Review ECOC Culture Strategies (Ireland)

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Musician Cormac Breathnach performs at Broken Politics. June 2016 Photo: G&C

The Cultural Strategies of the European Capital of Culture Candidate Cities (Ireland) Ed Carroll This short review examines the question of cultural participation and sustainability.

It will make an initial assessment at a cultural policy level of the current battle for the prize of European Capital of Culture in 2020 between the Three Sisters (Wexford, Waterford and Kilkenny), Limerick, and Galway city and county. The bid titles are - The Three Sisters. Re-imagining Our European Region, - Limerick. Embracing Multiplicity Creating Belonging and - Galway. Making Wave – Landscape, Language and Migration.

The bid documents will not become public for some time. However, each contestant has just published its cultural strategy. The interest must be not so much on who wins, but on whether whoever wins can place culture as the overarching goal of development and assure the necessary cultural participation for this.

The Three Sisters (pop.354,000) seek a model of partnership. The strategy, with a budget of â‚Ź31 million, sees culture mediating between the social, economic and

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environmental. Implementation would be based on new governance structures and action focused on excellence in service delivery. What is clear in governance is that there is no recognition of the need for co-governance with local politicians or communities.

Limerick (pop. 191,809) wants to strengthen cultural delivery and its visibility and its strategy is top-down and primarily sees culture as an independent element in development. Its idea is to emphasise culture and link it to education, research, environment, and to physical, social and economic regeneration. With a proposed budget of €37 million, the strategy seeks to increase cultural capacity, the infrastructure and support with culture at the heart of growth.

Galway (pop. 250,653) and its strategy with a budget of €45.75 million seeks to build a model of cultural excellence across various domains: safeguarding cultural heritage, supporting training initiatives, enabling access to learning partnerships for the artistic and creative communities; and improving ways for new media channels to transmit cultural communication, presentation and production. Governance identifies an ambition to include the development of a Charter of Cultural Rights and a management agency, like a Cultural Council but within the constraints of a performance management process delivered by the local authority. Galway sees culture primarily as a mediator between the social, economic and environmental but also as independent element of development.

In its submission to the Development Agenda towards Habitat III, the Agenda 21 for Culture - United Cities and Local Governments platform stressed that “incorporating culture in the sustainability debates seems to be a great scientific and political challenge.” The challenge to understand how culture operates emerged explicitly from the 2013 UNESCO International Congress “Culture: Key to Sustainable Development” and its final declaration – “Placing Culture at the Heart of Sustainable Development Policies,” the Hangzhou Declaration. Culture is now seen as a Goal in the Post-2015 Development Agenda.

To help locate the policy orientation of cultural strategies of each candidate city it may be helpful to draw from the research work of Katriina Soini, Joost Dessein and others into cultural sustainability. Culture can be the creative innovator of the public good that we regard as comprising the pillars of human development: social, economic and ecological. Their research identifies three typologies across four pillar spectrum: Culture in Sustainability where culture is a separate pillar of development; Culture for Sustainability where culture is a mediator of development;

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and Culture as Sustainability where development becomes a cultural process.

Working across the spectrum of roles identified in Figure 1 it is possible to sort or to characterise four ‘narratives’ underpinning the three strategies as follows: Figure 2: Sorting Four Dimensions of the Bid Strategies Narratives

Limerick’s bid is primarily but not exclusively focused Culture ‘in’ development.

1. Definition of culture 2. Culture and development 3. Value of Culture 4. Models of Governance

Culture as a capital Culture as an achievement in the development of the city Intrinsic with focus on excellence Hierarchical

Three Sisters and Galway are primarily but not exclusively focused on Culture ‘for’ development Culture as way of life but still bracketed by institutional life Culture as a resource and condition for development Instrumental and intrinsic

None of the Irish bids are primarily located within Culture ‘as’ sustainability.

Co-governance but without active community participation

Self-governance, metagovernance

Culture as semiosis Development as a cultural process Embedded

Adapted: Soini, JDessein et al., 2016

It is not a good start that the priority in all strategies is to increase the agency of institutions and the efficacy of delivery. The lack of guidance from the EU on where to locate culture and the absence of an Irish cultural policy is not helpful. One of the ways that the Irish bids could advance during implementation to a model of culture ‘as’ sustainable development is to work on their various engagement strategies for the public since culture is an agent for transforming people.

