The International Conference on Cultural Policy Research (ICCPR) took place in the end of August 2024 in Warsaw, Poland, with the timely theme Cultural Policy in Democratic and Nondemocratic Regimes. The interdisciplinary nature of cultural policy inevitably involved economic aspects, although the methodological approach may differ. It has been a wonderful opportunity not only to enjoy Warsaw and its great hospitality, but also to engage in enriching discussions on the topics often studied in cultural economics such as public subsidies tackled from entirely different angles. Cultural economists were well represented among participants.
Special session: Economic tools and theory for informed cultural policies
A special session titled “Economic tools and theory for informed cultural policies” was held as a part of the second day of the ICCPR2024 program. The session was organized by the regional chapter of ACEI, the Association for Cultural Economics Poland (ACEP), Aleksandra Wiśniewska, Bartosz Jusypenko and Paweł Siechowicz, together with ACEI members Trine Bille and Andrea Baldin. We aimed at making a clear link between the two disciplines, cultural economics and cultural policy research, rooted in common reflection of the value of culture, where economic analysis serves as a tool for research-based policymaking. Last but not least, the special session served to present the ACEI together with the ACEP to gain international visibility among our colleagues from the cultural policy research field.
As a part of the special session, Paweł Siechowicz, with his background in musicology, gave a theoretical paper on the economic characteristics of musical goods. The postulate stated was that the more musical goods are consumed, the more valuable they become for the consumers. In this sense, the positive externalities of consumption of music become the means of the music value. As such, promotion of productive engagement with the arts, development of cultural consumption skills among citizens and increased availability of cultural goods are socially advantageous and politically recommended.
The allocation of public subsidies to cultural organizations is both an economics and political choice. During the cultural economics session, we were bringing also up-to-date use of economic tools such as DEA and benefit transfer applied to the cultural field, which can help policymakers in determining the allocation of public funds. Andrea Baldin presented a paper coauthored by Trine Bille, Antonella Basso, Stefania Funari, in which the efficiency of Danish state recognized museums is measured. The authors propose an allocation model for state funding to the museums as an answer to cultural policy challenges faced by the Denmark administration. A range of possible goals of museum operations such as number of visitors, the development of the collection, research and revenue generation are included in the model. In result, the authors provide a model that can help politicians to create the policies in a way that provide the right incentives for museums to achieve the politically defined goals, but the decision about the weights put on different goals must be made by policymakers.
Aleksandra Wiśniewska provided a brief introduction into the use of benefit transfer in cultural economics based on research conducted together with Andrea Baldin, Trine Bille, Bartosz Jusypenko, and Ewa Zawojska. Benefit transfer is a non-market valuation tool, broadly used in public policy fields such as environmental policies where non-market valuation is well recognized as a reliable tool for cost-benefit analysis. In opposite to many popular studies using stated preferences collected in large surveys, benefit transfer is clearly less time- and resource-demanding. The use of benefit transfer is just emerging in cultural economics and regards nearly exclusively cultural heritage. The original benefit transfer studies applied to the performing arts in both local and international contexts were presented during the special session. On the local level, the researchers examined transferring the value of theater performance between provinces in Poland. Internationally, the benefit transfer method was applied to value the maintenance of public theaters in Poland and Denmark. In both cases the results were promising. The level of validity and reliability of the examined benefit transfers was comparable with studies in environmental economics, inviting for further use of this tool for cultural contexts.
The artistic labour market and funding
Also in other sessions, cultural economists had a voice. Wojciech Hardy presented his research on the consumption choices among music listeners during the pandemic. His findings suggest that attention budgets play an important role in the consumption behaviour – with more time and attention translating into more diverse choices.
Several sessions discussed the theme of policy for the arts and artistic labour markets. While researchers still seem to have difficulty defining what an artist is and who is an artist, and identifying artists in national statistical data remains a conundrum, the new category of the ‘creator’ is coming into the limelight. In addition to artists and musicians, also bloggers, streamers, and celebrities join a creative class who know how to monetize their talents by generating and posting content in the digital sphere. Where we previously talked about consumers and an audience, the concept of ‘fan base’ comes to the fore more in a creator economy, just as it is the case in crowdfunding.
In approaching so-called cultural-creative crowdfunding (CCCF), at the intersection of the culture sector and alternative finance technology, ICCPR also opened the discussion of how platform dynamics can impact the funding and financing patterns within specific sectors. Given the unique attributes, specificities, and relational structuring of the culture sector, the impact of crowdfunding requires more conceptual development, systematization, and potential policy instrumentalization. Hence, in an engaging discussion, scholars reflected on the conceptualization of a broader typology of CCCF practices that can better serve cultural production and consumption, as per the research of Alice Demattos Guimaraes, Natalia Maehle and Lluis Bonet. Crowdfunding is a web-enabled way of funding to be adopted, legitimized, and systematized in (and by) the culture sector, with also a role for the government.
From a cultural policy perspective, we see that governments are becoming a third party in crowdfunding, in different countries (from Japan to the Netherlands), and in different domains (from the arts to cultural landscapes). This is only one way in which the government engages in the funding and financing of the arts. Several presenters, with many from Poland, other countries in the East of Europe and the Baltic states, exposed how their national governments are developing support for artists.
The funding process was also presented from the perspective of the artist, who incur transaction costs and opportunity costs, and do a delicate balancing act between conforming and excelling, as per the research of Ellen Loots, Yosha Wijngaarden, and Carolina Dalla Chiesa.
Cultural policy in crisis?
In line with the theme of the conference, the conference hosted several engaged panels, for example on ‘the crisis of democracy and artistic freedom of expression’ and on ‘cultural work: from socio-economic to creative precarity’.
