The current Scottish Government review into the workings of Creative Scotland as the primary support body for culture in Scotland presents an opportunity to look at the role that culture plays and could play in society at large.
This paper proposes a policy shift and interventions to the support structures for culture in Scotland that would position culture as an essential element towards a Wellbeing Economy for Scotland – specifically culture as an accelerator for Community Wealth Building.
(The paper is an edited version of the submission I made to the Creative Scotland Review)
Traditional economic models define the health of a society by monetary output (GDP). Like many socially progressive countries around the world, Scotland is committed to moving towards a Wellbeing Economy where success is measured by the wellbeing, health and happiness of its citizens rather than simply by growth in a financial economy. In the eighties and nineties, Culture enthusiastically redefined itself as the ‘Creative Industries’ seeking to validate its claim on public funding as an investment in the ‘Creative Economy’. The Creative Economy would then pay dividends in jobs and innovation across the wider economy.
This proposal starts from the position that the idea of Creative Industries has largely failed both the cultural sector and society as a whole and we need to shift towards understanding Culture as key to the overall health of our society. Specifically, that Culture could be a super-power for Scotland in moving towards a Wellbeing Economy by bringing people together in communities, helping them to envision new futures and develop innovative ways of realising those futures.
(For further expansion of this position see also : Inquiry by the Scottish Parliament’s Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee into ‘ Culture in Communities: The challenges and opportunities in delivering a place-based approach’ [report: September 2023]; ‘A Creative Placemaking Approach’ The Stove and South of Scotland Enterprise [2024]; ‘Culture is Not and Industry’ Justin O’Connor [202]); Scottish initiatives - Culture Collective, Creative Communities and Arts Alive)
My hypothesis is that the national Culture Strategy provides a blueprint for this proposal, and that much of what is required to deliver on the ambitions of the Culture Strategy is already happening in different places in Scotland. However, examples are isolated and often not delivering to their full potential. A joining up geographically and across sectors is required. Currently this is inhibited by the lack of a strategic approach to allocation of resources, lack of capacity in many communities and lack of strategic planning within culture to support development across the breadth of cultural activity in the country.
The paper is built around three connected ideas to support for Culture in Scotland:
- The outcomes that we expect from funding for Culture should be re-directed towards support for the transition to a Wellbeing Economy in Scotland (and away from the idea of Culture as an ‘industry’ in the conventional economy)
- A proposal to separate the functions of ‘development support’ and ‘funding allocation and monitoring’ in the way we support Culture in the future. Currently these two functions are delivered by the same organisation, I suggest that this dual role results in an apparent lack of of transparency about decision-making and lack of clarity about strategic direction for everyone working in or seeking to work with the cultural sector
- A proposal to create bespoke strategies and funding allocations for different artforms – currently all artforms are considered equally within general funding allocations for culture.
The overall proposal is based on a targeted approach to funding through a national strategy, with some funding devolved to regional level. Funding enables projects and initiatives that develop capacity and cross-sectoral working in communities. Capacity building unlocks additional income sources which, in turn, feed back into more funding to sustain the momentum at both national and local level.
1. The role of Culture in Scotland – supporting a Wellbeing Economy
For culture to be genuinely part of building a Wellbeing Economy in Scotland, we need to consider the full spectrum of cultural activity and infrastructure and look at this through a lens of everyone in the country having agency and opportunity to be part of making their own culture as well as consuming it. This requires ‘hard infrastructure’ of theatres, libraries, galleries, heritage attractions (as well as more informal spaces like community centres etc), ‘soft infrastructure’ of the groups, organisations and education needed to produce cultural activity, and the infrastructure of commercial TV, film/streaming, music etc.
A comparison with how we fund Sport in Scotland is useful here. Sport is funded through two strands, firstly we support sports venues, organisations, individual sportspeople, international competitions and the promotion of sport. This first strand is very similar to the way we fund Culture. But, importantly, we also fund grassroots sports development, local clubs and opportunities for everyone to take part in sport. It can be strongly argued that this support for participation in sport embeds many of the qualities of sport in our nation – such as teamwork, self-improvement, physical activity etc far more than would be achieved by simply watching others playing sports. It also clearly drives an accessibility and inclusion which we see demonstrated in the diversity of backgrounds of successful sportspeople and those who comment on/present and administrate sport.
Fundamentally, in Scotland, we do not have a comparable ‘participation’ strand of support in culture. In 1946, the first chairman of the Arts Council of Gt Britain announced, ‘It is about the best not the most. The principle is we support professional artists. That’s our obligation. And our second obligation is to enable others to appreciate, understand and benefit from that’[3] and that is still pretty much the principle of how we fund culture in Scotland today. As a result, culture has ended up in a silo of its own, concerned with culture in and of itself rather than the potential for culture to make the deepest contribution to society as a whole.
So, why is the situation for sport so different? The straightforward answer is that sport made a focussed and sustained case for the health impacts of physical activity and inclusion in communities. One direct outcome of improving people’s wellbeing through sport is that there is less demand on the health service with a consequent saving of money.
