Training in cultural policy and management: international ... - Encatc

Survey on institutions and organisations ...
Though the provision of specialised professional and management education and training for the arts
and cultural policy and management had a late start compared with related areas such as library,
museum and archive work, there has been a rapid increase in the number and scale of such
programmes since the creation in 1975 of the first international co-ordinating body for such
programmes: the United States-based Association of Arts Administration Educators (AAAE), which,
among other things, organises an important biannual
information and experiences among members.
international conference to exchange
AAAE was, and remains, focused on what it calls Arts Administration, noting that its membership
consists of “university graduate and undergraduate programmes in arts administration, encompassing
training in the management of visual, performing, literary, media, cultural, and arts service
organizations”. This in turn was followed in 1992 by the creation of the European Network of Cultural
Administration Training Centres (ENCATC), to provide a system for exchanging information and
resources at the European level.
A review of their respective memberships shows that in practice both AAAE and ENCATC take a
significantly wider view of the concept of “arts administration” or “cultural administration” respectively
than the AAAE terms of reference quoted above would suggest. For example, both the membership
lists and the range of professional and management education and training programmes that they
include in their directories of resources, such as this new ENCATC survey and database of specialised
cultural management education and training, include programmes of librarianship, museology, and
even specialised conservation and restoration, as already noted above.
This in turn reflects the increasingly complex nature of the cultural sector globally, nationally and
locally, in which rigid divisions between, for example, arts management, museum management and
library, archive and information service management are disappearing. At the national level very few
European culture ministries deal exclusively with culture (or even only culture, communication and the
creative industries). Much more typical are ministries responsible for both public education and
culture, or for culture, sports and recreation, culture, heritage and tourism. These trends are even
more marked at the regional and local government levels, where one increasingly finds departments
of arts, libraries and museums, of culture, sports and youth, or leisure services, including heritage,
culture and tourism, or even an all-embracing “community services” department, responsible not only
for all of the cultural services already mentioned, but probably town and country planning, the public
health service and consumer protection as well.
Add to this the current trend towards team-based management within such services, and it is already
by no means unusual for someone trained specifically as an arts manager to find that he or she is also
required to take on, or contribute substantially to, policy development and both strategic and
operation management in relation to very different fields, such as sport and recreation, libraries and
museums, or environmental protection. Recent national studies in Britain indicate that as a result of
such changes between 15% and 20% of all employed persons (nearly three million workers) now have
significant management or supervisory responsibility, and are therefore at least in part managers.
Of these the great majority are holding what are primarily professional rather than administrative or
managerial positions, and now have increasingly urgent need for an understanding of this
management role alongside their professional or creative ones. Even where traditional specialisations
among middle and senior managers still survive at present, such changes are very likely in the
comparatively near future as these now global trends spread to more and more countries and regions.
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