Based on our experience with Programa Compasso, perhaps the most salient systemic influence on the implementation of SEL programming in low-income, conflict-affected settings is culture. Cultural values prioritizing SEL in Brazil provided an opportunity for our study to take place by fomenting initial demand for SEL services (Durlak and DuPre, 2008). Brazilians generally adhere to horizontal collectivist values, emphasizing group well-being and prosocial behavior alongside individual equality (Carlo et al., 2007; Martinez et al., 2020). Although Brazilians report that the learning of these values begins at home, they also believe that the education system is key to equipping children –particularly from low-income backgrounds –with skills to get along with others and endure the hardships of everyday life (Dessen and Torres, 2002). Indeed, Brazil’s national learning standards –codified in the Base Nacional Comum Curricular (BNCC) –explicitly emphasize SEL skills as outcomes of public education, including responsibility and citizenship, empathy and cooperation, self-knowledge and self-care, and critical and creative thinking (Movimento Pela Base Nacional Comum, 2018). In our experience, these collective values around (1) the importance of SEL and (2) the central role that schools play in its socialization generated the community appetite that allowed our work to be funded, implemented, and taken-up in Rio. Had we attempted this work in a different cultural context (e.g., areas of sub-Saharan Africa where parental demand prioritizes schools’ academic rigor; Bidwell et al., 2014; Wolf, 2020), we speculate that gaining community buy-in would have been more difficult.

Culture also positively and negatively shaped the structure and implementation of Programa Compasso itself. Prior meta-analysis quantifying the “cross-cultural transportability” of SEL programming suggests that interventions implemented outside the countries in which they were developed tend to be less effective for improving certain outcomes than those implemented in their country of origin (Wigelsworth et al., 2016). Accordingly, considering cultural relevance is important for optimizing the success of school-based SEL programming in LMICs and conflict-affected settings. To maximize the cultural appropriateness of Programa Compasso, Instituto Vila Educação added a student workbook and parent meetings to the original US-based Second Step curriculum to more explicitly reflect the centrality of the family system in Brazil (Carlo et al., 2007) and teachers’ beliefs that the program would not work without investments from parents. The core lessons from Second Step were also modified, but mostly in minor ways (e.g., replacing references to skiing with football/soccer) to avoid tampering with the program’s “active ingredients” (Durlak, 2016).

Although many teachers praised the final intervention content and structure as “relevant” and “productive,” some reported that the program remained “decontextualized from [their] own reality.” One educator, for example, questioned the importance of teaching students to individually regulate (read: control) their emotions, saying instead that Brazilian children should “embrace” emotions, sharing and co-regulating them with peers and caregivers. Teachers also sometimes pushed back against the scripted nature of the lessons, instead pursuing ad hoc approaches to teaching the SEL topic of the week. We speculate several different opportunities could have mitigated these challenges. For example, more substantive –or “deep structure” (Ahluwalia et al., 1999) –adaptations to Programa Compasso’s lesson content could have improved cultural alignment. Alternatively, helping teachers to understand how existing lessons could be used to support context-specific goals (e.g., co-regulation) may have improved their motivation to implement the program as-is, with greater fidelity.

Finally, our findings highlight the importance of viewing culture not just as a stable, broad-scale influence, but also as a force that shapes SEL program implementation and effectiveness more locally (Vélez-Agosto et al., 2017). Our evaluation showed that Programa Compasso improved child outcomes within neighborhoods characterized by lower-than-average levels of violence; however, in higher-violence communities, the program showed no impacts. Independent of the broader cultural values of Brazil as a whole, these findings could reflect more localized variability in the socialization practices used in safer versus less safe environments. Indeed, most SEL programs –including Programa Compasso –take an “approach” orientation to teaching conflict resolution, encouraging children to stop, think, and discuss their feelings with others. Although these mainstream strategies seem to have been modestly effective in low-violence neighborhoods, they may have contradicted the avoidant strategies often taught to protect children’s physical safety in conflict-affected settings (e.g., to quickly disengage from conflict, run away, etc.; Kliewer et al., 2006), limiting their applicability, take-up, and effectiveness in Rio’s more dangerous communities. Once again, these results reinforce the importance of aligning SEL programmatic strategies with cultural values. Importantly, however, they also encourage taking a narrower, more localized view of culture to avoid fallacies regarding cultural homogeneity (e.g., within all LMICs, within Brazil, etc.).

