Abstract

Governments, academics, and communities have defined social cohesion through multiple, overlapping lenses, reflecting different policy objectives, disciplinary traditions, and national contexts. Across disciplines and public policy domains, these definitions vary substantially. For instance, sociology emphasises social bonds and shared norms; political theory focuses on institutional legitimacy and fair cooperation; psychology examines group-level trust and belonging; and policy frameworks prioritise inclusion, participation, and mobility. While complementary, these perspectives leave social cohesion conceptually broad, analytically fragmented, and inconsistently operationalised for overlapping decision-making needs.

This paper summarises four international case studies and measurement approaches, including Australia’s Scanlon Foundation Research Institute’s Scanlon Index of Social Cohesion framework and comparative models from Germany and Chile, highlighting both shared domains and significant variation in focus, methods, and intended policy use. Together, these cases illustrate how definitional choices shape what is measured, how cohesion is interpreted, and which decisions measurement can inform.

Across these approaches, social cohesion is primarily monitored through national surveys of individuals’ perspectives and experiences, rather than applied as a system-level framework to guide program design, service delivery, or institutional reform. The paper finds that Australia’s dominant approaches rely heavily on surveys of individual attitudes. While valuable for tracking population trends, these instruments are not always sufficiently timely to meet policy needs. They are also under-utilised to diagnose causal drivers of cohesion or fragmentation, and need to be integrated with other data sources to support place-based, programmatic, or anticipatory policy decisions, suggesting a currently unmet need for an expanded measurement framework.

The aim of this paper is to identify tensions in current definitional frameworks. It seeks to inform policy discussions on how to operationalise social cohesion as part of a wider system approach. It is the first of a series of papers produced for and by the Australian Resilient Democracy Network.

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