Widening local development pathways: Transformative visions of cultural economy

Soon after the November 2013 launch of the United Nations Creative Economy Report 2013, subtitled Widening Local Development Pathways, Justin O’Connor posted a blog in The Conversation that made significant claims on the publication’s behalf. He thought it would free international cultural policy from the reigning ‘creative industries/creative economy’ approach, whose advocates ‘stand accused of over-emphasizing the commercial aspects of culture, reducing creativity to intellectual property rights, ignoring the growing exploitation of creative labour, and becoming narrowly economistic, reducing cultural value to the bottom line’ (O’Connor 2013). He also thought the report could counter ‘the uncritical adoption of creative industry policy nostrums from the Global North, [that] wrapped in promises of a dynamic new source of economic growth, has become increasingly counter-productive. Countering those nostrums was among the purposes that I brought to the task of serving on behalf of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) as the principal investigator and lead writer of the report, a task it assigned to me after having taken over responsibility for the new edition. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) had prepared the 2008 and 2010 editions. The subtitle Special Edition suited both, since the idea was that it would take a markedly different approach. Although UNESCO chose prudently to stick with the existing ‘creative economy’ brand, my conceptual preference went to the more inclusive notion of ‘cultural economy’. That is the term I would have used and is the one I shall therefore employ throughout this chapter, whose main aim is to give the reader a sense of how the report might justify O’Connor’s claims. In order to do so, I shall paraphrase or cite passages from the text. Any analyst in my position, however, who has laboured on behalf of an institu- tional position (and cause), needs also to understand the nature of the discursive artefact that has been produced. From this position, it would be useful to begin by alluding to an important issue of global knowledge production implied by O’Connor’s remarks and also trace the evolution of the ‘cultural and creative industries’ discourse within UNESCO. As regards the first point, many national and local cultural policy frameworks are deeply influenced by forms of knowledge articulated by international agencies such as UNESCO: ideas, methods, goals, motives and values that, combined, form what are presumed to be universally valid principles, constituting a kind of ‘global doctrine’ or even an inchoate form of ‘institutionalized cosmopolitanism’ (Beck 2006). These master narratives include ‘world heritage’, ‘intangible cultural heritage’, ‘cultural diversity’ (or at least a particular reading thereof), as well as the terms ‘creative industries’ and ‘creative economy’. All of these originated in the global North, whose ‘universalist’ patterns of understanding still dominate thinking within UNESCO. Yet as these ideas have travelled, many of them have been received, adapted, connoted and interpreted in different ways. In place of the conceptual imperialism of earlier years, the growing economic and political strength of non-western nations in a multi-polar world has helped reinforce these shifts of understanding and usage. In some domains, such as heritage, the shifts have been significant. In others, such as the ‘creative industries/ creative economy’, much less so, and hence the need for the report in question.