Re-Visioning Arts and Cultural Policy: Current Impasses and Future Directions

The Advantage of Proximity: The Distinctive Role of Local Government in Cultural Policy

“…However, it is first necessary to point out that as a portfolio of all levels of government, the arts and culture have received very little attention, outside those forums specifically devoted to cultural policy (such as the International Journal of Cultural Policy ). A notable exception to this case is Craik's () work on the history of and models for cultural policy – chiefly at the higher levels of government. Craik's analyses of Australian cultural policy (, , ) note that it has been largely devolved to state and local government, resulting in increasing financial responsibility for the arts at a local level along with greater policy intervention ().…”

“…A notable exception to this case is Craik's () work on the history of and models for cultural policy – chiefly at the higher levels of government. Craik's analyses of Australian cultural policy (, , ) note that it has been largely devolved to state and local government, resulting in increasing financial responsibility for the arts at a local level along with greater policy intervention (). Craik's account is not concerned with the history of local government involvement in cultural policy, the form and substance of these policies, and challenges or opportunities at a local level (Craik , , ).…”

Are governmental culture departments important? An empirical investigation

“…The explanations that have been proposed for this lack of central significance have generally referred to matters of specific sectoral characteristics, involving lack of political support or interest in the sector (Gray, 2000;2002), the dependency on arm's-length forms of organisation for the implementation of cultural policy (see the general discussion of this point in Craik, 2007), and the complexity of the sector and the lack of clarity about what it is intended to do in terms of public policy (Gray, 2009). More recently Nesbitt (2010) has argued that the DCMS is defined as much by its relationship to other departments as by its own status: the reactive nature of policy statements from the DCMS to external criteria and policy concerns may indicate that the department is a hostage to instrumental concerns that it has limited control over, and it is this that leads to the relative lack of centrality of the DCMS.…”

Instrumental policies: causes, consequences, museums and galleries

“…The range of approaches that states can adopt to matters of cultural policy can be placed on a continuum from direct responsibility and control of cultural affairs, usually in either an 'engineer' (as in China) or 'architect' (as in France) fashion, to working through arm's-length quangos or other intermediate institutions (such as the MLA or Arts Council England, or the Australia Council for the Arts (Craik, 2007), or through even more remote mechanisms such as tax incentive schemes (as in the United States) (see Hillman-Chartrand and McCaughey, 1989;Craik, 2007, Appendix C). While most governments are prepared to take some sort of responsibility for cultural policy the tendency is for them to adopt relatively indirect forms of involvement.…”