Social cohesion is having its season in Aotearoa New Zealand. Political parties invoke it, government agencies place it in strategic plans, and community organisations discover it in funding applications with the enthusiasm once reserved for words such as diversity, inclusion and resilience. The phrase is everywhere. The evidence of progress is harder to find.
This is not because Aotearoa New Zealand lacks a framework. Te Korowai Whetū has already done the conceptual work, setting out belonging, inclusion, participation, recognition and legitimacy as central conditions of a cohesive society. The trouble begins afterwards. Instead of asking whether an activity moves any of those conditions, we have quietly lowered the threshold until almost any respectable community gathering can qualify. A conference becomes social cohesion. So does an interfaith meeting, a cultural festival, a workshop, a shared meal or another round of consultation. The activity occurs, the photographs are taken, participants report that the discussion was valuable, and everybody leaves with that pleasant emotional fuzziness that accompanies a well-run event.
But a warm room is not necessarily a warmer society.
Much of this engagement also suffers from a familiar weakness: we keep inviting people who already believe in engagement. Officials meet faith and community leaders; also service providing NGOs and, after several years, many of the faces begin to look reassuringly familiar. They may disagree around the edges, but everyone in the room has already accepted the basic proposition that dialogue is worthwhile. In that sense, much social-cohesion work risks becoming preaching to the converted.
The harder terrain lies elsewhere. It lies with the person who distrusts government and will never attend its consultation; the migrant who has experienced discrimination but no longer believes complaint is useful; the worker who thinks immigration has made his own position less secure; the young person whose political education is taking place inside an online grievance machine; and the citizen who regards the language of multiculturalism itself with suspicion. If social cohesion is weakest in those places, repeatedly convening the already-engaged tells us very little about the fracture.
The same modesty of ambition can be seen in funding. There is nothing wrong with cultural festivals, meals, dance or celebration. Communities have done these things for centuries without needing a policy framework to explain why. The more awkward question is why public funding so often stops there. If, after years of grants, communities still require the state to subsidise the same festivals, meals and cultural performances, are we building resilience or merely maintaining activity?
There is a difference between support and empowerment, and we have become too polite to ask where one ends and the other begins.
A grant can produce a good evening. It can fill a hall, pay performers and provide photographs for an annual report. What remains when the chairs are stacked away? Has the organisation become better governed? Has it developed sustainable income? Have people gained skills, employment pathways, business connections or stronger access to institutions? Has a younger generation acquired the confidence and knowledge to participate in civic life? Is the community now better equipped to deal with a crisis, negotiate with government, navigate health and education systems, or stand on its own feet?
These are not departures from social cohesion. They may be closer to its foundation than another festival.
Economic insecurity, weak organisational capacity and dependence on intermittent grants do not disappear because people danced together on Saturday. A community that possesses skills, networks, assets and institutional confidence has a very different relationship with society from one perpetually waiting for the next funding round. If public money is being spent in the name of cohesion, surely one measure of success should be whether communities become progressively more capable of acting for themselves.
That raises the question government and the community sector have so far avoided: who will raise the bar?
Te Korowai Whetū gives us a language against which progress could be tested, but a framework has little force if every familiar activity can be fitted beneath it after the fact. The sequence should be harsher. Identify the fracture first. Decide what change would constitute progress. Choose an intervention capable of producing that change. Then return and ask, with some discipline, whether anything actually moved.
Aotearoa New Zealand does not need another definition of social cohesion, and it probably does not need another conference telling us how important it is. What it needs is a higher threshold for claiming success. Otherwise we may become exceptionally good at funding, discussing and celebrating social cohesion while leaving the difficult society outside the meeting room largely untouched.
