MANAGING THE UNMANAGEABLE: THE POLITICS OF CULTURAL PLANNING

Clive Gray

Department of Public Policy

De Montfort University,

Bosworth House

Leicester LE1 9BH

Telephone: 0116 2577787

E-mail:

Introduction

‘Culture’ has been increasingly seen as an important resource for the achievement of a wide variety of policy goals from those of urban regeneration to health. The extent to which such an amorphous subject as ‘culture’ is actually capable of delivering the benefits that other policy arenas are concerned with is currently, however, open to question. Research that has investigated the contribution of culture to the attainment of specific policy goals has been undertaken for some years (see, for example, the early discussions in Myerscough, 1988 andGriffiths, 1993) with inconclusive results. The reasons for such lack of clarity can be seen to lie in two distinct areas: definitional problems concerning cultural content; and endogenous particularities and peculiarities concerning the cultural policy sector itself. This paper seeks to identify the precise nature of these difficulties, and to investigate the extent to which cultural planning, as an explicit attempt to mobilise ‘culture’ in the cause of policy, can possibly overcome them.

Identifying the Problem

The development of something of a ‘cultural turn’ in British governmental circles is a relatively new phenomenon. While precursors to the current spate of involvement with cultural matters can be traced, at the local government level, back to the 1980s (Greater London Council, 1985) it was the victory of the Labour Party in the 1997 general election that served to make ‘culture’ an important word in policy circles – not least with the change of name of the central government department with responsibility for this area from the Department for National Heritage to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS). Since that date there have been numerous attempts to integrate culture more fully into governmental activities at all levels from the local to the national (see, for example, Department for Culture, Media and Sport, 1999a; 1999b; 2004; Scottish Executive, 2006b), and an increasing tendency to use culture in an instrumental fashion for the attainment of policy goals other than the cultural (Gray, 2006).

There have, however, been some difficulties with this new-found enthusiasm for culture as a form of policy panacea. These problems are sufficient to raise doubts as to the extent to which the use of culture is actually capable of fulfilling any of the demands that are placed upon it, either in its’ own right, orin an instrumental fashion. The problems that exist operate in a mutually reinforcing fashion to create a position of acute structural weakness for the cultural policy sector in Britain. By themselves, the factors that are involved in this problematic situation are not necessarily weaknesses per se - in other political systems they can actually be a source of political and policy strength for the sector– but, in Britain, they act as severe limits within which the sector must operate and have significant political and policy consequences for it.

The problems of the sector can be summed up as being:

  • the absence of a clearly defined arena of action;
  • a lack of political significance for the cultural policy sector;
  • the fragmented organisational universe that it operates within;
  • the variation in geographical scale that it operates within; and
  • the effectively reactive, rather than proactive, nature of policy development that it involves.

The manner in which these affect the opportunities for ‘culture’ to have an independent and effective policy role within the British system of government is discussed in the following sections.

‘Culture’: Defining the Indefinable

Williams (1976, p. 76) argued that ‘culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language’, and the most immediate difficulty with using ‘culture’ as the basis for policy action lies precisely in this complexity. ‘Culture’ is effectively an essentially contested concept (Gray, 2004, p. 44), and, as such, it can be defined in multiple ways with no possibility of determining the adequacy, or, indeed, the correctness of any of these definitions. While this leaves room for the use of multiple approaches to policy, aimed at differing objectives, and employing differing means towards policy ends, it also raises inevitable questions about whether any of these policy initiatives are actually ‘cultural’ in the first place.

Before examining this question, however, it is helpful to see how ‘culture’ is actually being used within government itself. Discovering what is understood by the term within governmental circles will help to identify the contextwithin which currentconcerns are located.

In practice governmental actors, in particular the DCMS, are extremely careful about how they use the word ‘culture’, preferring to discuss the ‘scope’ of culture rather than a definitive object of concern (DCMS, 2000, p. 7). Developing from Rotherham Metropolitan Borough’s cultural strategy from the 1990s, ‘culture’ is divided into two dimensions – the material and the valuative. The former is made up of specific resources (ranging from museums to children’s playgrounds to wildlife habitats) and activities (such as writing and countryside recreation), while the latter consists of less tangible factors that are assumed to be present amongst members of society (such as ‘shared memories, experiences and identity’, ’diverse cultural, religious and historic backgrounds’ and ‘what we consider valuable to pass on to future generations’).

