Tony Bennett, Differing diversities - Council of Europe

Differing diversitiespositive and effective (Lauer, 1994). Compared to many other fields, culturalorganisations have relatively little experience with evaluation. Many in the arts andculture community still regard attempts to measure the impact of the arts as futileand insufficient to capture the true value of the arts and culture, both generally andin support of cultural diversity. Therefore measurement efforts are often greetedwith scepticism, and attempts at impact analysis are viewed with suspicion.The current emphasis on performance measurement and evaluation, however, is amajor part of an strategy to recover public trust in voluntary and non-governmentalcultural organisations (Herzlinger, 1996). So far, results have been limited.Hodgkinson (1996) observes that after two decades of research and evaluation, thevoluntary and non-governmental cultural sector in the United States and Canadahas established only some basic facts about its size, scope, and dimensions, but itstill remains to measure the effects or impacts of the whole sector, specific subsectors,and individual organisations.In some countries, foundations provide significant funding to voluntary and nongovernmentalcultural organisations and they are showing an increased interest inpolicy formulation and evaluation. Stone and Cutcher-Gershenfeld (1997) observethat foundations also are under increasing pressures to demonstrate results fromtheir resource allocation decisions, and the public wants to know what outcomesare derived from their donations. Boards of directors want evaluation informationto guide allocations, staff to improve and validate programmes, and grant recipientsto determine effective project performance.To strengthen evaluation capacity in the cultural sectors and foster cultural diversity,major foundations such as the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Lila WallaceReaders Digest Fund have established evaluation departments i. to assist in strategicplanning by focusing resources on key opportunities for change and ii. toassess the effectiveness of specific grants and programmes in promoting culturaldiversity and improve their quality (Godfrey, 1996). However, critics consider theuse of evaluation by Pew to build a “new world of accountability” for the arts andtarget the “culturally underserved” as forging a bureaucratic nightmare for culturalpolicy and cultural organisations (see The New Criterion, 1999).Some promising new directions for evaluating cultural diversityinstrumentsClarifying policy outcomesOver the last forty years, democratising culture has been an objective of westerndemocratic governments. Stevens (1998) suggests that first we must determinewhat cultural outcomes we want to show and then track and measure them overtime. Without explicit and widely supported policy outcomes, cultural agenciesare vulnerable to waning public support for government and foundation involvementin the arts and culture. Methods are being developed to clarify policy outcomes,uncover hidden assumptions, and ground the discourses conceptually and98