Cultural participation: Stories of success, histories of failure [Editorial]

David Stevenson - ORCID: 0000-0002-8977-1818 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8977-1818This editorial introduces a special edition of Conjunctions that explores how cultural participation policies, projects, and practices could be improved through recognising the pervasiveness of past failures. It introduces current policy debates on cultural participation and posits that the dominant focus on ‘cultural deficits’ and ‘non-participants’ rather than on how activities are currently funded has resulted in a failure to increase the number and diversity of people participating in state subsidised cultural activities. It further suggests that a culture of evaluating success, rather than critically reflecting on failure, results in cultural participation policies and projects that replicate past failures and maintain an inequitable status quo. This special edition attempts to challenge existing narratives of unqualified success by offering alternative narratives that consider failure from different perspectives and at different points in the design and implementation of cultural participation policies and projects. In doing so it highlights the extent to which success and failure coexist and the richness of insight that comes from considering both. This matters because it is only such open and honest critical reflection that has the potential to facilitate the social learning needed for those who can exert the most power in the cultural sector to acknowledge the extent of the structural change required for cultural participation to be supported more equitably.https://doi.org/10.7146/tjcp.v7i2.1218127pubpub

Failures in Cultural Participation

This open access book examines how and why the UK's approach towards increasing cultural participation has largely failed to address inequality and inequity in the subsidised cultural sector despite long-standing international policy discourse on this issue. It further examines why meaningful change in cultural policy has not been more forthcoming in the face of this apparent failure. This work examines how a culture of mistrust, blame, and fear between policymakers, practitioners, and participants has resulted in a policy environment that engenders overstated aims, accepts mediocre quality evaluations, encourages narratives of success, and lacks meaningful critical reflection. It shows through extensive field work with cultural professionals and participants how the absence of criticality, transparency, and honesty limits the potential for policy learning, which the authors argue is a precondition to any radical policy change and is necessary for developing a greater understanding of the social construction of policy problems. The book presents a new framework that encourages more open and honest conversations about failure in the cultural sector to support learning strategies that can help avoid these failures in the future

Failures in Cultural Participation

David Stevenson - ORCID: 0000-0002-8977-1818 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8977-1818This open access book examines how and why the UK's approach towards increasing cultural participation has largely failed to address inequality and inequity in the subsidised cultural sector despite long-standing international policy discourse on this issue. It further examines why meaningful change in cultural policy has not been more forthcoming in the face of this apparent failure. This work examines how a culture of mistrust, blame, and fear between policymakers, practitioners, and participants has resulted in a policy environment that engenders overstated aims, accepts mediocre quality evaluations, encourages narratives of success, and lacks meaningful critical reflection. It shows through extensive field work with cultural professionals and participants how the absence of criticality, transparency, and honesty limits the potential for policy learning, which the authors argue is a precondition to any radical policy change and is necessary for developing a greater understanding of the social construction of policy problems. The book presents a new framework that encourages more open and honest conversations about failure in the cultural sector to support learning strategies that can help avoid these failures in the future.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16116-2pubpu

FailSpace project

This research explores how cultural policy can better recognise, acknowledge and learn from failure. It posits that failures are largely overlooked in the dominant narratives about cultural participation policies and projects and argues that this absence reduces the capacity for learning and change. By moving beyond the tendency to make the ‘case for culture’ which is prevalent both in academic and policy documents, this research provides space for alternative voices to be heard. In doing so, the study disrupts the taken-for-granted assumptions upon which existing policy processes and practices are sustained and reproduced. It presents alternative stories of failure, with the intention to encourage new routes for future policy intervention intended to support cultural participation. The data includes interviews, workshops, and surveys with policy makers, cultural practitioners and participants

