EUKN - United Kingdom - Promoting Sustainable Communities and Community Cohesion

Promoting Sustainable Communities and Community Cohesion

Introduction

The purpose of this report is to explore how the Sustainable Communities and Community Cohesion agendas may be promoted, developed and embedded within and across different professional disciplines and sectors.

Description

This report looks at promoting, developing and embedding the Sustainable Communities and Community Cohesion agendas within and across sectors.

This report seeks to map and describe:

the various professional and other bodies involved in building sustainable and cohesive communities;
identify their various routes to learning;
map sources of existing guidance provided by various statutory and other agencies;
identify ‘gaps’ in the extent to which organisations and sectors have developed some engagement with both agendas;
make proposals upon which future development strategies and programmes may be based;
build the foundations for a national practitioners network.

Background information

This report details the first phase of what is intended to be a three year programme.

The research recognises the overlap between the Sustainable Communities and Community Cohesion agendas and suggests that both the Academy for Sustainable Communities and the Institute of Community Cohesion should consider similar methods of promoting both agendas, targeting a common pool of professional, representative and other organisations.

Methodology

The research involved:

Constructing a Mapping Matrix of Organisations - identifying key organisations concerned with building sustainable communities and promoting community cohesion
Data Collection - gathering information from websites, supplemented – where necessary – by telephone interview.
Data Analysis - to determine the extent to which sustainable communities and community cohesion featured on the internal agenda of each organisation and within each sector.
Building a Practitioners Network based around those directly involved in building cohesive and sustainable communities.

Conclusions

A key conclusion was that the numbers of professional and other organisations that have begun to engage with the cohesive and sustainable communities agendas were encouraging.

However, the extent to which these issues seem to feature in internal policy themes and guidance, routes to learning and the dissemination of information was disappointing.

Even where organisations are engaged, their perspectives often appear to revolve around their own professional domains and is still rather ‘silo’ based. Nevertheless, the opportunities for development and rolling out connecting programmes are considerable.

Contact info

Academy for Sustainable Communities
Judith Stead (Learning and Research Officer), tel. +44(0)113 3944581

Publication date

Project finished

//2006

Researcher

The Institute of Community Cohesion

Links

Visit the Academy for Sustainable Communities website

Download the "Promoting Sustainable Communities and Community Cohesion" Report (DOC, Eng, 584 KB)

Document type

research

Themes

Urban Policy > Social inclusion & integration

Keywords

Community development