OECD Culture and Local Development.pdf - PACA

3. PROMOTING LOCAL DEVELOPMENT BY CREATING CULTURAL PRODUCTS
cohesive, and satisfy the desired objectives. They will also try to prevent situations
where the pursuit of private interests or rent seeking would be detrimental to the
partnership as a whole. The partners will try to achieve a desirable equilibrium
through “positive attitudes” and they will see to it that those attitudes are fostered,
disseminated, copied and maintained. If the partnership is to last, four conditions
must be satisfied:
• In a repeated “game”, the partners have an interest in acting on the basis of
positive attitudes and in behaving in such a way as to inspire positive behaviour
on the part of the others: this is the “reputation condition”. The partnership is
viable only between players who regard each other’s reputations as good. This
implies a dense information system, without which there is the probability
that negative attitudes will win out over positive attitudes, inevitably causing
the partnership to weaken or collapse. The appellation d’origine contrôlée is a means
of regulating the organisation (and sanctioning) of this information, but for
territories such as industrial districts that cannot organise it, other systems, such
as the label, must be used.
• With repetition of the “games”, participants must know that if they misbehave
today they risk being punished tomorrow by losing their rights to the label: this
is the “reprisals condition”. The difficulty is that reprisals, even if properly
organised, may be impossible to enforce. In some cases, firms may no longer
behave as required because their operating conditions do not permit it.
Counselling or financial support from the partners may help them do so. The
history of cultural and creative districts provides examples of such mechanisms,
in varying degrees of formality. It also demonstrates the importance of cultural,
ethnic and religious factors in the way certain districts function. But in an
atmosphere where individualism reigns supreme, as is often the case in artistic
circles, such arrangements are unlikely to be accepted spontaneously.
• Existing players may upset the initial equilibrium over time, as their size or their
market fluctuates. Interactions will then become less random, but will take
place through alliances and counter-alliances. There is nothing to guarantee that
such alliances will not work against the viability of the district. Thus, we have
a “proper segmentation” condition. The divisions that may appear must not
interrupt the invisible exchanges and the networks of trust that were built up
over time. A segmentation that is not necessarily harmful might occur in training
mechanisms, where some for example want to replace specialised initial training
with on-the-job training. There is disagreement, but it does not bear on
objectives, merely on the means for achieving them. A harmful segmentation
might emerge when some partners want to revise product quality and labelling
systems to accommodate larger-scale operations, while others insist on
maintaining small-scale “craft” production methods.
CULTURE AND LOCAL DEVELOPMENT - ISBN 92-64-00990-6 - © OECD 2005 121