Committente: European Committee of the Regions.
Periodo: 2018
Url: How to design cultural development strategies to boost local and regional competitiveness and comparative advantage: overview of good practices
Descrizione:
This study is meant to provide the evidence of positive experiences by local and regional authorities (LRAs) in the design and implementation of cultural development strategies. Cultural development strategies are planning approaches in which culture is a pillar for sustainable development (Hristova et al., 2015, Hutton, 2016), and through which policymakers may boost their cities’ or territories’ comparative advantage and competitiveness on the basis of existing or potential cultural endowment. The analysis undertaken in this study emphasises the following: o Cultural heritage, represented by hard/tangible assets such as ancient ruins or modern monuments, and by soft/intangible assets such as oral traditions or dialects, has a fundamental territorial dimension. o Governance of territories by LRAs imposes a role in the management, protection and safeguarding of cultural heritage but it also represents an opportunity to take advantage of such a distinctive endowment to impact on the local/regional economy and society. o Cultural heritage is a resource that contributes to the objectives of other policy areas. For example, it supports the development of sustainable tourism, or the establishment of hubs of cultural and creative industries; it creates local employment; it facilitates social inclusion within cities or territories (e.g. migrants); it fosters territorial cohesion (e.g. local identity); and it improves quality of life (e.g. health). Against this background, upon the referral of the Bulgarian Presidency of the Council of the EU, the Committee of the Regions (CoR) will adopt in May 2018 an opinion on ‘Cultural Heritage as a strategic resource for more cohesive and sustainable regions in the EU’ to feed into ‘The European Year of Culture Heritage 2018’ process. The results of this study are meant to contribute to the drafting of this opinion highlighting the benefits and boosting factors of cultural development strategies implemented at the local and regional level. The first step of the study was the collection of evidence. On the basis of bibliographic research, an inventory of 40 local and regional initiatives promoting cultural development strategies across the EU was compiled (Part 1). All identified initiatives, sourced from 24 EU countries, are implemented by LRAs, are on-going and have a positive social and/or economic impact. The analysis of these initiatives helped in outlining nine main categories of instruments (Part 2) whose use generated, often in combination, territorial development by culture. They include: 1) Action/development plans; 2) European and national awards; 3) Agencies or institutions; 4) Operational centres; 5) Partnerships; 6) Project-boosted interventions; 7) Calls for projects; 8) Valorisation of cultural assets; and 9) Marketing activities. The second step of the study was the deepening of the analysis through desk research of five case studies, selected among the most effective of the 40 initiatives included in the inventory (Part 3). Case study development allowed looking in detail at framing conditions, governance and implementation arrangements as well as types of culture-based outputs achieved. It also allowed the drawing of a series of instrument-specific lessons learnt which were then used, together with the evidence gathered through the compilation of the inventory, to make proposals on how to promote local and regional cultural development strategies. This proposal-making represents the last step of the study and is reported in Part 4. Action/development plans are the most common instruments used by LRAs to structure cultural development strategies in their cities/regions, hence the derived suggestion to plan culture as a resource within territorial development. Cultural action/development plans are used to coherently organise activities over a medium-to-long term period, to warrant the commitment to implementation of relevant stakeholders, to target specific policy goals in the field of culture, or to have a comprehensive approach where culture is embedded in the territory’s socio-economic context. European/national awards result in being impressive boosting factors for cultural development strategies, hence the relevance of making efforts to locally exploit these or similar opportunities available at the European or national level. The establishment of independent institutions/agencies is usually fostered by public authorities when they intend to give them a specific task or role. Creating institutional reference structures for cultural management may have positive effects given their intermediary role between the policymaking level and the recipients of cultural policies, a role which places these structures closer to the recipients’ needs. They may also focus on the promotion of a specific segment of the cultural sector and take the role of uniting and coordinating the effort of several stakeholders towards common goals. The suggestion to set spaces for culture derives from the evidence that dedicating physical spaces to specific cultural or creative activities is commonly implemented in the successful creation process of businesses’ incubators. These spaces provide ideal conditions for boosting innovation and open dialogue. Another suggestion is to systematically merge and combine interests for culture through the establishment of partnerships. Partnerships have multi-purpose scopes (e.g. to pursue investments, to engage the community) and are not limited to framing public and private agreements but may also combine different institutional actors who share common visions. Another recommendation points to taking advantage of one-off opportunities to address specific issues. This refers to the use of projects as multi-purpose tools. Even if projects usually provide oneoff occasions to tackle one or more specific objectives, they may also be replicated regularly or in sequence (‘chain of projects’) and hence provide a sort of continuity for the concerned intervention, or develop ‘a story’. Furthermore, the importance of cultural assets endowment in supporting the shaping as well as the implementation of cultural development strategies is evident. Still, concerned public authorities are not always fully aware of these assets and of their exploitation potential, hence the suggestion to get to know and make sustainable use of the cultural assets of a city or territory. If it is common that hard cultural assets are publicly owned, it is also common that soft cultural assets are found within communities (e.g. artists and creative people), businesses (e.g. creative industry) and other stakeholders’ groups. In this case the task of the public administration is to valorise these assets and provide the assets’ carriers with opportunities in this sense. Finally, it is evident that the cultural image of a city or of a territory is a powerful marketing tool and as such something to be tackled and made visible by public authorities. Examples show that such a cultural image may derive from very diverse (including in size) marketing activities but that in all cases these initaitives end up contributing to the development of the cultural strategy of concerned cities/territories. The scope of the above proposals is to provide inspiration to local and regional authorities on possible ways to approach the design and/or implementation of their cultural development strategies.
Report for the European Committee of the Regions, 29 aprile 2018.