Contemporary Perspectives on Art and International Development

Polly Stupples, Katerina Teaiwa, Polly Stupples, Katerina Teaiwa

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317618492
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Global Development Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Visual artists, craftspeople, musicians, and performers have been supported by the development community for at least twenty years, yet there has been little grounded and critical research into the practices and politics of that support. This new Routledge book remedies that omission and brings together varied perspectives from artists, policy-makers, and researchers working in the Pacific, Africa, Latin America, and Europe to explore the challenges and opportunities of supporting the arts in the development context. The book offers a series of grounded analyses which cover: strategies for the sustainability of arts enterprises; innovative evaluation methods; theoretical engagements with questions of art, agency, and social change; artists' entanglements with legal and structural frameworks; processes of cultural mapping; and the artist/donor interface.

The creative economy is increasingly recognized as a driver of development and this book also investigates the contribution made by the arts to the processes of international development, and considers how those processes can best be supported by development agencies. Contemporary Perspectives on Art and International Development gives scholars of Development Studies, Social and Cultural Geography, Anthropology, Cultural Policy, Cultural Studies, and Global Studies a contextually and thematically diverse range of insights into this emerging research field.

Part One
Structuring the Cultural Sector for Development

1
The Creative Economy and the Development Agenda

The Use and Abuse of ‘Fast Policy’

Christiaan De Beukelaer and Justin O’Connor

Fast and Slow Policy: Introductory Remarks

Cultural policy—like all public policy—travels at different rates. Preparation for United Nations (UN) or other intergovernmental resolutions—on culture’s multiple links with the sustainability agenda, for example—can be painstaking, lumbering, exhausting and above all, slow. On the other hand, we have seen ‘fast policy’ (Peck 2002), where ideas such as the ‘creative city’ and the ‘creative economy’ gain immediate traction in their zone of origin and rapidly circulate through what has become a global circuit of such ‘fast’ cultural policy. ‘Fast policy’ is often dismissed as a superficial fad, a quick fix adopted without scrutiny, easily available to politicians and policy makers who do not have to risk much but stand to make highly visible gains (Peck 2011). This is usually so; however, it does not necessarily follow that slow policy is always deeper, more rooted in real developments, more long term in focus. Fast policy often has the virtue of touching the zeitgeist, no matter how fleeting and insubstantial; slow policy may simply become out of touch, irrelevant, as it makes its way through the opaque circles of intergovernmental negotiation and bureaucratic-diplomatic processing.

The ‘creative economy’ is a quintessential ‘fast policy’ phenomenon. Initially popularized by ‘New Labour’ in Britain (DCMS 1998; Hewison 2014; Smith 1998), it was intended to promote the economic contribution of arts and culture to Britain as a forward-looking, post-industrial nation. However, it was rapidly taken up by those East Asian economies it sought to keep ahead of and by many developing countries who saw a new route to economic growth. From 2008, the creative economy agenda was promoted through a series of United Nations Creative Economy Reports (UNCTAD and UNDP 2008, 2010, 2013). As global debates are both crystallized in and driven by these reports, we will take them as the most tangible instance of what we call the ‘creative economy debate.’

In this trajectory, the creative economy exemplifies the phenomenon of fast policy slowing down, congealing into a discourse able to frame the real across multiple locations. This is not simply a question of ideology—the reduction of the discourse of the value of culture to that of economic benefit. As actor–network theory has helped demonstrate, this framing involves very real processes of measurement, of the creation and (re)calibration of instruments, of new sets of agents and institutions vested with the power to establish the boundaries and legitimate rules involved in a determinate set of practices—implicitly and explicitly set against other, competing ways of framing (Callon 1998, pp. 1–56). The creative economy is, in Michel Callon’s sense, performative. Of course, (cultural) policy is meant to be performative, and what the creative economy discourse performs is a transformation of the debates around cultural value into debates around the economic value of that cultural value. It grounds the value of culture in the language of economic efficiency (O’Connor 2015). We invest in culture insofar as it delivers new forms of economic growth, ones that perhaps are more cost effective (low barriers to entry for individuals and cash-strapped states), more sustainable (they do not rely on resources other than the human) and point away from the past (old industry, subsidized culture) towards the rising economic model of the future, where culture has become creativity (Garnham 2005), a resource transferable and productive across all sectors of the economy.

