Transforming Communities: The Power of SBCC in Environmental Protection

What happens when communities stop waiting for someone else to clean up their act and decide to do it themselves? The answer, it turns out, can be transformative – not just for a neighbourhood, but for an entire nation. Social and Behaviour Change Communication, or SBCC, is built on exactly this premise: that meaningful environmental change begins not with infrastructure alone, but with shifting how people think, feel, and behave toward their surroundings. Two landmark initiatives from India – EXNORA International and the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (Clean India Mission) – illustrate this with remarkable clarity. Together, they show how strategic communication, community ownership, and sustained advocacy can turn environmental challenges into collective victories.

What is SBCC and why does it matter for the environment? 🔗

SBCC is a participatory communication strategy designed to bring about sustained changes in behaviour. Research published in the Research Review International Journal of Multidisciplinary describes it as “a potent tool for attaining public health goals,” one that goes well beyond awareness generation to actively reshape social norms, attitudes, and practices. In the context of environmental protection, this distinction is critical. Simply informing people about pollution or waste doesn’t guarantee they will change how they dispose of garbage or use sanitation facilities. SBCC addresses the deeper behavioural and social drivers behind those habits.

Evidence from the SBCC Strategy Guidance Manual confirms that merely increasing knowledge rarely leads to sustained behaviour change – using multiple SBCC approaches and communication channels is far more effective than any single method. This multi-channel, community-embedded approach is precisely what has made initiatives like EXNORA and Swachh Bharat Abhiyan stand out as global models.

EXNORA International: when communities become the solution 🔗

EXNORA International is one of India’s most recognised examples of grassroots environmental action powered by SBCC. Founded in 1989 in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, by M. B. Nirmal – a former bank officer turned social activist – it grew out of a deeply personal experience. Nirmal, who lived near a slum plagued by garbage and poor sanitation, mobilised over 2,000 residents to collectively build drainage systems, create gardens, and improve hygiene conditions, transforming the area into a model neighbourhood. That hands-on, self-reliant approach became the organisational philosophy of EXNORA.

The name itself spells out the mission: Excellent, Novel and Radical ideas for solving environmental problems – crucially, by involving the very people who caused them. This framing is pure SBCC logic: instead of treating communities as passive recipients of government services, EXNORA made them active agents of environmental stewardship.

The civic EXNORA model and community chapters 🔗

EXNORA’s model is built around Civic Exnora units – self-sufficient community groups, each adopting a neighbourhood of 75 to 100 households. These units collect garbage at homes, sort it at pickup, compost organic waste, and generate income for community workers – locally called “street beautifiers” – through the sale of recyclables. The organisation now operates through around 17,000 street chapters, covering 40% of Chennai city and 75% of its suburbs. The chapters also work with local corporations and municipalities on broader civic issues like sewage leaks, water supply problems, and street lamp repairs – embedding environmental responsibility into the fabric of everyday community life.

SBCC in action: communication, education, and behavioural change 🔗

What distinguishes EXNORA is its deliberate use of communication to shift mindsets before – and alongside – any physical clean-up. EXNORA has created widespread environmental and civic awareness by promoting community and street-level involvement in waste collection, removal, recycling, and environmental upkeep. Its Environmental Training Institute runs programmes for schoolteachers on biodiversity, climate change, and waste management – multiplying the reach of behavioural messages through education systems.

The results have been internationally recognised. The organisation received the Best Practices of the World Award from UNCHS (Habitat) at the 1996 conference in Turkey, and was cited as a UNICEF Model Project in 2008. Its partnership with PepsiCo under the Zero Waste Management project – which educated households on waste segregation and set up vermicomposting – achieved 97% household municipal solid waste recycling, earning a Golden Peacock Award for Innovation in 2006. UNICEF subsequently published a best practices booklet on EXNORA’s model, encouraging other municipalities to replicate it across India.

Challenges and lessons 🔗

EXNORA’s journey has not been without hurdles. Academic evaluations note that its decentralised, volunteer-led model faces challenges of long-term sustainability – particularly when community motivation wanes or participation becomes inconsistent. Zero-waste schemes have faltered in some areas without sustained resident involvement. This is a critical lesson for SBCC practitioners: communication and community engagement cannot be a one-time campaign. They require ongoing reinforcement, local leadership, and adaptive strategies to maintain momentum over time.

Swachh Bharat Abhiyan: scaling SBCC to a national mission 🔗

If EXNORA demonstrates SBCC at the community level, the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (SBA) – launched on 2 October 2014 by Prime Minister Narendra Modi – shows what SBCC can achieve when deployed at the scale of a nation. Covering 4,041 statutory cities and towns, the mission aimed to achieve an open defecation-free (ODF) India by 2 October 2019, the 150th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi, for whom cleanliness was a core principle.

The scale of the challenge was enormous. In 2016, nearly 60% of India’s population still practised open defecation – four times the global rate. Addressing this required more than building infrastructure. It demanded a fundamental shift in behaviour, social norms, and public attitudes toward sanitation and cleanliness – exactly the domain of SBCC.

