The social and built infrastructure of cultural policy: between selective popular memory and future plans

The rise of digital music distribution has caused decreasing returns from CD and cassette sales in Burkina Faso and Ghana. In response to this decline in revenues, artists and their management have been trying to find ways to find other sources of income. One major way of doing this has been through focusing on (live) music performance. Yet this requires built and social infrastructures that are not always present, functional, or put to full use. This paper explores how musicians and music workers make sense of the cultural policies that have shaped and will shape the built infrastructure (concert venues, clubs, etc.) they need. Because the complex links between the built and social infrastructures mean that history weighs significantly on future plans, this paper argues that calls for new venues cannot be the solution to the range of existing issues without engaging more thoroughly with the past.     

Introduction and Overview

The international negotiations on climate change in November 2000 in The Hague collapsed amid broad media coverage. Getting the talks rapidly back on track failed and they will now resume in Bonn in July 2001. In the meantime, however, the political landscape has changed: there is a new US administration, and new scientific conclusions from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have been released. The introduction and overview to this issue of International Affairs introduces five articles, all of which agree that the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on climate change can be saved. The rescue can be made either through fundamental changes to the Protocol itself or by learning the lessons of the failed round of negotiations in The Hague. On the basis of an assessment of the five articles, the author proposes his own solution-to un-bundle the issues that had accumulated in the three years since Kyoto. The author believes that some of the key developing-country Articles, dealing with issues such as adaptation, capacity-building, and financial and technology transfer, can be dealt with outside the pressure of the targets and timetables. Decisions on Kyoto's emission targets, mechanisms and some aspects of 'sinks' would be made easier without the 'inter- connectedness' with the 'developing-country issues'. It might even be possible, he suggests, to negotiate some deals on targets within smaller groups of countries such as the EU, or those countries that have targets, the Annex B countries.     

Introduction: cultural policies for sustainable development

Abstract

Sustainable development has long conceptual roots, and international organisations have played a significant role in articulating the meaning of the term and the content of the dominant discourses. Within these frames, the concept of cultural sustainability tends to be diversely defined and operationalized. This article and special issue examine culture and sustainable development in ways that articulate and contemplate different roles for cultural policy.     

Urban Land Restitution and the Struggle for Social Citizenship in South Africa

Reintegrating the city is a priority of social justice and development in many urban centres of the ‘South’ that bear the legacy of forced displacement. In South Africa, much of the land restitution programme has thus far focused on urban areas. In certain large cluster claims involving the transfer and development of significant tracts of well‐placed land, restitution has presented the prospect of altering landed property regimes in the heart of the city. The predominantly rural and economic emphasis in scholarship and policy debate on land reform in South Africa — which reflects historical trends in development studies — has led to a narrowed vision of what is at stake in urban land restitution. Complex interventions aimed at redressing urban spatial segregation can potentially alter the relationship between citizens, institutions and urban space in ways that expand the possibilities for social and political agency in sites that are strategically important for influencing the direction of change more broadly. A key, as yet unrealized, challenge is how to articulate such struggles for a ‘right to the city’ with efforts at redressing the spatialization of poverty on the urban periphery.     

Ordinary culture in a world of strangers: toward cosmopolitan cultural policy *

The image of Zwarte Piet, as part of Dutch Sinterklaas celebrations has caused heated debate in the past decade, which has polarized tensions between the ‘Dutch’ and ‘strangers’. This article argues that the debate cannot be resolved within a framework of a methodologically nationalist cultural policy. Building on Kwame Anthony Appiah’s book Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, I argue that a cosmopolitan framework for belonging is not only a normative but also a policy imperative. Cultural policy should recognize our shared global belonging, rather than building a national polis predicated on difference that sets us apart. However, a methodologically cosmopolitan cultural policy cannot be a blanket approach to replace or undermine national frameworks. It should embed the nation in a cosmopolitan public policy to accommodate cultural and religious diversity under globalization that has irrevocably eroded the illusion of a national unity.     

Cultural policies for sustainable development: four strategic paths

Abstract

In the Sustainable Development Goals adopted by the United Nations in 2015, the role of culture is limited. We argue that culture’s absence is rooted in the longue durée of interplay among theoretical and policy debates on culture in sustainable development and on cultural policy since the mid-twentieth century. In response to variations in concepts and frameworks used in advocacy, policy, and academia, we propose four roles cultural policy can play towards sustainable development: first, to safeguard and sustain cultural practices and rights; second, to ‘green’ the operations and impacts of cultural organizations and industries; third, to raise awareness and catalyse actions about sustainability and climate change; and fourth, to foster ‘ecological citizenship’. The challenge for cultural policy is to help forge and guide actions along these co-existing and overlapping strategic paths towards sustainable development.     

COP‐6 Collapse or ‘to be Continued?’

In November 2000 the Sixth Conference of Parties in The Hague was suspended without reaching agreement. Before the start of the meeting, Executive Secretary Michael Zammit Cutajar described the conference as 'a make or break opportunity for the climate change treaties'. However, the collapse of this meeting does not mean a total breakdown of the climate negotiations. Only 10 days after the collapse, leading developed country negotiators gathered again to revive the talks. Four articles in the April 2001 issue of International Affairs will analyse in much more detail the meeting in The Hague, the revived negotiations and the implications for further climate policy. Four distinguished authors will shed light on the climate change issue from four different perspectives: Europe, the United States, developing countries and the non-governmental organizations.