However, if the creative economy was fast policy, it could be so because it fed off—and helped rework—a wider ‘economic imaginary’ (Jessop and Oosterlynck 2008) of the ‘new’ or ‘knowledge’ economy (Jessop 2005). The creative economy was part of the next step in an economic evolution away from industrial production and the mass provision of public sector services towards a new kind of economy and state. ‘Creative’ may be dismissed as an ‘empty signifier’ (what, now, is not creative?), but it was also a semiotic condensation of multiple narratives articulating a reinvented future which was within our—everybody’s—grasp. Creativity articulated the kind of human resources needed for a move to an innovation driven economy, but it did so in a way that drew on one of the oldest, most available reservoirs of human inventiveness and self-fulfillment: artistic creation.

The creative economy as fast policy contrasts sharply with the ‘culture and development’ moment in development studies in the 1990s. Throughout this period, much attention was given to a rich, diverse and theoretically substantiated debate on the role of culture in processes of development (Hermet 2000; Nederveen Pieterse 1995; Radcliffe 2006; Schech and Haggis 2000; Yousfi 2007). These arguments and ideas, which culminated in the UN Decade for Cultural Development (1988–1997), certainly gained policy traction, but nowhere near as quickly as the creative economy, nor did they move out of a well-defined cultural policy field.

In this chapter, we explore the creative economy agenda as a complex, unfolding set of discourses, tools, actors and imaginaries. We examine what happens when fast policy encounters other, older policy formations, in this case, that of ‘culture and development.’ This is clearly a rather large subject, so we focus our attention on the ‘creative economy debate,’ which attempts to combine elements of an older ‘culture and development’ approach (UNESCO 1998a, 1998b, 2000; WCCD 1996) with that of the creative economy. The challenge, we argue, is to connect the fast creative economy debate that has grown out of cultural (policy) studies (O’Brien 2014), geography (Pratt 2008), media and communications (Hesmondhalgh 2013) and economics (Throsby 2010; Towse 2003) to ‘culture and development’ thinking that is rooted in critical development studies through anthropology (Apthorpe 2005; Clammer 2012; Mosse 2005), development studies (Da Costa 2010; Nederveen Pieterse 1995) and post-colonial studies (De Beukelaer 2012).

From Cultural to Creative (and Back?)

The rise of the creative economy agenda in the ‘developed world’ has been extensively discussed (Hesmondhalgh 2013; O’Connor 2010, 2011). Less attention, at least until recently, has been paid to its extension outside its ‘heartlands,’ even though there are emerging exceptions (e.g., Barrowclough and Kozul-Wright 2012; De Beukelaer 2015; Fonseca Reis 2008). Though, while ‘the West’ has long shifted its economic policies towards services and ideas, the ‘Global South’ is now increasingly following suit (Miller 2009, p. 93). It is quite clear how this creative economy imaginary, its particular language, new econometrics and new kinds of actors/agencies from outside the traditional cultural policy field, quickly became a global agenda. It was picked up by those East Asian countries (Keane 2013; O’Connor and Gu 2006) trying to push their way into the ‘developed countries’ club, seeking to go beyond their established manufacturing success and promote the kind of high value-added economic sector that advanced services and innovation systems could provide. This happened in the first decade of the 21st century. More surprisingly, perhaps, has been the increasing take-up of this agenda in so-called ‘developing’ countries—including some of the poorest (De Beukelaer 2014a, 2015). This began in earnest in 2008 with the first United Nations Council for Trade and Development (UNCTAD) report, and was followed up with a second in 2010. Other international agencies such as the World Bank and World Intellectual Property Organisation have embraced the creative economy discourse as a key area for copyright exploitation, as have many national cultural diplomatic agencies, most especially the British Council and the International Organisation of the Francophonie, which have enthusiastically promoted the agenda throughout Africa and beyond.

No matter how fast the policy, it eventually runs into older discourses, older imaginaries, often embedded in long-standing networks of policy institutions, universities and think tanks, governmental departments and networks of cultural practitioners, activists and consultants. At the level of international agencies, it is UNESCO that has taken the lead in cultural policy and its relationship to the development agenda. UNESCO, in collaboration with other agencies, had across the 1990s developed a sophisticated understanding and critique of ‘development’ (WCCD 1996). It generally asserted the values and practices associated with ‘culture’ over against what they saw as reductive and destructively one-sided approaches to development, as expressed in GDP. Yet mainstream development thinking remains reluctant (or unwilling) to incorporate this critique (Clammer 2012). In spite of this, the ‘culture and development’ approach influenced parts of UNESCO’s (2005) Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions. In explicitly rejecting the World Trade Organisation’s reduction of cultural goods and services to commodities like any other, it also sought more positively to assert the need to provide the social and economic preconditions for equitable and diverse access to the consumption and production of culture.

