Making the case for cultural devolution

The question for our sector is where and how culture and creativity will feature. All parties acknowledge its importance, but concrete commitment is scarce. So perhaps the bigger question is: how do we make the case for cultural devolution?

As University of Bristol’s Jack Newman explains in Culture Commons Insight Paper: What do we mean by local decision making?, devolution can bring distinct advantages. It’s easier to work across policy and sector silos at the regional and local levels. Development can be crafted around the distinctive features of a place, the needs of its people, and economic situation. Learning and innovation accelerate across networked geographical areas. 

The cultural sector is adept at a lot of this stuff. Cultural leaders today are sure-footed civic leaders and brokers. Culture-led initiatives make connections across sectors, tripping lightly across policy silos and bringing communities together to articulate and celebrate their local identity. 

This aptitude was fully acknowledged in the DCMS Committee’s 2022 Report on placemaking and levelling up: “[P]laced-based cultural policymaking can help deliver on the missions set out in the Levelling Up White Paper, including improving pride in place but also local leadership, living standards, education, skills, health and wellbeing, so long as these are done in a locally-sensitive way.”

As per Spirit of 2012’s recent report, this is perhaps most visible in the mega-event arena, not least because these one-off events benefit from forensic and embedded evaluation. 

Working with LEEDS 2023 on their evaluation, it’s clear the team have evolved the formula, rebranding the city while remaining true to their commitment to originality, inclusivity and involvement across all 33 of its wards. It is a privilege of the culture-led approach to be able even to attempt this. 

On a smaller scale, we have seen how the Mayor of London’s Borough of Culture transforms overlooked parts of the capital through a deeply embedded, locally-led practice, borough by borough.

And when it comes to the incubation of learning, the Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre’s (PEC) extensive research shows how creative clusters fuel innovation through ecosystems of creative organisations and people.

Notionally, it’s win-win. While there is a consensus that culture can be a great catalyst for converting the benefits of devolution, we can see that culture thrives under locally-led decision-making. 

Greater Manchester’s cultural sector has ridden the wave of devolution, emerging stronger, more united and more ambitious than ever after 10 years of working closely with England’s first combined authority with devolved powers. 

Decentralised decision-making and participatory funding will help cultural organisations shift towards more democratic and inclusive models, as Centre for Cultural Value’s John Wright suggests in his recent article, based on this essential digest on cultural placemaking.

And yet, concrete proposals and financial commitments are thin on the ground. The DCMS cross-party Levelling Up Inquiry committee stressed the importance of increased and more equal investment in infrastructure and skills, and the need explicitly to recognise culture in levelling up policies. These things did not materialise. 

Keir Starmer’s broad commitment to cultural devolution and the ‘cultural compact’ partnership model is then encouraging but we don’t yet know if and how these promises will translate. Cultural organisations and local authorities are at breaking point and will need more than a rearrangement of the governance deck chairs to realise the potential of cultural devolution. 

And there are real risks. Experts point out that a key challenge to meaningful devolution is short-term ‘policy churn’ based on scant evidence and crowd-pleasing assumptions.

Not surprisingly then, there are a clamour of voices calling for better evidence at scale. The Local Government Association sees a direct link between devolution and a “radically improved approach to collecting and sharing data so that the interactions between different public services, expenditure and outcomes are mapped and aligned”. 

This is a particular challenge for culture, given the complexity of articulating cultural value and the fragmentation of data to evidence that value. As our Centre for Cultural Value colleague Anna Kime points out, it’s not just about better evidence but more joined-up data, a main finding of the Making Data Work study.

The next step is to now find inventive and collaborative ways of generating this evidence. You can have as many economic multipliers as you like, but if you have no quality data to put into a model it’s impossible to make the case for investment. 

An example is our collaboration with Fifth Sector, MyCake and Tees Valley Combined Authority (TVCA), we had to roll up our sleeves to dig up and piece together data on investment, workforce, venues, organisations, education, and participation in the region. 

Once we had, we were able to create what may be the most comprehensive map of opportunities for a local creative economy. And we can see now how that’s benefitting TVCA and cultural organisations in the region. Significantly, exercises like this pave the way for a future national cultural data observatory.

But work is afoot to enable us to translate cultural value into the ‘capitals' economists think of as the drivers of levelling up. For example, we’re currently working with Historic England on AHRC-funded research supporting DCMS’s Culture and Heritage Capital programme (CHC).

It’s creating the framework for anyone developing funding and policy proposals to better articulate the value of culture as a cross-cutting capital. It might sound academic but making it possible to put a monetary value against culture’s social benefit is what will drive increases in investment. Watch this space.

We’ve seen in our work that a little bit of decent data shared can go a long way. To advance the march of cultural devolution, get talking to your neighbours and start digging. 

Some of our free tools and these evaluation resources might help.

This article, sponsored and contributed by us, is part of a series sharing insights into the audiences for arts and culture originally published on Arts Professional on 3 July, 2024