Deconstructing social cohesion: Towards an analytical framework for assessing social cohesion policies

Abstract

Academics as well as policy-makers consider social cohesion to be an important quality of cities. A high level of social cohesion is associated with a wide variety of positive characteristics of cities: for instance low crime rates, high economic growth, low unemployment and happy citizens. This has lead to a wide variety of policy initiatives explicitly or implicitly aimed at increasing social cohesion. The perceived importance of social cohesion is in remarkable contrast to the lack of its clear definition and a widely agreed-upon analytical framework. The lack of conceptual consensus may be explained by the complexity of the concept. It has multiple dimensions and can be found on different institutional levels: from the level of states to the level of local neighborhoods. In this article I develop an analytical framework that builds upon these multi-dimensional and multi-level characteristics and connect this with an attempt to classify policies aimed at increasing social cohesion.