The Policy of Cultural Policy

Having worked through contrasting definitions and uses of ‘culture’ in the last chapter, it is now time to turn our attention to the second keyword of our title – policy – and ask and answer a seemingly simple question: what is cultural policy? This question, it turns out, is only seemingly simple: as with Chapter 2, as soon as we embark on the quest for definition, we quickly find ourselves in complex terrain, for what the policy of cultural policy actually is, what policy means when wedded to culture, and a whole raft of related questions soon break the surface, as do questions about who makes cultural policy, at what geographical scales, for what purposes and with what effects (and note here that purpose and effect are not always the same thing). But let’s begin with a simple answer: cultural policy is the

branch of public policy concerned with the administration of culture. As ever with the work of definition, we are immediately thrown into a chain of signification: what is public policy? What is policy? What is public? Thankfully, the well-established field of policy studies has been pondering this particular issue for some time and has developed a diverse toolkit to interrogate this very question (see later in the chapter). Kevin Mulcahy (2006: 265)

borrows this succinct definition from Thomas Dye (2005): ‘public policy is what governments choose to do or not to do’. Public policy is, Mulcahy continues, ‘the sum of government activities’ – hence cultural policy becomes the sum of government activities in relation to culture, or what governments choose to do or not to do in relation to culture. This statement reminds us that we need to attend to the issues of government and choice as well as to what Mulcahy (2006: 268) calls the ‘ecological complexity’ of public policy: that cultural policy does not exist in isolation from government activities and choices in a whole host of policy/political domains – economic policy, welfare and social policy, foreign policy and so on. But it is very important to restate the simple point that cultural policy, as we understand and analyse it in this book, is a form of public policy – important because, as Dave Hesmondhalgh (2005: 96) comments, within studies of cultural (and media) policy, ‘it sometimes seems to be forgotten … that these are areas of public policy more generally’. This forgetting has potentially serious consequences for the practice of cultural policy analysis and for the remit of the emerging inter-disciplinary enterprise of ‘cultural policy studies’. Back to definition: as noted above, public policy is what

governments do. But what does ‘government’ mean here? Does it mean national government, the passing of laws, parliamentary debates, the work of ministers and central government ministries? Certainly it does mean this, but not only this. Public policy works at a range of geographical scales, from the local to the global, and cultural policy is no different (hence our attention in subsequent chapters to these different scales). As Deborah Stevenson et al. (2010: 159) write, ‘Cultural policy is now the province of all levels of government as well as supra-state bodies such as the European Union’. As they go on to describe, there is a dense network or cartography of ‘policy circuits’ across and between these scales – cultural policy’s ecological complexity is in part due to this multi-scalar landscape. And, as we show in Chapters 4 to 6, at each scale we uncover particular niches where policies can come into being: cultural policy is not a simple top-down hierarchy whereby central government cascades policy agendas ‘down’ to regional and local scales (though there are examples of this, as we

will see). This also means being attentive to the ‘Who?’ question, which we address below. So cultural policy is what governments at various scales choose

to do or not to do in relation to culture. But what is it that they are choosing to do (or not to do) when they are choosing to do something in relation to culture? Here we come to a major fork in the road; on one side we have what might be labelled the regulation of culture, and on the other what we might call support for or promotion of culture. In terms of the former, we can include issues to do with censorship, protection (for example, from market forces), ownership (for example, of the press) and so on. The latter includes patronage, state funding for culture, etc. In practice much cultural policy includes elements of both regulation and promotion, perhaps more so today than ever before. And promotion of culture also means the promotional uses of culture – or what Raymond Williams (1984) called cultural policy as display (and which he distinguished from ‘cultural policy proper’; see also McGuigan 2004). Regulation and promotion are intertwined in policies which require, for example, local governments to produce strategies that audit and promote local cultural assets (an example we will return to later in this chapter). The discussion above has used a somewhat abstract, general

term to discuss the actor(s) involved in cultural policy-making: government. Even with the added nuance of geographical scale, we are nevertheless corralling together a diverse body of real actors under the umbrella of government. So, at this juncture, we need to get specific: who actually makes policy and what does the act of policymaking entail?