Such an approach to considerations of ‘culture’ draws from two major sources. The first derives from planning with an emphasis on tangible attributes of habitats and activities that are amenable to management and manipulation (see, for example, Evans, 2001). The second derives from rather datedanthropological concerns with understanding the totality of human societies and the social glue that binds them together, with this glue being labelled ‘culture’. In this respect the emphasis is on a conception of ‘culture’ as an entity (a ‘thing’) that is held by individuals and organisations, and which is capable of being managed and purposively transformed. This view was commonly held within anthropology until the late 1960s/early 1970s but has been largely replaced by a more active conception of culture that views it as a process concerned with meanings rather than as a specific entity in itself (see Wright, 1998).

Thus, the version of ‘culture’ that has become dominant within the major governmental discourse concerning the subject adopts what is effectively an instrumental conception of it, even when talking about its’ valuative dimension: it is seen as a set of resources or tools that can be managed in a top-down fashion for pre-determined ends. The concern with culture as a variable that can be specifically related to concrete phenomena and which is capable of being controlled and managedthrough human choice goes against the more recent anthropological version of culture and, instead of being perceived as a living set of processes, becomes merely one more resource to be controlled.

Operationalising ‘Culture’

The development of such instrumental approaches to the management of cultural resources is a relatively recent one that isrelated to the development of commodified conceptions of public policy (Gray 2006). A major problem with the reformulation of policy concerns that this gives rise to is that it is exceedingly difficult to identify precisely how ‘culture’ contributes to the attainment of policy goals, whether these be the goals of cultural policy per se, or those of other policy sectors to which cultural policy has become ‘attached’ for instrumental reasons (see Gray, 2002).To a large extent this is a consequence of the rather nebulous status of much of what is contained within the definition of ‘culture’ that is being employed within governmental circles: how, for example, is it possible to demonstrate that parks and fashion, let alone individual relationships and shared memories, make a positive, identifiable, contribution to goals of social inclusion? It is possible that these effects may exist, if not directly then through the unintended consequences of policy interventions, but identifying the causal mechanisms that are involved and the precise manner in which they work are extremely complicated issues of analysis that cannot be simply hypothesised, modelled or measured.

The difficulties that arise here are largely those that are associated with attempts by government to operationalise ‘culture’ as a measurable component within assessments of policy effectiveness. It has been argued by Belfiore (2004, p. 200), for example, that attempts to demonstrate a positive benefit from the utilisation of cultural policies to resolve the concerns of other policy sectors have only served ‘to generate ever-growing expectations that they are, quite simply, unable to meet’. This pessimistic view is reinforced when measurements based upon the principles of ‘evidence-based policy’ within the cultural sector are examined.

The range of such measurements has varied considerably and can be found, in official versions, in the Public Service Agreement (PSA) Targets of the DCMS (DCMS, 2005); the Best Value indicators and Key Lines of Enquiry of the Audit Commission (Audit Commission, 2005); and the Local Performance Indicators of the Audit Commission and the Improvement and Development Agency. The utility of these measures, however, is somethingof an open question in terms of cultural policy itself. In the case of the four PSAs of the DCMS the operative words are ‘enhance’, ‘halt’, ‘increase’ and ‘improve’, but only one of them refers to questions of the quality of cultural provision itself (PSA 1 referring to ‘high quality PE and school sport’: DCMS, 2005, p. 6). The Key Lines of Enquiry for Culture are largely tick-box assessments of the presence or absence of certain managerial tools and information, with little direct concern with the content of the cultural services that are involved (Audit Commission, 2005). Similarly the Best Value indicators for cultural services (BV 114, 117, 119a-c, 170a-c, and 219a-c) are statements of number (of visitors to museums (170), or numbers of conservation areas (219), for example) or of mere existence (as in ‘does the authority have a local cultural strategy’ (114)). This BV measure does also involve tick-box assessments of whether, for example, groups have been consulted in the drawing-up of the plan,and the score that a local authority receives on this is dependent upon how many criteria have been met – regardless of the quality or even quantity of such consultation. The absence of concern in each of these measures with the content of cultural policies, or with assessment of whether they succeedas cultural policies, reflects the limitations of an over-reliance on quantitative measures in terms of assessing the efficiency or effectiveness (however these may be defined) of policy interventions.

Commissioned reviews of the evidence of the contribution of culture to policy concerns such as ‘quality of life’ (Scottish Executive, 2006a) have demonstrated some of the difficulties of employing measures of intangible objects, whilst others have identified the limited extent of persuasive, numerical, evidence in the field of urban redevelopment (Evans and Shaw, 2004).Case studies of cultural services in action (for example, IDeA, 2004)further indicate the problems that exist in unambiguously demonstrating that ‘culture’ is the sole factor that leads to improvements in a range of social concerns, from education and health to transport and environmental improvement. Even the most optimistic literature review concerning the positive impact of cultural, arts and sports policies points out that there are major problems in generalisation from the available evidence given the limits to comparability that are present in the studies that exist (Ruiz, 2004).

