Abstract
In the last two decades academic and policy interest in the economic growth potential of the cultural sector has risen sharply in UK, as well as in other OECD countries. Alongside this there has been a shift in cultural policies away from a focus on the public value of culture to the economic value of creativity. Where public funds are allocated to arts and culture this is heavily and increasingly skewed towards London. Although there is wide recognition of the intrinsic value of the arts and the inequalities of provision, culture is increasingly invoked as a narrowly instrumental concept for other policy aims. The new discourses of creative economies have been slow to reach rural studies and where discussions of the ’creative countryside’ have taken place, notions of rural cultural value remain largely within an instrumentalist discourse. This paper is an attempt to shift the discussion to new ground by exploring cultural value through the lens of a social justice approach to wellbeing, based on the capabilities approach, using material from an AHRC funded year-long knowledge exchange project with rural arts organisations in Northumberland. The paper argues against the narrow instrumentalism of culture as a delivery mechanism for other policy agendas and offers a different conceptual framework based on social justice for considering the value of culture in conceptions of a ’good life’. It finds that using such an approach allows a different conceptual space and a clearer normative basis for understanding and arguing for the intrinsic value of culture in rural development.
Highlights
In his seminal text The Country and the City (1973) Raymond Williams highlights the persistent construction of the urban as a site of enlightenment, advancement and cosmopolitanism, and the rural as a retreat into a traditional, idyllic existence with little worldly outlook
Our focus on ‘culture’ was a challenge when trying to map onto Nussbaum’s list of individual wellbeing as the Northumbrian Exchanges (NX) project showed us clearly this is a complex set of interwoven narratives about relatedness between art, artists, place and community
As Luckman (2012, 9) argues this sort of detailed understanding from creative artists themselves who choose to locate in rural areas with a particular ethos ‘are marginal to the dominant theoretical and policy scripts’ of the creative industries but they give us a clue to the nature of both the work and how rural communities interact with it. Both culture and wellbeing policy narratives have been allied to ambiguous narratives about the greater individual responsibility of citizens and of communities to create their own Good Life, within an increasingly constrained financial climate
Summary
In his seminal text The Country and the City (1973) Raymond Williams highlights the persistent construction of the urban as a site of enlightenment, advancement and cosmopolitanism, and the rural as a retreat into a traditional, idyllic existence with little worldly outlook. As others have pointed out this dichotomous rhetoric underpinned the ‘Creative City’ and ‘Creative Class’ discourses (Landry, 2000; Florida, 2002), had a determining influence on regeneration policy in the last decades - within a post-industrial urban context (Bell and Jayne, 2010; Woods, 2012) and left rural advocates claiming a bias of funding opportunities towards urban-based culture (see, for example, Rural Cultural Forum, 2010). More recently rural arts and culture has risen up the political and policy agenda in the UK as austerity policies have impacted on public investment in the arts. In an increasingly hostile policy environment Arts Council England (ACE) have been criticised for the unfairness in the way it allocates its funding investments (House of Commons 2014). Earlier concerns over lack of rural cultural spend resurfaced, with ACE responding with a Rural Position Statement (March 2014a, 2004b)
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