National social policy agendas tend to be dominated by a relatively small number of key concepts. In Britain, one such concept, ‘community cohesion’, has assumed a pre-eminent role over the past decade. It has been the subject of a host of government enquiries, policy papers and even a national Commission – the Commission on Integration and Cohesion (CIC). There is also a policy institute, the Institute of Community Cohesion, committed to propagating its use as a guiding theme for national policy and practice.

In addition, it has spawned a voluminous academic literature, much of it, to one degree or another, critical of its central tenets. What is currently lacking, however, is a serious engagement with the evaluation agenda: in other words, the question of how one might assess the fruits of ‘community cohesion’ policy in its various guises. As Khan (2007, p 40) argues, ‘providing linkages between policies and concepts is a difficult enterprise but one that is necessary for justifying and ultimately evaluating the implementation of government measures’. The existing academic literature engages with the concept and outlines alternative ways of interpreting the key policy challenges facing Britain, but fails to elucidate appropriate policies in any detail and, even more noticeably, fails to provide any guidance on evaluation strategies.

This book aims to address this lacuna. In doing so, it builds on the excellent work of, for example, Wetherell et al (2007), Flint and Robinson (2008) and Finney and Simpson (2009). It evaluates the theoretical and substantive arguments for moving from a focus on ‘community cohesion’ to the rather broader notion of social cohesion and then looks at the implications for policy and evaluation. In other words, it addresses not only how one might evaluate existing cohesion policies, but also how one might do this given a restructured and reformulated cohesion policy context.

As a consequence of this shift in emphasis, our approach places a much greater emphasis on material inequalities. This in turn has significant implications for the evaluation of policy and practice around ‘community cohesion’. The book provides a thorough critique of current measures based on national indicators, clarifies the aims and objectives of what we see as the ‘social cohesion’ paradigm and provides alternative frameworks for policy development and evaluation.