Social cohesion is often discussed as though it is something that happens after the “real” work of public services is done. Housing, health, education, policing, then perhaps a communications campaign to explain what is happening. The LGA’s Common Ground guidance makes a different claim. Produced by Belong, the cohesion and integration network, the Common Ground guidance treats cohesion as a practical condition of everyday life that has to be built and maintained, not assumed. It also treats communication as part of that condition, not an optional add-on.
This matters because the UK is now operating in a mixed information environment. Much of what shapes attitudes and expectations is no longer produced locally, and is often not produced with any duty of care to the places and communities it affects.
At the same time, local institutions are expected to prevent tensions escalating, maintain trust, and support democratic participation. Common Ground puts this tension in plain terms. False or malicious claims, online or offline, can fuel hostility, deepen divisions, and damage confidence in public services. It warns that silence creates space for harmful narratives, and that clear, timely, empathetic communication can mitigate harm and promote social cohesion.
Decentered Media’s Foundational Media work starts from the same reality, but pushes further. The question is not only how to rebut misinformation in a crisis. The question is what kind of media system helps places stay cohesive before a crisis happens, and how the UK builds durable capacity for civic communication that is accountable to people’s lived experience rather than to remote institutional and corporate incentives.
Common Ground uses a social cohesion model grounded in participation, belonging, democratic confidence, trust, and safety. It also highlights bonding, bridging and linking social capital. Bridging and linking are especially relevant for media. Bridging is about relationships across difference. Linking is about relationships between people and institutions, including confidence that institutions are listening and acting fairly. Communication is not separate from these relationships. It is one of the ways they are created and tested.
This is why Common Ground explicitly includes media inside its model of cohesion, listing “media, social media, narratives, addressing misinformation, and shaping attitudes” as a component of “communications and understanding”. The guidance is not making a cultural studies point, but is describing a governance problem. If narratives fragment, trust becomes brittle. If trust becomes brittle, participation falls. If participation falls, democratic legitimacy weakens. If legitimacy weakens, tensions become harder to manage. The system then becomes more vulnerable to manipulation, scapegoating, and panic.
Foundational Media can be understood as a practical response to this chain of risk. It argues that a healthy civic system needs communication channels that are locally legible, socially accountable, and easy for ordinary people to participate in. It also argues that the value of these channels is not only “information” in the narrow sense. It is relationship, shared attention, and the ability to hear one another in ordinary life. That is why, in earlier Decentered Media work, radio is described as retaining an “affective intimacy” and an integral sense of “liveness and directness” that supports a shared social and cultural experience, especially at local level.
We can link the two frameworks directly by asking what each cohesion condition requires, and what kind of media practice helps deliver it.
Participation, in Common Ground terms, is not only voting. It is the capability and opportunity to engage meaningfully in local life. In practice, this depends on whether people can find out what is happening, whether they can see a route into involvement, and whether they feel welcome.
Common Ground’s engagement guidance includes the idea that open local forums can help challenge misinformation and promote shared understanding. Foundational Media adds an enabling mechanism: people need access to production and distribution tools and the confidence to use them.
Earlier Decentered Media work explicitly frames community media as a civil society approach that promotes active citizenship, participation, and access to platforms, with local ownership and editorial independence as practical safeguards.
Belonging is not achieved by slogans or branding exercises. It is formed through recognition, shared reference points, and the sense that one’s everyday life is visible in the public story of a place.
Foundational Media treats this as a core purpose of place-based storytelling. It is the opposite of a media culture that only pays attention when there is conflict, scandal, or catastrophe. It is also the opposite of a national conversation that flattens local differences into stereotypes. Media that supports belonging does not need to be cosy or compliant. It needs to be familiar with people’s lives and capable of holding contradictions without turning them into caricature.
Democratic confidence depends on whether people can understand how decisions are made and whether they believe those decisions are open to challenge. Common Ground highlights that councils need clear, communicable definitions of cohesion and the ability to communicate a vision to residents.
Foundational Media extends this into a national-level critique: if public life becomes mediated primarily through platforms designed for engagement-maximisation, then political communication becomes less about deliberation and more about mobilisation, outrage, and identity performance. A foundational approach instead emphasises civic explanation, contestable evidence, and a plurality of local voices that can scrutinise institutions at human scale.
Trust is where the two frameworks interlock most tightly. Common Ground’s section on mis, dis and malinformation, describes harms not only to reputations but to the stability of democratic society, linking disinformation to degradation of public trust, polarisation, weakening civic bonds, and fragmentation of local networks and partnerships.
It also notes that vulnerability is linked to low digital literacy, social isolation, and distrust in institutions. Foundational Media does not treat these as separate problems. It treats them as an interdependent system.
