OECD Culture and Local Development.pdf - PACA

3. PROMOTING LOCAL DEVELOPMENT BY CREATING CULTURAL PRODUCTS
Governance issues
A cultural and creative arts district is only sustainable if the aspirations and the
demands relating to it can be linked in a positive way, i.e. if the people expressing
them become true partners. As with any cluster, its players may be mutual competitors
and at the same time complement each other’s efforts. This is true of cultural producers,
who may be in competition with each other to meet demand. The same may be true
of private players in conservation work or in the hotels business, for example, whose
interests may diverge when it comes to exploiting a common heritage resource.
What are the conditions that make a cultural district viable?
We might of course hope that good governance will result if all these firms,
training institutes, heritage protection associations and governments share the same
values, and that this will be enough to ensure proper cohesion. They might for
example be agreed on the value of perpetuating an inherited production system,
because it is consistent with the desired lifestyle or with conservation of the
environment. We can then turn to games theory or the ”core” approach to social
interactions.
Without falling back on such a strict hypothesis, we can refer to the existence of
a “bargaining set”. Some stakeholders will want to depart from this development path,
believing that they can do better for themselves by pursuing a different one. The other
stakeholders will quickly bring them back to their senses by showing them that if they
leave the ultimate cost will be much higher than if they stay on the initial path. Such
a situation might arise, for example, in an industry that works with highly skilled
labour and high-quality materials, where some firms begin to debase their quality
standards in order to boost short-term profits — in the long run, this will undermine
the product’s cachet and make it indistinguishable from mass-produced items that
are more cost-competitive. Essentially, the long-term interest demands that they
renounce their short-term interest. To achieve this, a bargaining set must be introduced,
i.e. a cooperative system for keeping watch over behaviour and, if necessary, compiling
evidence and preventing any deviations. In this case, a label can be the element for
crystallising the bargaining set, for it will induce producers who want to use it to
embrace the arguments for maintaining the district’s long-term sustainability and
preventing opportunistic behaviour.
The steps towards good governance
In light of these difficulties, we may start with a more general interpretation.
Partnership offers a situation where social interactions are characterised by entry and
exit costs, and there is a direct relationship between its members. The rules or
conventions that a partnership adopts will seek to catalyse behaviour, keep action
120 CULTURE AND LOCAL DEVELOPMENT - ISBN 92-64-00990-6 - © OECD 2005