OECD Culture and Local Development.pdf - PACA

CONCLUSION - DESIGNING LOCAL PUBLIC POLICIES
contribution (if any) that a territory’s culture makes to its development. This
represents an extension of the analysis of the role of collective behaviour in
development, but at a point where everyone is aware of the logical interference
between a territory’s culture and the culture of the businesses and players located
there.
The conditions for eliciting these development effects will vary depending on the
type of process considered:
• If we take the “attraction paradigm”, the importance of the contribution of
cultural activities to local development will depend on the territory’s population,
its integration and its extent; on the length of the season for cultural activities,
on their synergies, and on their local employment content.
• If we take the “dissemination paradigm”, the importance of the contribution of
cultural activities to development will depend on how concentrated cultural
activities are locally; on their capacity to transmit and adapt their specific
knowledge and know-how; on their capacity to balance production and marketing
dimensions; on their potential to win recognition, or even protection, of their
originality.
• If we take the “territorial culture paradigm”, the importance of the contribution
of cultural activities to development will depend on their capacity to reveal and
disseminate values and reference points that will encourage players, individually
or collectively, to think to the future, to devise new plans and projects, and to
pool their defences against the unforeseen.
Towards local policies for culture and creativity
The variety, the complexity and the fragility of the impact of cultural activities are
often overlooked, and policies to promote artistic and cultural activities tend to focus
exclusively on final consumption and on tourism. Cultural activities need then to be
considered as a whole, with particular attention to the artistic creativity that lives and
breathes at their core. As Venturelli put it (Venturelli, 2003), “the real issue is also
less about the handful of giants that dominate the history of arts (the aesthetic claim
to culture) or the essential qualities of cultural practices (the anthropological claim),
or the size of the market for mass produced cultural products (the industrial claim).
Instead the most significant issue confronting us today concerns the possibility
available for most people in a society to participate in originating new cultural forms.
Hence, the environmental conditions most conducive to originality and synthesis as
well as the breadth of social participation in forming new ideas comprise the true test
of cultural vigour and the only basis of public policy” 118 .
158 CULTURE AND LOCAL DEVELOPMENT - ISBN 92-64-00990-6 - © OECD 2005