Many sessions either directly or indirectly raised the issue that cultural policy needs a new paradigm, including a presentation by Trine Bille and Anja Mølle Lindelof from Denmark. There are several rationales for cultural policy, each with its implicit understanding of what culture is and why policy should intervene. Those are known to cultural policy researchers by shorthand phrases such as “democratisation of culture”, “cultural democracy”, “creative industries”, or “culture as a driver of social and economic development”. A reading of the rhetorical commitments of contemporary cultural policy plans often reveals an eclectic bundle of elements from many of these rationales, ignoring the inherent incompatibilities and tension points. Many of these were raised in discussions and all were found insufficient to deal with current challenges facing cultural sectors. Something new is needed, but what exactly?
Justin O’Connor summarised the arguments from his recent book “Culture is not an industry”, vehemently condemning the near-total takeover of all cultural policy discourse by the creative industries narrative and instead proposing that culture should be viewed as foundational (a reference to the idea of social foundation as, for example, found in the economics of Kate Raworth), a public good that is an essential ingredient in a democratic society. How to do that? O’Connor seemed to suggest we need to return to a form of democratisation of culture. Cultural democracy, he suggested, has gone too far and possibly got lost on the way. We are too readily celebrating everyone’s freedom to choose whatever the next click at a digital platform brings. Over-emphasising personal choice understates the degree to which it can be subverted and manipulated by digital platforms that have fine-tuned their algorithms to neurologically informed precision. It’s just the market deciding. Or rather those with enough clout to shape the markets, that is the big platforms and content producers. We need curation, the courage and legitimacy of someone making some decisions about what is culturally valuable and relevant. O’Connor is not arguing for a return to a narrowly defined version of elite culture that needs to be democratised through granting access to opera houses and museums, but turning towards a much broader notion of culture, embracing popular music and video games, etc. How this could be translated into practical cultural policy making remains to be addressed.
Connected to a need for a new paradigm is the question of articulating the value of culture for policy making purposes. These debates, as noted by Tully Barnett, are still unresolved and we need to continue them however frustrating it seems. The questions of value are haunted by fears of all sorts of instrumentalisation of culture. First it was harnessed in front of social and economic development, then addressing climate change and ecological transition and now fixing the mental health crisis. How much can a chronically underfunded and deprioritised field of human activity achieve?
Another concern that was raised in several sessions is the constant need to measure cultural activities to inform policy making or argue for political relevance. Culture is not an asset, asserted Patrycja Kaszynska. Measuring is mostly seen as a byproduct of the broader New Public Management paradigm, which can be seen as an application of neoliberal ideology into public administration. And therefore, it is sinister from the very start. There are ample reasons to declare the misguided application of generic corporate performance evaluations to arts organisations a failure. It misses the context, nor does it produce anything of value for cultural policy making (cf. Walmsley, 2013). However, it would be equally unproductive to expect that any kind of cultural policy could be made that would forgo all expectations to be able to somehow conceptualise and detect policy success. While there are ideas out there, none were really discussed at the conference sessions.
It is the natural task of cultural policy researchers to bring a careful reading and reasoned critique to cultural policy strategies and agendas and lament the inherent vagueness of the policy rhetoric. We see this as a failure of coherence and a lack of quality in reasoning. We also suspect political opportunism and lack of serious interest in culture as a policy field. The fuzziness of policy language can be seen as a genre of fiction, as noted by Bjarki Valtýsson. However, from the perspective of a policy maker, perhaps the vagueness is not a bug, but a feature and creates the necessary murky space of flexibility for compromise? Ben Walmsley concluded that culture is a classic case of a “wicked problem” for policy making – defying clear definitions, lacking finite solutions and what can only be mitigated at best (Rittel, Webber, 1973). While the call for a new paradigm for cultural policy making was loud and clear, nothing is on the horizon. Perhaps the only way forward, then, is to continue to muddle through, at least for now.
In exploring the baseline of the conference, ‘Cultural Policies in Democratic and Nondemocratic Regimes’, several sessions reflected on the Politics of Cultural Policy. Recognizing that in recent years, this aspect has (finally) received more attention, researchers presented and discussed the various political structures and economies from around the globe. ICCPR actively seeks to foster cultural policy research outside the typical Euro-American centers, thereby expanding our understanding of policies made in the global south and peripheric contexts and raising issues around the main challenges of institutional continuity. In an environment of motivated and passionate scholars, the sessions, and even the social settings, showed a common drive of understanding cultural policy to support and explore policymaking as a concept while expanding scholarship towards other regions that are not our own. In brief, one of the main takeaways of this ICCPR was the matter of political choice and ideology of cultural policy, with a community realizing that it has a responsibility to comprehend how to shape the ways towards a perhaps more inclusive future.
Final reflections
Cultural economics’ data-driven approach was well received. We were pleased with the perceived interest towards the papers presented in the dedicated economic session and individual presentations. The discussion on the use of economic instruments with cultural policy experts and practitioners confirmed that the perspective brought by cultural economist can indeed be informative for cultural policies and cultural policy research.
The ICCPR2024 in Warsaw was a gathering of researchers from various discipline and as such it allowed to build new important connections that might result in cross-disciplinary exchange and contribute to interdisciplinary collaborations in the future. Similarly to our experiences from cultural economics, we were happy and thrilled to discover a lot of scholars defining themselves as cultural policy researchers being simultaneously instrumentalists, musicologists, composers, art managers and theater practitioners. Listening to their life stories, one can have an impression that it is not uncommon to make career shifts resulting in versatile knowledge that can be used in different contexts. Also, looking at Warsaw from the elevated terrace of the iconic Palace of Culture and Science was a wonderful metaphor of the ICCPR2024 experience, synthesizing the numerous insights shared at the event.
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