When people lack trusted local intermediaries, they become more dependent on remote or anonymous sources. When people become more dependent on remote sources, local institutions lose their ability to correct misinformation quickly. When local institutions lose that ability, they appear weak or evasive, and distrust hardens. Communication then becomes reactive and defensive rather than relational and continuous.
This is why Common Ground’s practical advice about communications channels is important. It explicitly calls for multi-channel strategies, including social media and community radio, and recommends partnering with trusted local organisations, tailoring messages using values-based communication, and combatting misinformation through anti-rumour strategies and myth-busting campaigns.
In Foundational Media terms, this is a recognition that trust is routed through intermediaries. National institutions matter, but they cannot do this work alone, and they cannot do it everywhere with the necessary specificity and credibility.
Safety, in a cohesion context, is both physical and psychological. People need to feel safe enough to participate, and safe enough to speak. The information environment affects this directly. Harmful narratives can escalate tensions and amplify hostility.
Common Ground notes that such narratives can target people grouped by protected characteristics and can amplify hate and discrimination online and offline. The Foundational Media response is not censorship as a default. It is a more specific and more democratic approach: build local communicative capacity, develop practical accountability, and use locally trusted channels to reduce the space in which rumours and scapegoating thrive.
This is where national policy becomes decisive. Local authorities can only do so much in a system where the primary narrative drivers are global platforms and centralised media markets. Common Ground references the Online Safety Act and Ofcom’s role in oversight and enforcement, and it notes that councils are expected to collaborate, report harmful content, and support resilience-building initiatives.
This is one side of the settlement: platform duties and regulatory oversight. But a Foundational Media settlement requires a second side: investment in, and reform of, the distributed civic communications layer that sits between institutions and everyday life.
Put plainly, the UK needs more than rules for platforms. It needs more civic capacity to communicate. That includes community radio, place-based journalism, civic podcasting, and open community reporting networks. It also includes practical skills and governance: the ability to moderate dialogue, to handle contested issues responsibly, to correct misinformation without patronising audiences, and to do so in ways that keep participation open.
There is also a commissioning problem hiding in plain sight. If cohesion depends partly on communication, then communication should be treated as a public value function, not only as public relations. Decentered Media has previously developed the idea of Communications Impact Analysis as a way to align communications practice with organisational values, community needs, and ethical principles, and to measure real-world consequences and unintended effects.
In cohesion terms, this suggests a more mature national approach: public bodies should be expected to evidence how their communications choices affect trust, participation, inclusion, and resilience, and not only whether a message “landed”.
At national level, this leads to three policy implications that should now be discussed openly, not only inside government and think tanks.
First, cohesion needs a media infrastructure lens. If a place has weak local media capacity, it has weaker ability to respond to rumours, explain decisions, sustain shared narratives, and support participation. This is not a cultural luxury. It is a resilience function.
Second, the UK needs a clearer settlement for distributed public value media. This is not an argument against national institutions. It is an argument against concentrating civic communication into a small number of centres while expecting social cohesion to hold at local level. A credible national approach should ask where communicative capacity sits, who owns it, how it remains independent, and how it is sustained across economic cycles.
Third, cohesion needs measurement that is not crude. Common Ground encourages robust evidence bases and monitoring approaches. Foundational Media adds a specific requirement:
Treat trust, participation, and shared understanding as outcomes that can be supported or undermined by communications decisions. If we cannot measure those outcomes, we cannot improve them reliably.
There is a final point that is easy to miss. Common Ground is written for local authorities, but the public should treat it as a wider civic document. It offers a language for discussing cohesion without slipping into either managerial jargon or ideological theatre. It also makes clear that cohesion is now part of the everyday work of governing. If that is true, then cohesion should also be part of the everyday work of public conversation.
That is why Decentered Media wants this discussion to move beyond closed professional loops. We want people who care about civic life to hear the arguments, challenge them, and adapt them. We want media practitioners, local leaders, and residents to compare experiences across different places. We want to test what works in practice, not only what reads well in a strategy document.
If you have informed experience in local government, civic society, community media, education, health, youth work, policing, faith settings, or local business, and you want to explore these issues in a calm and open format, we invite you to take part in podcast conversations and related open civic forums.
Our aim is straightforward: to make the choices visible, to make the trade-offs discussable, and to help build a more widely shared understanding of what social cohesion requires in the information conditions the UK now lives with.
1. Local Government Association: “Common Ground: Building cohesive communities”.
2. UK Government: Online Safety Act explainer.
3. UK Government: The Khan Review: Threats to Social Cohesion and Democratic Resilience.
4. Ofcom: Protecting people from illegal content online.
5. Decentered Media (2019): When the Goal is Not to Scale (internal report).
6. Decentered Media (2023): Need and Benefits of Communications Impact Analysis (internal report).