A second noteworthy factor affecting SEL implementation in low-income, conflict-affected settings is timing. Around the start of our study in 2017, the federal Ministry of Education ratified the BNCC, increasing political appetite for curricular approaches targeting SEL-related learning standards. Simultaneously, Brazil was experiencing widespread gang violence and police shootouts amidst an economic recession and several highly publicized government corruption scandals. In particular, Rio experienced a 26 percent surge in community crime (Fonseca and Alper, 2018), forcing schools to close for so-called “violence days” during 99 of the first 107 school days in 2017 (de Oliveira, 2017). Even when children were attending school, educators reported concerns with students’ social–emotional wellbeing, noting that children “are here, but their head is always outside” (Londoño, 2017). Finally, a simultaneous move from part-to full-day schooling for many primary schools in Rio effectively doubled the “supply” of instructional hours available to meet the demand for SEL programming inspired by the BNCC and rise in community violence. Collectively, these “opportunities” opened doors for us to implement Programa Compasso in Rio. Nevertheless, the stress these same factors placed on educators may have also negatively affected their capacity to deliver the intervention with sufficient dose or fidelity. For example, more than 60 percent of teachers in our sample said that violence affects their school at least “a little,” and approximately 70 percent said that either they or their students had trouble getting to school because of violence.

Overall, these findings suggest that the timing of broader political, cultural, or societal events can present as both opportunities and barriers for program implementation. In low-income and conflict-affected settings, destabilizing events like the ones we observed in Rio (e.g., bursts of violence, policy shifts) are especially common, and often result in calls for supporting the social–emotional needs of children. Nevertheless, as we observed in our study, the stress and instability created by these events may also limit the bandwidth of individuals tasked with delivering SEL supports. Such tensions were also observed globally amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, as widespread teacher burnout coincided with broader demand for and availability of SEL services (Reimers et al., 2020; Gultom et al., 2022). Taking advantage of the opportunities to affect change presented by these broader social shocks, while also compensating for the additional stress that they place on program implementers, could be one path forward for successful implementation of SEL programming in LMICs and high-violence areas.

Such shocks may also open opportunities for creative SEL solutions that either supplement or replace traditional school-based approaches. Community-or technology-based programming (e.g., parent groups, apps) may be particularly useful for reaching children when they cannot attend school safely. Virtual SEL programs have been especially popular since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic (Katzman and Stanton, 2020). In 2021, for example, our team worked with Rio’s Ministry of Education to deliver lessons on stress management remotely via television. Although these non-school-based approaches to SEL hold promise for addressing access gaps during times of crisis, evidence regarding their effectiveness is still emerging.

A third systemic factor that we observed to underpin SEL implementation is government support and stability. In many LMIC and conflict-affected settings, government officials (e.g., staff from Ministries of Education) influence not only whether an SEL program is taken up, but whether it is sustained and how it is implemented. Government turnover is a major issue globally, and especially in contexts characterized by instability and public mistrust. In Brazil, it is common for new governments to abolish or severely restructure programs established by their predecessors. In the case of Programa Compasso, the 2016 municipal elections in Rio led to staffing changes in the Ministry of Education that coincided with the start of our study. Although we were fortunate to receive permission from the new government to continue our research, the initial enthusiasm we received from the Ministry of Education was tempered as new officials took office and focused on their own agendas. We speculate that these changes ultimately affected implementation, with new government staff providing less oversight, guidance, and encouragement for schools to deliver Programa Compasso than their predecessors.

Even in non-election years, inconsistencies in government oversight and support can affect SEL implementation by breeding mistrust from program implementers. Some teachers in our study voiced resistance to Programa Compasso solely because it was mandated by officials who they perceived as unfamiliar with and unsupportive of their day-to-day work. Despite the shift to full-day teaching, teachers reported being over-worked, having limited time, and needing social–emotional services for themselves before they could support their students. Studies have shown similar patterns of government mistrust in Brazil, with many teachers pushing for increased autonomy regarding resource allocation and curricular planning (Lennert da Silva and Mølstad, 2020).

Despite these barriers, durable partnerships between NGOs and public officials whose jobs are not tied to a particular political party or election result (i.e., “comissionados” in Brazil) could help to sustain implementation in the face of government instability. Although we lacked such partnerships in Rio, we have seen in other areas of Brazil that collaborations focused outwardly on advocacy, awareness-raising, and empowerment may be particularly effective. For example, efforts led by a coalition of foundations to educate political candidates and the public in Ceará, Brazil about the importance of the early years have helped to ensure the popularity –and longevity –of early childhood programs in the state (Fundação Maria Cecilia Souto Vidigal, 2021). Furthermore, internal dialogs focused on building trust and equality between government staff and program implementers could help to overcome the issues of mistrust that we observed in our study. In particular, such partnerships can support implementers’ (e.g., teachers’) understanding of the value of a given SEL program while also improving their capacity to make improvements aligned with government goals. Indeed, experimental evidence from Brazil has shown that shifting decision-making authority from governments to teachers can reduce teacher turn-over and improve student learning and social–emotional outcomes (Piza et al., 2020).