Culture has a myriad of similar arguments for the societal value of participating in and shaping the culture of the country, including:
- Mental health/wellbeing and positive pathways for disadvantaged individuals/communities
- Reducing social isolation
- Education in teamwork, problem-solving and adaptability
- Community cohesion/safety
- Community visioning and placemaking
- Innovation growing new businesses and social enterprises
So, why don’t we have support for participation in culture as we do in sport? I believe that part of the answer lies in the very multiplicity of societal impacts from participation in culture, the argument can become diffuse and unclear because of its diversity. However, the issue also lies with the culture sector itself, we have clung on to the idea of being relevant to governmental policy by proving our value as an ‘industry’ and this has failed us because that argument is only relevant for a tiny fraction of what we understand as ‘culture’.
My proposition is that national strategy should be directed to both excellence/development of professional cultural production AND participation in culture – the blend of the two being essential to unlocking the power of culture to accelerate our move towards a Wellbeing Economy, with equity and opportunity for everyone in communities everywhere.
Making the Case: I believe the opportunity and case for supporting culture as a key building block towards a Wellbeing Economy has yet to be effectively made to our politicians, so that they can lay a pathway of understanding and support in parliament and government. The Culture Strategy offers a policy framework for this work, and I’d propose we’d use the strategy as a foundation for making the case through its three pillars of Strengthening, Transforming, Empowering through culture and its core principle of culture being ‘mainstreamed’ across all the portfolios of government.
2. Clarity in the different cultural support functions
I propose that supporting cultural activity requires 4 key elements:
1. the cultural sector – the people, communities and organisations that produce culture
2. a developmental infrastructure for cultural activity – a body/network that actively works with the cultural sector to coordinate activity within the sector, gather/share learning, develop/implement strategy, facilitate collaboration with funders/partners and local/national government.
3. a funding body for cultural activity – a body with specialist knowledge of the cultural sector who can distribute funds and collect information on the impact of those funds on behalf of Scottish Govt and other funders supporting cultural activity. A funding body should work to the strategies evolved through the joint working of the four elements of the support system.
4. Scottish Govt, Local Authorities and other funders/commissioners of cultural activity (NB I recognise there are other sources of income for cultural activity, but am omitting these in the interests of simplicity)
A new system of exchange and ongoing development of values/purpose between these four elements, I believe, would help support thriving culture in our country.
In the current system, the second and third elements in the list above are within the remit of one single body – Creative Scotland. I think these two functions are fundamentally different and for one organisation to attempt to perform both simultaneously can short circuit the effective flow of information, transparency and trust that is the aim of the 4-part structure described above
There is nothing radically new in the idea of a 4-part system as I’m outlining above, my hope in putting this forward now there might be some debate about developing two new elements in our national support structure for cultural activity – a development agency for culture that is separate from a funding body for culture. The development agency would work as a communication channel between all four parts to develop strategy and advise politicians regarding the role/impact of culture in relation to other national agendas. Strategy developed in this way would then be passed to the funding body to manage a process of allocating funding according to the objectives within the strategy – be that support for early-stage organisations, particular geographic/artform focus, support for places to work with artists etc,etc. Key for transparency in funding would be a clear allocation for specific artforms (see 3. below) so that funding decisions are based on comparing like with like within the same allocated pool of funding. Also, that all strands of cultural activity should be included within this system, including the national companies that are currently directly funded by Scottish Govt.
I am not suggesting that we need to create two new organisations. There is so much value and knowledge within Creative Scotland and other existing bodies (national/regional artform organisations and funding bodies) that could be built into a new system and also possible ways of devolving elements of both the development and the funding roles into regional structures.
3. Strategy and funding allocations for individual artforms
One of the founding principles of Creative Scotland was to move away from a structure of specialism within individual artforms (Scottish Arts Council), instead focussing on the wider idea of ‘creativity’ which was seen as the driver behind the ‘creative industries’.
The challenge of judging ‘apples against pears’ in funding decisions has been challenging for everyone across the cultural landscape. Funding panels have a set amount of funding to allocate, but no directive or rational to judge, for example, the strategic value of a dance project against a literature project.
This proposal requires that a development agency would work with the culture sector, Government, regions, research etc to develop strategies for individual artforms. Such strategies would be shaped by outcomes for the Wellbeing Economy, nurturing that particular artform (inc. international profile etc) and specific regional contexts. Artform strategies would be translated into funding schemes and allocations of funding from the national Culture budget (+ potentially match funding from other departments/agencies) and the funding schemes would be rolled out, monitored and evaluated by the new culture funding body
Only through a direct and transparent line being drawn between the intended outcomes of funding, the allocation of funding and the subsequent monitoring and evaluation will Culture be able to take its place at the centre of our national toolkit for the Wellbeing Economy. For this to happen we need the clarity of: understanding the purpose and value of Culture; defined roles for different agencies within the national support structure for Culture; and recognition that artforms work differently and require different forms of support (regionally/nationally).
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