Indicators for local policies of cultural welfare: content, dimensions, and quality criteria

Abstract

Wellbeing measures are gaining consensus as complementary to the traditional GDP approach when it comes to assessing the development of countries and communities. Cultural Welfare is a new, integrated approach aimed at promoting the wellbeing and health of individuals and communities through practices rooted in the arts and in cultural heritage. Recently, experimental tools have been devised and applied, with reference to either specific target groups of beneficiaries or individual cultural/artistic disciplines, the purpose of which is to measure and assess the contribution to individual and societal wellbeing, as well as the health of cultural and artistic participation and practice in general. Policies aimed at promoting cultural welfare need a robust body of evidence, and indicators may contribute to supporting them. While measures for the assessment of the culture-and-wellbeing relationship have been proposed at the national level or at the level of individual organizations or programmes, the level of local policies appears still largely unexplored. The article discusses a few theoretical and methodological issues and proposes a set of quality criteria for designing cultural welfare indicators on a local scale.

Culture and the City: Towards a Context-Aware Assessment Framework

“…The contribution assumes that the evaluation of the social impacts of cultural policies requires us to rethink how we look at social impact generation dynamics and to adopt a process-focused approach, more attentive to local context dynamics and the cross-cutting social and cultural consequences of public or private actions (Cicerchia, 2021(Cicerchia, , 2022.…”

“…In this last perspective, a key challenge is represented by assessing the effective contribution of cultural actions in terms of social value generation within specific urban contexts (Cerreta & La Rocca, 2021;Cerreta & Panaro, 2017;Cicerchia, 2022) Obstacles of various kinds contribute to this evaluation challenge, grounding on heterogeneous and -at times -conflicting conceptualisation of what "social value" is and how it is generated in complex social and spatial settings. Cultural policies and initiatives are frequently evaluated regarding the (inherently positive) economic outcomes they provide.…”