Project description
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Social cohesion is a topic of increasing social concern. As European societies are becoming more diverse and processes of economic globalization introduce new social pressures and inequalities, the question “what keeps society” together becomes all the more salient.
Various possible threats to social cohesion can be identified: social and economic exclusion, discrimination and inequality, or a lack of adequate access to public services. Furthermore, social cohesion also has a strong normative and attitudinal component: we assume that citizens have to be able to trust their fellow-citizens and political institutions. Briefly, societies tend to function if there is a “sense of belonging”.
The maintenance of the European social model is one of the key goals of the Lisbon Strategy, as it was developed by the European Union. Using an open method of coordination, all authorities and stakeholders are invited to participate in this challenge. This idea has also been taken up by the Belgian Federal Government and by the Regional Government of the Flemish Autonomous Region in Belgium.
If our goal is to promote social cohesion, this implies we need careful and reliable monitoring mechanisms to ascertain whether or not social cohesion is becoming stronger, or is threatened in European societies.
The current research project, Social Cohesion Indicators in Flanders, or SCIF (SCIV in Dutch) wants to explore the possibility of creating such a comprehensive set of social cohesion indicators. We want to focus on monitoring exclusion, inequality, participation, trust, feelings of insecurity, and the role played by local government offices. SCIF is a multi-annual project, conducted jointly by the Flemish universities of Leuven, Ghent, Antwerp and Brussels, and by McGill University (Montreal, Canada). Central co-ordination of the project rests with Marc Hooghe of the Catholic University of Leuven. Other participating research are Bea Cantillon (Social Policy, Antwerp), Paul Ponsaers (Criminology, Ghent), Bruno Heyndels (Local Economy, Brussels) and Dietlind Stolle (Political Science, McGill). The project is funded by the Flemish Agency for Innovation, Science and Technology.
The ambition of the project is to develop social cohesion indicators that can be used by the Flemish Government and by local authorities and stakeholders. Simultaneously, however, we want to develop a methodology that can be used to monitor social cohesion policy, and which can be applied in different settings.
http://www.socialcohesion.eu/ |
