based on different assumptions about choice and behavior. One of these is scaled based on evaluation results, and this cycle of continuous iteration continues even after the intervention is scaled (WDR 2015).
Learning about the core principles of iteration and evidence in behaviorally designed interventions resonated with my own beliefs about policy design. While time and resources constraints in developing contexts make it difficult to follow every stage of this process, the mindset towards being evidence-driven and iterative is something I have always believed in. It was great seeing these beautifully explicated in eMBeD's intervention cycle.
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