There is no space here to discuss in detail the provenance of the three UN Creative Economy Reports. What is clear is that the creative economy debate attempts to raise some more critical issues around the creative economy agenda, drawing on the perspective of the ‘culture and development’ approach discussed. In particular, it asserts the importance of local development pathways and highlights some of the problematic aspects of global cultural economies as well as the opportunities they provide. As such, it is entirely compatible with the aims of the 2005 Convention—arguing the need to provide social and economic policy frameworks and support structures for local cultural production and consumption. Such local cultural economies should be about equity and diversity and should maximize the opportunities for local cultural producers to make a living from their activities.

However, as De Beukelaer (2015) has argued, although the ‘culture and development’ agenda tried to challenge single-minded economic developmentalism by taking the cultural context into consideration, the celebratory accounts now associated with the creative economy agenda, often uncritically adopt the teleological sense of progress, economic growth and technocratic change associated with the kind of modernist development that ‘culture and development’ aimed to challenge. Yet the conflation of ‘culture and development’ and ‘creative economy’ might be interpreted as tactics or diplomacy. The creative economy is a real fast policy ‘brand’; it gets ‘culture’ to the negotiating table with the powerful economics, technology and development ministries in a way that the ‘culture and development’ debate never managed to do. The creative economy debate certainly performs some of this tactical work. More pointedly, the 2013 Creative Economy Report (UNESCO and UNDP 2013) uses the specific brand of a recurrent report established by UNCTAD in its 2008 and 2010 Creative Economy Reports—whatever reservations UNESCO may have about the term ‘creative economy’ that term must be used and some of its key economic imaginary kept intact as part of this brand.

Contradictions of the Creative Economy

To an extent, the creative economy debate illustrates the ways in which fast policy runs into the complex messiness of the real. What started off as an easy rhetoric has to deal with the realities of the object it tries to designate and form. How does this encounter change the local details of its ‘rollout’ and at the same time alter the basic terms of the discourse itself? Part of this messiness relates to the way fast policy creates its own success, in that many constituencies use it as a way to further an already existing agenda. In the broadest terms, the cultural sector saw the creative economy as just another way of making the argument for culture: in emphasizing the economic benefits of culture, it sought increased resources which would in turn be beneficial to culture (Hewison 2014). Pragmatism, tactics, ‘rendering unto Caesar’ in the name of getting culture to the top decision-making tables—these all provided the circuits for the rapid dissemination of the creative economy agenda, alongside economic agencies and other new entrants that were brought in (design, tech firms, SMEs etc.). This new approach towards government often brought in new sectoral actors who welcomed the change of emphasis towards entrepreneurialism or commercial markets, and new sources of funding, such as from economic and trade departments. However, such new strategies have real consequences for the detailed implementation of creative economy policies, as well as provoking new conflicts of voice (or exit) around the agenda.

Such tactics might be effective in the short term, but they lack the robustness required to negotiate difficult strategic choices, when a policy narrative is tested against the competing interests and dynamics of the real. This is reflected in the creative economy debate that favors positive outcomes over critical engagement with challenges. The focus on positives reveals not only a desire to be upbeat, but also to hold together a complex and flimsy coalition. This conceals both the limited social inclusion that can be attained through arts, culture and creative industries (Belfiore 2002; Oakley 2006) and the negative spillovers of creative industries policies (Peck 2005). Moreover, it fails to consider the full extent to which creativity is rooted in uncertainty and thus is prone to failure (Bilton 2010; Menger 2009). Beyond these general points of critique on the creative economy, we will highlight three ways in which the 2013 Creative Economy Report (CER) (UNESCO and UNDP 2013), as the most explicit exponent of the ‘global’ creative economy debate, has not quite connected to the messy context it operates in.

First, there are no bad examples in the 2013 CER. By this, we mean a focus on failed or outright problematic projects that highlight the difficulty to attain the success of the ‘best practices’ on display. Yet our call for ‘bad examples’ does not signify a cynical stance towards success: there is increasing debate on the necessity to recognize, acknowledge and understand failure and its underlying reasons in development practice. ¹ This does not mean that the 2013 CER, or any policy document, should be turned into a naming-and-shaming show of (un)known failed projects. Rather, it should invite all stakeholders involved to be more open about what does not work, and why certain elements, processes or relations posed problems in their practice. Surely, we can learn from b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• List of Contributors
• Introduction: On Art and International Development
• PART ONE Structuring the Cultural Sector for Development
• PART TWO The Interface of Art, Agency and Activism
• PART THREE The Practical Dynamics of Art and Development
• PART FOUR The Question of Evaluation
• Bibliography
• Index