Introduction

This chapter is concerned with the evaluation of social cohesion. It begins by identifying some key evaluation challenges posed by the proposed definition of social cohesion. It situates these challenges in ongoing debates about the merits of different approaches to evaluation and highlights the potential contribution of recent developments in ‘theory-based evaluation’. Drawing on ‘theories of change’ – a popular example of theory-based evaluation – the chapter explores how these challenges may be met and the implications for evaluators.

This book argues for a reappraisal of the value of policies based on ‘community cohesion’ and their replacement by a policy programme aimed at ‘social cohesion’. As Ratcliffe argues in Chapter One (p 000):

Equality is also understood in a particular way,

This book sets out what it considers to be the key components of a social policy agenda for social cohesion. In terms of policy areas, education, the labour market and housing are identified as central to the material conditions experienced by all communities. In addition, the complex and often contradictory nature of ‘community’ will influence the likely impact of policy interventions. This impact needs to be considered in a number of ways: in relation to intergenerational dynamics, in the exchanges and relations between settled and ‘new’ migrant groups, in the context of the neighbourhood conditions that ‘communities’ inhabit and in the influences of wider ‘communities’ and places on each other and on neighbourhoods. Also, overlaid on the policy/community/neighbourhood canvas is the role of political institutions, cultures and practices, the interface between the national and the local and the interface between the representative and participative modes of democratic engagement.