Outside of governmental circles the difficulties of operationalising ‘culture’ to demonstrate an unambiguously successful role for it in terms of public policy have been equally noted, often at the level of basic methodological problems in dealing with the concept. Thus, in the case of art therapy ‘there is a notable absence of hard evidence’ to demonstrate its’ utility or effectiveness (Madden and Bloom, 2004); the identification of benefits, for either society as a whole or at the individual level, from utilising the arts, is seen to depend upon the development of completely new criteria for impact assessment that are often, by their nature, actually non-assessable in any straight-forward, conventional, sense (see, for example, the contributions in Cowling, 2004). An attempt to undertake a large-scale evaluation of the Poems in the Waiting Room programme (where selected poems were made available for therapeutic purposes in hospital, health centre and other medical environments) depended upon anecdote and other unsupported claims to demonstrate the utility of the scheme, largely because ‘the precise impact of the poems displayed in the waiting room was always going to be hard to measure. Poetry is by definition a matter of quality and subjectivity’ (Wolf, 2002, p. 6).

Apart from the difficulty of evaluating the component elements of cultural policies there is the added problem that attempts to evaluate the value or impact of cultural policies in terms of other agendas (such as social inclusion or economic re-development) normally involves assessing these other agendas on criteria that are quite alien to the cultural sphere in the first place: what is an appropriate measure of success in terms of social inclusion, for example,is not necessarily going to be so for a cultural policy. Long and Bramham (2006), for example, have argued that even within the social inclusion arena it is possible to identify at least five types of approach that could be adoptedto fulfil the requirements of inclusion through the utilisation of cultural policies, none of which actually assesses these policies in cultural policy terms, but only through their instrumental contribution to the social inclusion agenda. As such, evaluation of such policies would be purely instrumental in intent and would have no bearing at all on whether the policies involved actually are cultural policies or whether they are social inclusion policies manqué.

This problem of inappropriate assessment has raised questions of whether culture has a meaningful policy existence that is independent of the instrumental policy concerns of governments (Gray, 2002, pp. 86-88; Holden, 2004) and, if it is, how it can be demonstrated to be a valid existence within its’ own sectoral terms. Jowell (2004), as the Secretary of State for the DCMS,has providedpolitical support for culture in cultural,and avowedly non-instrumental,terms - even if this was expressed in terms that would not have been out of place in the 19th century – indicating that a complete replacement of cultural concerns for those of the policy areas to which it has become attached is seen,by relevant policy actors at the core of the political system, to be at least problematic, if not positively damaging, for the central concerns of cultural policy itself. This lack of autonomy for the policy sector derives not only from the instrumental or attachment strategies that have been employed within it, but also from the structural position that it locates within the sphere of public policy.

Structuring the Unstructurable

The structure of the cultural policy sector displays certain peculiarities that mark it off from many other sectors. The problems of actually defining the content of the sector, and the consequent problems of developing coherent and effective tools for policy evaluation and assessment have contributed to the position where the construction of an effectively autonomous sphere for cultural policy has become, politically, extremely difficult to achieve, but it is not only these factors that contribute to this position: the manner in which culture and cultural policy have been managed by political actors has had a major effect on this.

Many of these structural factors exist in a position of mutually reinforcing weaknesses for the sector, combining to establish a position where the development of instrumental approaches to cultural policy are neither surprising nor easily avoided; and where the creation of a coherent set of policies that will satisfy, efficiently and effectively, the requirements that are made of them is open to severe doubt. Dealing with these structural factors in turn will demonstrate their impact on the field of cultural policy.While this will be less successful in demonstrating how their inter-connected nature provides a mutually reinforcing set of limits to effective action, indications of this will be provided in the examples that are utilised to demonstrate the case.

Cultural policy has acquired a great deal of significance in recent years, largely based around claims that ‘culture’ is a key resource for bringing together diverse policy concerns, and serving as a focus for solutions to a range of disparate problems (Gray, 2004). The extent to which this new significance is actually matched by effective political support is, however, another matter. Questions of ‘culture’ within the British political system have always tended to be placed in a position of low political value (Gray, 2000, pp. 198-203), partly for reasons of fear of accusations of state censorship and control, and partly because of a perception that ‘culture’ is a matter for individuals and not the state. Such views tend to see involvement with culture as creating as many political problems as it solves and has a long British history as displayed when Lord Melbourne, as Prime Minister in the 1830s, declared ‘God help the government who meddles in art’ (Minihan, 1977, p. 60) (with the assumption that art has something to do with culture!).