Collaborating but not listening

April 2016 6 3

he Arts Council and the County and

City Management Association

(CCMA), the local government man

agement network, have just agreed ‘A

Framework for Collaboration’. The

Framework culminates thirty years of collabora-

tion between the Arts Council and the local

authorities. It is promoted as a new way for

these partners to work together, maximise the

impact of their collective efforts, and reﬂect

their shared belief in the contribution of the arts

to cohesive and sustainable communities.

Could this new partnership agreement be the

Irish hub to lead-out a strong, democratic voice

for culture? Could it reﬂect the ambition of The

Agenda 21 for Culture, with its concern for the

interdependent relationship between citizen-

ship, culture and sustainable development?

These are the expectations which should under-

pin the Framework.

Local authorities spend €37.5 million annu-

ally through their arts services. They are the

most signiﬁcant supplier of the arts – appropri-

ately since they are the elected bodies with the

closest relationship to person and place. How-

ever, local government is poor at community-led

participation. This raises questions as to the

very starting point of the Framework and its

capacity to live up to any expectations of a

strong democratic voice for culture.

The state and its executive will lead out the

Framework Agreement with no sign of engage-

ment by elected representatives or citizens. In

2016 the ﬁrst in a cycle of three-year plans will

be developed by a Management Liaison Group

that will establish strategic priorities. A Work-

ing Group will develop and implement strategic

actions to reﬂect these priorities. Both struc-

tures are limited to Arts Council, CCMA, and

local authority executive representatives. This

is more of the discredited top-down manage-

ment approach to the arts.

There is a notable absence of the obvious

linkage to the community-development respon-

sibilities of local authorities. The Framework

puts too much emphasis on its own role and

infrastructure and not enough on its potential

to integrate the arts into a community develop-

ment agenda and to ‘work with’ rather than ‘on’

or ‘for’ communities. It ignores the role of civil

society, artists, and communities. It gives no

consideration to their pioneering work of re-

rooting the bonds between people and place

across people of diverse backgrounds and

orienations, and of empowering these diverse

communities.

The four shared commitments identiﬁed in

the Framework do suggest an intention to foster

some interdependence between citizenship,

culture and sustainable development. There is

a commitment to “access to and engagement

with the arts for all people”. However, this is

posed in economistic terms: ensuring public

investment in the arts “beneﬁts as many as

possible”.

There is a more promising if nebulous com-

mitment to ensuring “a diversity of contexts

and types of participation that constitute public

engagement, most particularly social and cul-

tural diversity”. After that there are the

workaday commitments to value the work of

artists and to achieve quality and the best pos-

sible artistic outcomes.

Sadly, with our closed-in artocracy focused

on who gets funded and on mechanisms of con-

trol, our arts institutions and services continue

to be more interested in the objects rather than

the subjects of culture. The Framework reﬂects

this situation in leaning more towards being a

service agreement.

Five of its eight goals are internal to its own

modus operandi, focused on issues of delivery

rather than content or vision. We get a delivery

mechanism for arts services to citizens, when

we need improved capacity and resources for

local authority arts ofﬁcers to deliver as agents

for a local arts ecology sustained in tandem

with citizens.

The Framework fails to open up fresh think-

ing and remains trapped between binaries: the

right to art and its intrinsic value versus the cul-

tural tourism and economic arguments for the

arts. It is silent when it comes to the stark real-

ity of cultural inequality; issues of gender

inequality and discrimination in the arts; and

opportunities presented in the diversity of local

communities.

The Framework should have paid more atten-

tion to the way people experience their

engagement with arts and culture. It should

place more emphasis on the cultural value and

public value of the arts. Local sustainable

development is about people and place. It

belongs to all citizens and is only given to local

authorities to administer.

The Agenda 21 for Culture highlighted “Cul-

tural goods and services are different from

other goods and services, because they are

bearers of meaning and identity”. It set out a

challenge in noting “Artists, cultural organisa-

tions and cultural institutions play a central role

in developing sustainable urban and rural

space”. The Framework remains far from any

such aspiration.

Collaborating but

not listening

Local authorities and the Arts

Council agree a framework but

don’t engage communities

by Ed Carroll

for all

Five of the CCMA’s eight

goals are internal to its

own modus operandi,

focused on issues of

delivery rather than

content or vision