In response to the influx of some 488,000 Syrian refugee children since 2011, international and local NGOs working in Lebanon have provided formal and non-formal education services designed to promote both children’s academic skills and their social and emotional learning (SEL) skills. However, the majority of SEL-related frameworks and materials used are typically grounded in theory and research from western, educated, industrialized, rich, democracies (WEIRD), which are not always coherent or aligned with Lebanese societal cultures and norms. Towards the goal of generating contextually meaningful evidence to guide program and policy decision-making in Lebanon, our research-practice-policy partnership has engaged in a rigorous, multi-method, iterative process to develop and contextualize an SEL framework for children in Lebanese primary schools. In this paper, we will describe the process of engaging experts in education, psycho-social support, and SEL from the Government of Lebanon, World Learning, Harvard’s EASEL Lab, and NYU Global TIES to empirically code existing frameworks and identify priority SEL constructs. We will reflect on the development of systemic and transformative relationships across partners as a means toward contextualization, and conclude by sharing a first version of a National SEL Framework for Lebanon.

Various chapters in this volume describe efforts on behalf of governments, civil society, and researchers in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region to ensure that children gain the social and emotional skills and competencies that enable them to thrive personally and professionally while promoting collective peace and prosperity. We cannot, however, most effectively design and target such efforts-or know the extent to which we are succeeding (or not) in such efforts-without tools that provide information about the nature and extent of children's social and emotional skills, how such skills change over time, and the aspects of children's school, family, and community environments that promote or impede the development of such skills. In this chapter, we introduce a “Measurement for What?” framework to guide emerging efforts to develop and adapt measurement tools to assess and promote children’s holistic learning and development in the MENA region. This includes assessments of social and emotional skills, as well as the quality of programmes intended to promote such outcomes. We illustrate the utility of the framework using examples from the Education in Emergencies: Evidence for Action (3EA) Middle East, North Africa, and Turkey (MENAT) Measurement Consortium.

While the past decade has seen increased global efforts to develop reliable and valid measures of developmental phenomena for use in diverse populations within and across countries, the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), and in particular the education goal (SDG4) have revealed a dearth of meaningful and valid measures and indicators to monitor countries’ progress toward achieving the 10 SDG4 targets. Developmental science can a) inform the choice of outcomes, processes, and mechanisms that yield the greatest promise in advancing countries ability to formulate solutions; and b) provide guidance on how to measure educational phenomena to ensure maximum policy relevance. Moving forward, developmental science will need to provide rigorous evidence on measures that incorporate the principles of bioecological frameworks on human development and learning to capture the complexity of the multi-level, multi-dimensional, dynamic processes of development and learning that are relevant to achieving SDG4. The chapter concludes with specific recommendations for how developmental scientists can ensure that their research is directly relevant to and can best support the SDG process.

This chapter discusses the roles of transnational multiple stakeholder partnerships in addressing development and implementation challenges affecting youth and children in both rich as well as low- and middle-income countries. We first discuss each of five major sets of stakeholders –national governments; community members; civil society organizations; the private sector; and researchers – in terms of their stakes in working towards SDG progress. Then we present how networks across these groups (e.g. at national, regional and global levels, or Multiple Stakeholder Partnerships (MSPs), can help achieve progress, with several current examples. Throughout we balance discussion of challenges, strengths and opportunities in both individual stakeholder approaches and MSPs. We also place special emphasis on the role of research in general and developmental science in particular, in the work of MSPs on the Sustainable Development Goals.