2. Bridging the Trust Divide: Understanding the Role of ‘Localism’ and the ‘Local’ in Cultural Policy
3. Scale, the Local and Cultural Policy’s Geographies
4. Scaling Heritage: Situated Policy in an Expanded Ontology
5. The Goals of American Cultural Plans
6. Community Management of Local Cultural Assets: Implications for Inequality and Publicness
7. Devolved Responsibility: English Regional Creative Industries Policy and Local Industrial Strategies
8. Reclaiming Place: Cultural Initiatives in Cretan Villages as Enablers of Citizen Involvement, Local Development and Repopulation
9. The Public Administration of ‘Place’: Labels and Meaning in Local Government Arts Development in the Irish Urban-Fringe
10. From Streets to Silos: Urban Art Forms in Local Rural Government and the Challenge of Rural Development
11. “Policies Aren’t Pieces of Paper”: Tussles and Tactics in Action-oriented and Agile Cultural Policy Research
Victoria Durrer is Ad Astra Research Fellow in Cultural Policy at University College Dublin.
Abigail Gilmore is Senior Lecturer in Arts Management and Cultural Policy, University of Manchester.
Leila Jancovich is Professor in Cultural Policy and Participation at the University of Leeds.
David Stevenson is Professor of Cultural Policy and Arts Management at Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh.
This Open Access edited collection calls for a greater understanding of ‘the local’ within the ways the arts, culture and creative practices are governed, promoted, regulated, resourced and valued. Cultural policy studies tends to privilege the national (and international) as the primary site at which cultural policy is enacted, and focuses on the ‘local’ as a case study of practice, rather than a site of policy in its own right. While this may make global policy transfer manageable for national policy agencies, it ignores the contingent relationships, diverse geographies and distinct identities of localities.
This volume addresses this gap and is structured around three themes: disciplining the local, which examines key concepts from different academic fields of study; managing the local, which identifies policy approaches that engage with the idea of ‘the local’ in different ways; and practising the local, which offers case studies of how ‘local’ cultural policies are being enacted in places of differing scale and geography.