New research into how the ‘devolution revolution’ and increased local decision-making can affect the creative, cultural and heritage ecosystem has been unveiled by Culture Commons. As a project partner, the Centre’s work has played a central role in the findings and policy recommendations shared at a launch event on Tuesday 5 November.

The Future of Cultural Devolution in the UK is the culmination of a year-long four-nations research and open policy development programme – The Future of Local Cultural Decision Making – led by the Culture Commons team, with contributions from a network of 30 partners.

Bringing together creative, cultural and heritage sectors, local governments and leading researchers, the programme aimed to co-design a new package of policy recommendations that could support a more equitable and sustainable creative and cultural sector in the UK.

All aimed at helping to set out a collective strategic response to further devolution in the coming years.

Sector expertise

As one of five research partners, the Centre has provided research, policy and cultural leadership expertise.

Our research associate John Wright’s paper Cultural strategies and local cultural decision making, part of a series commissioned and published by Culture Commons, helped to shape the recommendations.

John’s work highlighted the complexity and evolving nature of cultural strategy development, alongside the growing importance of inclusive, sustainable and locally tailored approaches.

In addition to these valuable research insights, the Centre’s inaugural director, now Associate Director of Policy, Ben Walmsley, was a member of the project’s steering committee and introduced some of the findings at the online launch event.

The Centre’s Policy Officer, Anna Kime, was instrumental in sector consultation and policy development and co-chaired an insightful discussion about ‘Local Voice’ at the launch event.

And former Centre Associate Director, Professor Leila Jancovich also contributed to a discussion paper (produced by the University of Leeds), How do we define effective public involvement in cultural decision making, which fed into the resulting policy recommendations.

Tackling injustice

During the early scoping of the programme, one headline policy challenge emerged: “that unknown devolution policies are likely to be deployed at pace into an inequitable and unevenly distributed creative, cultural and heritage ecosystem.”

Now, with the report’s publication, Culture Commons has defined its mission as: “To harness the ‘devolution revolution’ to tackle socio-economic and geographical injustice associated with the creative, cultural and heritage ecosystem to unleash its full potential in all parts of the UK.”

To work towards this, the formalisation of the findings has resulted in 20 recommendations for local, regional, national and international policymakers.

The recommendations are centred around the six policy principles listed below. Where relevant, we have also signposted related reading and resources from the Centre for Cultural Value:

1. Harness the lens of place (see the Centre’s Culture and Placemaking research digest and essential reads focused on the role of culture in place-based development)
2. Back local authorities to maintain their role as anchors
3. Facilitate decision-making across wider spatial scales
4. Move away from purely competition-based models of funding
5. Enable multi-agency decision-making (highlighted in the people-centred evaluation principle and discussed further in this recorded workshop Listening to Many Voices)
6. Engage communities in decision-making at all tiers of governance (as discussed further in this think piece for the Local Government Association and this reflective piece from artist Makala Cheung)

Culture Commons share the findings and recommendations in more depth on the Future of Cultural Devolution in the UK website.

Moving the recommendations forward, they have also shared a series of next steps, including the recently announced national research project to develop a blueprint for a UK cultural data observatory, being led by the Centre with partners The Audience Agency and MyCake.

Culture Commons are also particularly interested to hear from organisations who are keen to collaborate to put the recommendations into action.

Discover more about the next steps and how to connect with Culture Commons.