The assemblage of culture-led policies in small towns and rural communities

Abstract

The mobile global discourse on culture’s prominent role in driving development policies is increasingly influencing small cities and rural communities. Global networks of information and ideas flow through space and become reconstructed as place-based and territorial narratives or policy assemblages; meanwhile, communities are increasingly producing local policies within these networks. The policy mobility literature has been occupied with perspectives on how to follow policies; it has only to a limited degree addressed empirical questions about how such policies are constructed from a situated perspective. Therefore, an analytical approach is needed to analyze the empirical construction of culture-led policies or local culture policy as it happens “in place” This paper aims to study how local culture-led policies are constructed in small Norwegian towns and rural communities as ‘assemblages’ of mobile global policy discourses mixed with and translated through local traditions, local practices, materialization and institutionalization. The assemblage of local cultural policy emerges in the tension between territorial and relational forces. Some forces serve to territorialize—while other forces deterritorialize—the assemblage of local policy and development strategies. The dynamic tension between these forces must be analyzed to understand the situated construction of local cultural policy.