Cooperation among intergovernmental organizations in global cultural governance: Towards an actor-centered constructivist approach

Abstract

This article provides an empirical investigation of the cooperation among intergovernmental organisations (IOs) in global cultural governance. The existing scientific literature has not yet taken up the inter-organisational cooperation as a serious topic of research and the present contribution aims to fill this gap. Based on an actor-centred constructivism, the article seeks to address inter-organisational cooperation as an observable empirical phenomenon, to explore when and why the cooperation between IOs risks not lasting and to understand why the dynamics of inter-organisational cooperation in cultural affairs have a specific-time limit. The focus will be on two cases: the European Union-Mercosur audiovisual programme and the United Nations interagency group on creative industries. As such, the article is more concerned with analysing the political micro-foundations through which the cooperation among IOs takes place and with exploring the factors, which contribute to not establish sustainable cooperative arrangements.

Why to regulate Netflix: the cross-national politics of the audiovisual media governance in the light of streaming platforms

“…The article argues that audiovisual media governance does not emerge spontaneously from moral relevance of normative principles, deterministic power of digital technologies, business plans of global platform corporations or path-dependence decisions, but it is a political act, shaped by conflict and competing political worldviews that aim to promote their own values and objectives (Freedman, 2008: 1–4). In this respect, the politics in digital cultural governance should not be an unacknowledged element, something regarded as unproblematic; instead, our research proposition is more concerned with highlighting the dynamics through which the decision-making process takes place (Popiel and Sang, 2021; Vlassis, 2022). By avoiding ‘one-sided monolithic understandings of platform dominance’ (Poell et al, 2022: 2), the article suggests that the key assumptions of the academic literature seem to be too distant from the agents making governance arrangements (Radu, 2019) and leave little space for exploring in which ways the national policy responses in the audiovisual media governance are shaped both by state-interest groups relations and global interdependence.…”