The Three Sisters social development programme seeks a social contract for culture-in-health and wellbeing to ensure connectivity and access to culture for all citizens. Limerick seeks to foster multiple examples of imagination, innovation and integration and to use creative approaches to help citizens and visitors re-imagine the city and to engage citizens through involvement in culture. Galway’s strategy identifies cultural rights, health and well being as ways to develop a framework for cultural citizenship - as expressed in the development and management of this

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cultural strategy and to ensure that more of the local population – both visiting and resident - are offered opportunities to engage in health improving art and cultural activity.

Indeed during implementation the candidates could draw from Ireland’s strong legacy of access and participation. For example, in the 198o’s when the Art, Community, Education (ACE) Report surveyed the inter related domains (art, education, community) it proffered a set of cogent arguments to shift institutional culture towards empathy with the subject. These domains included opportunities for social and creative outlet for individuals beyond their normal day to day activities (amateur arts); as well as actions to identify, confront and celebrate issues of personal and communal development and social justice (community arts). Many groups spawned from European Union funded community projects in 1980s and 90s in Waterford, Wexford, Kilkenny, Limerick and Galway e.g. Macnas/MacEolas Integrated Community Arts Programme in Galway, Kilkenny Collective for Arts Talent in the disability sector and Creative Activity for Everyone’s National Arts Worker Course. These traditions of participation naturally produced signature works of an artist or collective.

Finally, what is quite striking is the absence of goals or objectives dealing with the sustainability of precarious practices of artist-citizens who put their capacities at the service of communities. Artists often work voluntarily moving from engagement project to festival and spend significant time unemployed. If we value the contribution of these citizen-artists, if we value culture’s overarching role in development, surely we should make their contributions more secure? The contribution of artists and creative’s in education, community and health could provide a basis to test ‘public value jobs’, an idea currently advocated by Arlene Goldbard and the United States Culture Department.

The three strategies do articulate various strategies for the citizen. However, the language of top-down engagement prevails, and participation is not a core value.

More effort is needed during implementation to innovate with new forms of participation. For instance, it would have been interesting to consider the implications of the 2015 Faro Convention for participation. Raquel Freitas argues for “the inversion of top-down structures that compartmentalise and pre-define policy areas, into alternative frames for guiding decision-makers through bottom-up, contextualised decisional processes. New forms of participation are needed that work with the ‘demand’ side through community mobilisation, capacity building, and empowerment because the cultural rights of excluded groups thrive best when freed from institutions. Culture without community cannot weave a new social fabric.

The United Nations has argued that culture is about people and human flourishing, not as isolated citizens but in “communities and groups”. The strategies need to place culture in a politics of transformative change. That way the bar gets raised

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towards an ecology where culture can deliver transformative change for human good.

Ed Carroll blue.drum@yahoo..com

An edited version of this review was published in Village Magazine in July 2016.

Reference Institutions: The Hangzhou Declaration Placing Culture at the Heart of Sustainable Development Policies. Available online: http://www.unesco.org/new/fileadmin/MULTIMEDIA/HQ/CLT/images/FinalHangzhou Declaration20130517.pdf Council of Europe Framework Convention on the Value of Cultural Heritage for Society * Faro, 27.X.2005. Available online: https://rm.coe.int/CoERMPublicCommonSearchServices/DisplayDCTMContent?documentI d=0900001680083746 Rio +20 and Culture. Advocating Culture As a Pillar of Sustainability. Available online: http://www. agenda21culture.net/index.php/docman/meetings/467-rio20engdef/file UNESCO (2015) Reshaping Cultural Policies– A Decade of Promoting the Diversity of Cultural Expressions for Development. Available online: http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0024/002428/242866e.pdf UCLG: Agenda 21 for Culture. Culture and Sustainable Development: Examples of Institutional Innovation and Proposal of a New Cultural Policy Profile;, 2009; Available online: http://www.agenda21.culture.net UCLG: Agenda 21 for Culture. January 2016. Why must culture be at the heart of sustainable urban development? N. Duxbury, J. Hosagrahar, J.Pascual.

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