Reflecting on Place and the Local

David Stevenson - ORCID: 0000-0002-8977-1818 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8977-1818Engaging with both place and ‘the local’ has become an important part of cultural policy rhetoric in many countries, from the resurgence of city-regional governance models to calls for new forms of ‘localism’ involving participatory governance approaches intended to engender more active citizenship and to help people feel more empowered regarding the decisions that affect them. Depending on their approach, national interventions can exacerbate existing socio-economic inequities between places and risk investing in infrastructure without due consideration to sustainability within locations or the movement of cultural workers and audiences across locations. This introduction makes the case that views of the ‘local’ have been limited in the fields of cultural policymaking and study. It summarises some of the ways both place and ‘the local’ have been conceptualised. It argues how conceptions of ‘the local’ in policy can vary significantly requiring an examination of the process of situating ‘the local’ as it occurs in policymaking as well as what happens in ‘the local’ as a result or even despite that positioning.aheadofprintaheadofprin

Situating the local in global cultural policy

David Stevenson - ORCID 0000-0002-8977-1818 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8977-1818From the growth of city regions to the calls for more localism, engaging with ‘the local’ has become an increasingly important part of cultural policy rhetoric in many countries (UNESCO, 2013; UCLG, 2019). Yet despite apparent recognition that the practices of culture are always situated (and hence local), contemporary cultural policy research tends to privilege the national or international as the primary site at which cultural policy is enacted and thus, can be reformed (Durrer, et al., 2018). For all of its increasing use ‘the local’ remains abstract, seemingly deployed to legitimate activity that is of debatable benefit to the places and practices imagined by its invocation.https://doi.org/10.1080/09548963.2019.164478028pubpub

Great art for everyone? Engagement and participation policy in the arts

New Labour began its administration with a commitment to bring democracy to culture. However, a decade later the Arts Council England (ACE)'s mission statement of "Great art for everyone" suggested a continued emphasis on access to mainstream culture rather than on cultural democracy. The argument in this paper is that Labour's vision has resulted in little change to the basis upon which arts institutions receive regular funding, or the social composition of those who participate in the arts in Britain today - who remain predominantly white and middle class. Public consultation through The arts debate provides evidence that the arts are still perceived as elitist, and policy too insular and self-reflective. The report clearly identified the public's desire for not only greater transparency in decisionmaking processes but also involvement in the decisions themselves, in order to democratise the arts. This paper draws on research investigating the extent to which participatory decisionmaking schemes affect cultural democracy and the subsequent impact on artistic policy and practice. In addition to documentary analysis, this study involved interviews with policymakers, practitioners and the public, focusing on two projects using participatory decision-making in England. © 2011 Copyright Taylor and Francis Group, LLC

Building local capacity in the arts

© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis GroupThe importance of place-based funding and local policy initiatives is evident in policy literature internationally with concepts of creative cities and cultural regeneration building in prominence since the 1990s. Such literature makes the case that investment in arts and culture will bring broader social and economic benefits at a local level, but in practice investment and research has prioritised a small number of metropolitan arts venues and mega events over a larger rural or community-based infrastructure. This paper in contrast explores two case studies of cultural planning in small towns. It analyses the relationship between policy and practice in these specific community contexts and considers the role of participatory decision-making in developing a local arts infrastructure. The findings suggest that locally based initiatives can build capacity and engagement with the arts. But it further argues that this requires long-term commitment and investment, to facilitate shared decision-making between professionals and public

The participation myth

Policy rhetoric around strategies to and the value of increasing participation in the arts has been well documented internationally over more than a decade. But in the UK, which is the focus for this article, targets to increase participation have been consistently missed and there remains a direct correlation between those taking part in cultural activity and their socio-economic status. The starting point for this article is to examine the barriers to increasing participation in the arts and question the way that such policy has been implemented within the English context, which may have relevance for policy making in other countries. What is demonstrated is that policy implementation is influenced by vested interest of those in receipt of funding and that a narrow range of voices, from a powerful cultural elite, are involved in the decision making in the arts. The article makes a case for widening the range of voices heard in decision making in order to support both artistic practice and public engagement