24/09/2026
🏛️ Museums, libraries, and community centres bring people together - but the extent to which the economic case for investing in them captures the true benefit of this connection is largely uncertain.
We were commissioned by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) to scope out potential methods for monetising the value of social cohesion generated by culture and heritage assets, contributing to DCMS's Cultural and Heritage Capital (CHC) project. Non-market benefits like social cohesion are often missed by existing economic appraisal, leading to systematic undervaluing and underinvestment in the sector.
🔍 We reviewed the evidence on how social cohesion is defined, how culture and heritage contribute to it, and how it's currently measured — then developed a Theory of Change mapping the pathways from investment to social, economic and wellbeing outcomes.
🔍 We assessed six non-market valuation methodologies — including contingent valuation, discrete choice experiments, and wellbeing valuation — against a Red-Amber-Green framework covering monetisability, robustness, data requirements and scope.
🔍 We piloted a new valuation survey in the context of local libraries, testing different approaches to understand how people conceptualise — and value — social cohesion.
Our research found that social cohesion is complex and multidimensional, with no universally accepted definition, and that no single valuation method suits all contexts — the right approach depends on the outcomes being valued, the data available, and the evaluation objectives.
Read the full report 👇
