CaDDANZ was a New Zealand Government-funded project studying the impacts of growing population diversity in Aotearoa New Zealand. The project ran from 2014 to 2020 and was extended to March 2021 due to the effects of the global COVID-19 pandemic. Staffed by a multidisciplinary team of researchers, CaDDANZ aimed to identify changing demographics and the impacts of ethnic and demographic diversity on aspects of economic and social change. This report has synthesised a bundle of key insights that could only have surfaced through the reflection on the interplay between the research questions that the original bid set out to address. While we, as a project team, did not intend to produce transdisciplinary or even interdisciplinary work on migration, diversity or the diversity dividend, setting a goal to synthesise something from the project as a whole has produced this report. Using social cohesion as a sorting mechanism for the insights has meant this overview is selective and high level. Not all the projects can be read against a social cohesion or even social inclusion lens. In particular, many of the econometric outputs explicitly addressed aspects of diversity as an economic dividend and that work is not highlighted in the synthesis.
Three broad themes are addressed
1. Immigration and diversity – understanding population trends
2. [Re] conceptualising ethno-demographic diversity in Aotearoa – Tangata whenua perspectives
3. Diversity in context – in different settings and over time
The report concludes with four high-level insights
1. Immigration policy needs to re-examine its position in relation to Tiriti o Waitangi where any Crown partnership relationship is currently lacking.
2. Despite social cohesion being a negotiated term, its use as a framing for the impacts of migration on both the host country and individual migrant lives is underpinned by its use in the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the terrorist attack on Christchurch mosques on 15 March 2019 and is preferable to the concept of a diversity dividend.1
3. While ethnocultural diversity is the default for ‘diversity dividend’ research, the concept of the social organisation of difference has broader relevance to social justice-oriented policy development.2
4. The use of wide range of different methodologies is vital for the production of wellevidenced, theory-informed strategies and policies