Multi-channel communication as the backbone of the campaign 🔗

The Swachh Bharat Mission’s communication strategy was deliberately layered. Specific behavioural change strategies included the involvement of multimedia channels, community mobilisation, celebrity endorsement, SBCC material development, and interpersonal communication. Television advertisements, social media campaigns, and the now-iconic slogan “Clean India, Green India” reached millions across urban and rural India simultaneously. Media houses voluntarily devoted advertisement slots to the initiative, and technology was used innovatively – from mobile apps reporting sanitation progress to an interactive challenge platform where people shared “before and after” images of cleaned spaces and nominated others to do the same.

Interpersonal communication was equally central. The focus was on house-to-house interventions, community-based monitoring and vigilance committees, and generating peer pressure on outliers. Street plays (nukkad nataks), elocution contests, and school-led pledge campaigns made the message personal and local, not just top-down. Youth volunteers – trained under programmes like “Asli Tarakki” – went door-to-door across urban areas to motivate citizens and inform them about government support for toilet construction.

The role of advocacy and public-private partnerships 🔗

Swachh Bharat Abhiyan was also a landmark exercise in advocacy. The mission was framed not merely as a government scheme but as a moral duty – invoking Gandhi’s legacy to give it cultural and emotional weight. High-profile celebrity endorsements brought visibility, while public-private partnerships funded and implemented sanitation projects at scale. This combination of political will, civil society engagement, and strategic media use is a textbook example of how advocacy, when integrated with SBCC, amplifies reach and impact.

Measurable outcomes: environmental and public health gains 🔗

The numbers tell a significant story. From 2014 to 2020, the Government of India constructed over 100 million household toilets, with more than 600,000 villages declared free of open defecation. According to UNICEF, the mission transformed the lives of nearly 500 million people – roughly half of India’s population – by providing access to safe toilets. National sanitation coverage rose from 38.7% in 2014 to 90% by August 2018. The number of schools with separate toilet facilities for girls grew from 37% to 91% – a gain with profound implications for girls’ education and safety.

The public health impact has also been documented. Research published in the Journal of Family Medicine and Primary Care found that 2017 and 2018 recorded the lowest number of acute diarrhoeal disease outbreaks in India over a nine-year period, a trend researchers attributed in part to the expansion of sanitation infrastructure and the behavioural changes driven by the SBM. Women in rural areas – who previously had no choice but to venture out after dark for open defecation – gained dignity, safety, and improved health outcomes.

However, independent researchers have also noted that ground realities have sometimes lagged behind official statistics. Some studies found toilets used for storage rather than their intended purpose, highlighting the limits of infrastructure-only approaches and reinforcing the SBCC argument: behaviour change communication must accompany physical interventions, not merely precede them.

Key lessons from both initiatives 🔗

Taken together, EXNORA and Swachh Bharat Abhiyan offer a clear set of principles for effective SBCC in environmental protection.

Community ownership is non-negotiable. Both initiatives succeeded where they most deeply engaged residents as participants, not audiences. When people feel a sense of ownership over their environment, the probability of sustained change increases substantially.

Communication must be multi-layered and culturally rooted. From street plays and school rallies to celebrity endorsements and mobile apps, the most effective SBCC campaigns meet communities in the channels and idioms they trust. A single medium or a single message is rarely enough.

Advocacy and policy must walk alongside grassroots action. EXNORA worked hand-in-hand with municipal corporations and attracted international partnerships. Swachh Bharat drew direct political sponsorship at the highest level. Neither operated in isolation from the systems of governance and power that shape communities’ daily lives.

Behavioural change is a process, not an event. Evidence consistently shows that sustained change in behaviour is unlikely to be achieved through a single activity – it requires ongoing engagement, reinforcement, and locally adapted messaging. Both EXNORA’s community chapters and SBM’s Phase II (which focuses on maintaining ODF status and advancing solid and liquid waste management) reflect this understanding.

Environmental stewardship and public health are inseparable. Whether it is reducing diarrhoeal disease through improved sanitation or cutting municipal solid waste through composting, both case studies make clear that environmental SBCC directly improves community health outcomes. Cleaning the environment and keeping communities healthy are not parallel goals – they are the same goal.

What do you think? Can the grassroots, community-fee-based model of EXNORA be successfully replicated in densely populated urban slums across South Asia – or does it only work in specific social and geographic contexts? And beyond building infrastructure, what communication strategies do you think are most effective in making environmental behaviour change truly last?

References

1. https://rrjournals.com/index.php/rrijm/article/view/1662
2. https://waterforpeopleindia.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/SBCC-strategy-guidance-manual.pdf
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exnora_International
4. https://www.citizenshandbook.org/unesco/most/asia3.html
5. https://global.comminit.com/content/swachh-bharat-mission
6. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/environmental-science/articles/10.3389/fenvs.2023.1141825/full
7. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-71268-8
8. https://www.unicef.org/india/stories/decade-indias-transformative-sanitation-mission
9. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6482782/