Creative Policy

waveThe path to a successful local creative industry policy is a complex journey of navigating, supporting and endorsing international, regional and national laws, conventions and agreements. This study seeks to ease that journey for creative industry policy planners by detailing how the United Kingdom created, launched and maintains momentum in its pioneering creative industry policy.  Such a study has obvious economic, social and development implications for UK based creative industries and potentially other members of the international community.

As reviews are being carried out at various levels regionally and internationally on the impact of the creative economy it is an opportune moment to analyse the different effects that creative industry policy has had the success of local British cultural institutions.  We will do this by identifying existing cultural and creative industry policy at the international, European, national and local level. Through a case study on the London Design Festival we will describe the extent to which they effect local creative and cultural institutions.  Finally we develop an explanatory theory and suggest ways in which the London Design Festival may better benefit from the strategic implementation of existing policy.

A general overview of the emerging creative industry policy issues at various levels will provide details on international, regional and national creative industry policy. With an in depth analysis of the Festival we will discover an innovative example of how to develop a local creative enterprise through implementing local policy objectives.  From this example best practices will be discussed and analysed.

This report begins with personal questions that stem from professional experience within the United Nations.  That experience is then followed by a brief illustration of a personal project undertaken to place work experience within a real world context. This cycle of developing a theory and testing it as a participant observer is a recurring theme within the study.

The questions emanating from professional experience were broad. In an effort to narrow the focus of those questions the study then covers existing literature.  The selection of literature presents the issues and authors that best summarize the global shifts policy planners must consider when drafting contemporary creative and cultural policy.  The main issues cultural and creative industry policy planners seek to merge are individuality, entrepreneurship, cultural diversity and digital technology.

By merging the questions and assumptions from professional experience and academic reading, a series of aims and objectives informs and guides the rest of the study.  Overall we seek to understand whether or not international, regional, and national cultural  and creative industry policies play significant roles in the success of local cultural institutions?  The local cultural institutions and the national policies studied are those of the United Kingdom.

With the election of the Labour government in the mid 1990s and throughout this decade the United Kingdom has restructured its national cultural policies to include the creative industries.  This shift away from a limited view of culture, encompassing the traditional classical arts, to a larger view of the creative economic sector has paid considerable dividends for the country. During this time the government has identified workspace, intellectual property protection, education, financing and the ability to access foreign markets as the main issues that should be addressed by local authorities to stimulate a thriving creative industries sector.

This novel formula of enlarging the definition of cultural industries to creative industries coupled with systematic research within the sector drastically altered the national discourse on the importance of the creative industries within the economic and social development of the United Kingdom.  These new cultural policy ideas have clearly had an effect within the UK and have begun to appear in regional and international policy arenas.  Approximately a decade after the first attempts to redefine the cultural industries was undertaken by the British authorities an international wave of national cultural policy reviews is now underway in developing countries to restructure local industries to facilitate their participation in the creative economy movement.

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